Well let's begin with the reasons for my emotional turmoil:
1. It was the end of Spring break week. He had been walking on my counters and peeing on my floor and eating my nutella with hint of lime tostitos for a whole week.
2. My biggest baby was gone for the week and this momma was missing him something fierce.
3. I carry a (sweet adorable precious) baby around all day and provide her sustenance every three hours all day and all night, and thus can't shake the bags under my eyes and the need to hear the coffee pot continuously percolating.
4. I've still got that postpartum funk going on so I spend most nights plotting ways to murder my snoring husband. (Just kidding, kind of. It's just a funk, but postpartum depression is serious. Please don't murder your husband. Get help.)
So anyways, we had spent the final Saturday of Spring Break veg'ing out on the sofa, watching movies, eating corn dogs for lunch, and snacking on those delicious oatmeal sandwich Little Debbie's the rest of the day... every kids dream day, right? Who am I kidding, this is my dream day.
Well Waylon has a bit of an obsession with toilet paper, and he tends to clog the toilet with an entire roll, oh like, every other day. So when Rose came in and casually mentioned that the master bathroom toilet was clogged, Travis and I, in our exhausted stupor, took note- guess we'll have to use the kids' bathroom until one of us gets in there and unclogs it. No biggie. Right?
Wellllllll round about 4:30 in the afternoon, we decide we should probably get up and around- maybe head to town for church- Travis comes back from our bathroom and says, "I don't think we're going to church tonight... the bathroom's flooded."
I started to say "Oh dear, better check the basement" but he read my mind and opened the basement door mid-sentence, whence I was drowned out by the sound of Niagra Falls coming out of my basement ceiling. Real life. True story. Ain't making this up.
I suppose that is the 5th reason I was in emotional turmoil.
Travis started crying and I called my Mom.
So by about midnight, after hours of shop vac'ing the bathroom and closet carpets and basement floor, squeegee'ing standing water, renting an industrial sized dehumidifier, setting up fans, moving the basement sofas and rugs and totes and bags of clothes and soaked carseats.... you get the point..... anyways, around midnight, I started sifting through a box of photos I found that had gotten wet and laying them out to dry. (Here's a good place for me to advise you all to not store your photos in shoe boxes.) This box happened to be from about 2007 and 2008- Waylon's first year and a half. So I'm looking at photos of him opening his first Christmas presents and hunting for Easter eggs. He's reading a book on my lap and playing with his brother; cheesing for the camera and soaking up the interaction like any typical toddler. For pete's sake he's even wearing hats. I look in these pictures and I see his personality. And I remembered back then, when I felt like I knew the boy behind those eyes. Back when I still had Waylon.
And that's when I really felt flooded.
So I guess that's reason #6 for my emotional turmoil.
And the straw that broke the camel's back.
Can I be honest here? It really pisses me off.
What are those "stages of grief" I learned in nursing school?
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.
Anger.
Anger.
Anger.
I am really angry. Angry that I had a boy. A beautiful boy. For such a short period of time. And I had no clue. I didn't cherish it. I didn't realize that those piercing blue eyes staring at me with such love would soon be precious to find. No clue that that would be his last Easter egg hunt for years. No clue that it would take him six more Christmases to open presents with that much gusto again. How should I have known that he would soon "come down with something" that would keep him from being able to do something as simple as putting on a hat?
I had no clue.
And you know what else pisses me off?
That no one can tell me why.
The CDC is having a press conference today to announce their latest estimate of the rate of kids being diagnosed with autism. Again, we're making a big production of the prevalence but not getting to the root of the problem.
Please, will someone just tell me where my son went?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can hear you optimists out there. There's a little optimistic angel sitting on my other shoulder, too.
He's a beautiful boy. He still has those beautiful big blue eyes. He's a wonderful, unique person who has made our lives so much more rich and fulfilled than I could have imagined.
I'm aware of that.
But sometimes, I just have to grieve a little. For what was. It's ok.
Because it's that anger that keeps me going. Going to IEP meetings, and reading food labels, calling insurance companies and service providers, state representatives and senators, and keeps me sane while scraping the hint of lime tostitos crumbs out of my nutella.
And it keeps me praying that someday that Waylon will return, and he'll rip open his Christmas presents and say, "Cool, that's what I've always wanted, Mom."
And you know what? I don't care if he ever wears a hat again. But just to hear those words-
that's all I've ever wanted.
