Finding Air

Estrangement and the holidays.

I pick up my pen.

Holiday cards are scattered across my desk. It’s less of a desk, really, but an old dining room table my husband Joe and I bought when we first got married.

All five of my kids smile back it me from a photo bordered in green. Not kids exactly – but a motley crew of teenagers and young adults.

I scan the Excel spreadsheet full of addresses. Old neighbors, cousins, in-laws. My dear friend from college.

I’m close to the end of the alphabet. For the second year in a row, I come upon her name.

My mother.

Toni Watterson.

So much in two words.

Toni was a nickname for Anthony. She was named after her father – the expected son.

And Watterson was from her first marriage. She kept her my father’s name long after the divorce, hoping in some way to give the image of a family still intact.

Her name was all wrong—a disappointment wrapped in failure.

What does it matter?

She is gone now.

There were many things I thought of asking for once her house was sold. The ornate silver teapot she’d keep roses from my stepfather, the large ice cream bowl with her name across the front, the plaid jacket she loved from—even though, a size petite small, it never would have fit me—yet in the end I didn’t take any of it. I could see how it would fit here, in my house.

I don’t think of her at all.

Yet I think of her constantly.

How do you trace estrangement back to its roots?

Maybe it’s the day I met a dark-haired boy on a golden college campus. Later, I would marry this boy. Then I would stop speaking to my mother.

Perhaps it was earlier than that.

Maybe our story started when the seeds anxiety, and mental instability first took hold in infancy - only to fully blossom some thirty decades later, the result being a young, single mother who could tear a room apart one moment, and bake homemade blueberry muffins the next.

The problem was, you never knew which day it might be—a sweet treat, or dishes smashed to pieces on the floor.

My son Jack has autism.

He is twenty.

He lives in a program almost three hours away.

We visit him every few months. We walk down the street to get lunch at his favorite pizza place. I watch him bob and weave in front of people, cutting off new mothers pushing strollers and older men with canes.

Watching him, I think of her.

I can’t quite explain how my mother’s story and my son’s story belong to one another, but they do. Maybe it’s the way they are misunderstood in the eyes of the world. Maybe the way they both reject the world altogether.

Or how deeply I wish they both could breathe, free of the binds of their minds, if only for a moment.

How do any of us find the air? That is the question.

I guess it really doesn’t matter how it all started.

Whether it was on a campus, with a boy, or an unexpected girl, either way one day I would sit at a dining-room-table-turned desk, surrounded by Christmas cards with pictures of my own children.

Just before she died, she asked me what I thought God looked like. We were in the hospital. I perched on the edge of her bed, awkward and uncertain. In an uncharacteristic display of affection, she held my hand.

I thought of her youngness as she stood before the oven. Her delight in a special recipe.

I wanted to remind her of it. But I didn’t know how.

I just looked at her face.

I should have said what was stored beneath my ribcage. Words I knew were true.

The air is coming.

Don’t be afraid.

Breathe with me.

Breathe with me.

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