This is it

When we learned that our oldest son has autism, we began our life of true compromise. We started to formulate a plan, one that we hoped would result in a support network and supporting net for our son, one that would make the hard years of socialization easier for him. Piece by piece, we dropped little bits of ourselves so that we could replace them with a foundation of this life we imagined. And now, after all that compromise, the foundation has essentially crumbled, and we are left with the reality that...this is it.

We'd formulated plans before, only to have to jettison them thanks to those nifty little curveballs life has a penchant for throwing. Big plans and little ones have gone astray, forcing a regrouping of minds, bodies, and possessions as we embarked on the next branching in the path. But this time? This time, we thought we had found It. We were in, for the long haul.

What did we expect, I wonder? We've discussed it quite a bit lately as play date invitations don't come in, as our sons wonder out loud why people don't invite them to their homes, as we realize that the dynamic among parents likely has as much to do with socialization and socializing as the dynamic among the children. As we realize that we were really pretty much total idiots to think that we could reinvent life, reinvent genetics, reinvent destiny and make our sons' lives something we never had thanks to genetics and destiny.

Four years ago marked our entry into this school district. The plan was that TH would enter with the kindergarten cohort, that they'd get to know him, if not accept at least tolerate him, that he'd be so familiar to them at school and in the neighborhood that this very familiarity would breed a sort of comfortable ignoring, at least, of his oddities.

Built into this plan was the purchase of a home we could barely afford in one of the most expensive--and among the highest-ranked--school districts in the state. Built into this plan was the move into a suburb, one I'd literally sworn several years earlier I'd never live in. Built into this plan was volunteering at school, forcing myself to interact with people, joining a goddamned country club, putting our sons in Boy Scouts, soccer, after school activities. Holding birthday parties. Inviting people over for play dates. In other words, the plan was to be many of the things we are not and never have been. All this compromise, all this submersion of who we really are beneath this built-up foundation on behalf of our children.

That foundation was weak. Shockingly, it turns out that we are not people who are good at pretense. We are not social butterflies, we don't care about neighborhood or school politics very much, soccer and football are not our thing, and I just can't get that wound up over whether or not the teacher's gift should be monogrammed. Everyone looks the same here, and my mind and my eyes and my ears crave difference and new insights and some seriously interesting people watching. Playground visits in our neighborhood seem more like a junior-high dance, with the mothers all guardedly eyeing one another, scoping out whether or not the other mother has on the right...oh, everything. The tennis skort, the sports shoes, the pony tail bouncing around over the sunshade hat.

We can't pretend. I started realizing this about three years in, exhausted from efforts to conform and somehow shoehorn my parallelogram-shaped children into the smooth round holes that everyone else's children seemed to fit into effortlessly. As the Viking pointed out, what were we thinking, that we--the two of us, insular, hermity, nose-in-a-book, trail-loving, non-football-watching, quiet-loving gen-X geeks--could possibly have children who'd be any different? That's like expecting a pair of cacti to produce a towering oak. Where we are, among the sturdy, fit oaks, we are just that: cacti. And you know what? Cacti just don't socialize very well.

So, we canceled the country club membership a year ago. Ditched soccer, tried one day of flag football only to walk--run--away and never look back. No Boy Scouts, which ended up being a free-for-all among the smoothly fit little round oak progeny in our neighborhood, one into which our little cacti did not do well. Haven't been to church in weeks, have only one child now left in the public school in the district, and we drive across town to the playgrounds at the burgeoning mixed-use development on the east side so that our children can play and we can bask in the people watching, not worried that we--and our children--are in some way not fitting up to wealthy suburban standards. I'd love to be above all that, and in some ways I am, but years of knowing that judgment is there in this fishbowl of a suburban life has made me edgy and paranoid about it.

For the last few days, as one child or another has cried about not having a playdate or told us mournfully of their "best" friends from school meeting at one another's houses for playing, as we realize that this district of perfection and football and clean suburban living is not It, we've done a lot of talking. A couple of times now, we've moved somewhere, thought, "This is it." And it's turned out not to be. We bought this house, invested in this life, compromised ourselves trying to make This one be It. And it was, yet again, a mistake. We think we have a plan--selling here, buying in a place we've always longed to live, one that feeds into everything about us that isn't a compromise. But will it happen again? Will what we think of, again, as It turn out not to be?

I've thought about it a lot, thought about all of these Its we believed in so strongly until we'd lived in them long enough. There were some great positives from each of these experiences, yea verily, even a tiny little batch of good friends, and of course, this dawning realization that it's sheer folly to try to compromise who you really are for the sake of your children. And what I've realized is that maybe it doesn't matter if what comes next is "It" or not. Because whatever we're doing right now, here, growing and learning and living through pain and happiness, as long as we're working toward making us and our children the best selves we can be--well, that moment, that now? That Now is IT.