Between Grief and High Delight

“I can’t be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.” – J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

I’ve been doing an overhaul of TeenAutism.com, which has been in existence since 2008. Cleaning up broken links, installing a new theme, replacing missing photos (still have a long way to go with that), and completely redoing the Recommended Posts page. Every original post listed there was from the first six months I had written. And while there were a few good posts during that time period, I knew that there were plenty of even better ones after it. But because it had been two years since I had posted anything to the site, I had to read through all of the 436 posts to find them.

So I spent last week rereading some pretty emotional stuff. I read all of the heart-wrenching posts about my son’s bullying experiences. I read the mostly frustrating posts about dealing with the school district and having to homeschool him. I read posts like “The A-Files” –

By the time I got to the last file, the general autism file, I didn’t realize how fragile I was… I felt like I did all right with it. I thought that I’d kept my emotions at bay. But I had barely begun to sort through that last file when my face suddenly twisted into a grimace of pain and sorrow. A hideous sob racked my chest. The jig was up.

– and felt the grief again, familiar and unwelcome. That website is like a journal, a documentation of my life as a parent, autism sitting on my kitchen table, epilepsy and bipolar banging on the front door. They were there too, even before their names were typed into posts. The signs were there, and I could see them as I reread those posts last week. Strangely enough, from reading the old posts I could identify the signs of bipolar not only in Neil, but also in myself. It was all there.

Of course, the good posts were there too (thank God). The milestones, the triumphs, the successes, the beauty of words uttered. Like an unprompted “Thank you.” A moment of self-advocacy. A goal achieved. Finally, at age 15, being able to enjoy an entire meal in a restaurant:

Last week, we went out to dinner at a restaurant that we’d gone to periodically over the years, once my son had gotten to a point where he no longer wailed and writhed on the floor. In the past, he’d crawled under the table many times, he’d gotten up and walked all around, he’d had to go outside for sensory breaks. He’d never acknowledged the waiters. But this time was different. This time it was like autism took the evening off.

So, I cried, I laughed, and, to put it in Salinger’s words, I went “back and forth forever between grief and high delight.” I’ve always loved that phrase, probably for 25 years now. But I never fully understood its meaning until now, until realizing that life with Neil has been exactly that. And that’s not a bad thing – that’s just how it’s been, how it continues to be. As you can well imagine, the moments of high delight trump the grief.

Over the course of several days I compiled The Best of Teen Autism on one page. And I’ll leave you with that as optional reading material for the next two weeks – Neil and I are going to L.A. to visit Adam and some other family members! Disneyland and wine tasting head the activities list. And I will be back here in April with the unveiling of a special autism-related project I’ve been working on. Happy Spring!

Special thanks to Paulene Angela Nissen for the new Teen Autism header design!