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Sparkle (1)
While I would never characterize my life as simple or easy (HAAAAAA!), I have been incredibly lucky in one very specific way: I have not yet, as an adult, experienced the loss of someone to whom I was very close. So in some ways, I feel I'm something of a stranger to grief.
The closest I'd come until fairly recently was the grief of losing my first marriage, and my hopes/dreams/plans associated therein. It's not the same, of course, but it followed a similar trajectory and kind of came out of nowhere to bite me on multiple occasions when I "should've" been well past mourning. The up side is that time, therapy, and then a much healthier marriage have largely resolved my associated issues and pain. (Remind me to bake my wonderful husband some cookies. He is awfully swell.)
And now I'm struggling and grieving, and I feel like I just don't know how to do it, how to get through it, how not to throw down the rest of my life and stomp and cry "It's not fair!" But nobody died, which means that outsiders don't necessarily understand. So I keep living and writing and shopping for groceries and paying the bills and trying to pretend I am not grieving every day, every hour.
Yesterday I wrote a post for Work It, Mom! that generated a lot of discussion, and a fair number of people saying, "No, I don't agree with you," and I was back there in comments, reading, listening, responding, and feeling sort of like, "YES, this is a conversation worth having." My head was COMPLETELY in my work and it felt great.
And then the phone rang, and it was the school. It was Monkey's parapro. "Mir, don't panic," she started out. "But we can't find Monkey. He got really angry with me and ran off."
I couldn't even process what she was telling me, exactly. How do you lose a 5th grader in a school that isn't even all that big? The follow-on made it a bit clearer: There had been "an incident" in class, he'd melted down, he ran to the guidance counselor's office (his "safe haven" in times of stress), she wasn't there, he took off around the corner ... and by the time the parapro caught up, he was gone. Just gone.
She called because they thought he might have left the school and headed home. They had mobilized in the building, of course, and were searching there. As she filled me in and I pulled on my shoes and prepared to rush out, all I could think was that if he was angry and impulsive enough to run out of the school, there was no way he was going to stop and look both ways anywhere he had to cross the street. Which meant I might well be running out to scrape him off the pavement.
I was about to hang up and go when I heard shouting on the other end of the line. And then I heard a giant EXHALE from the parapro. "We have him," she said. "He's okay. It's okay. Let me call you back in a few minutes." I agreed. I put the phone back on its base and sat down at my desk.
I couldn't stop shaking.
Later, I got the rest of the story. He hadn't bolted, not really -- he went where he was supposed to be, next, but the parapro had forgotten he had a special activity, and then the teachers who were supposed to be there were a little late. No biggie, not really. Monkey was surprised by all the fuss. He was very apologetic.
When he got home yesterday afternoon and I tried to talk to him about it, he started screaming at me and crying that no one understands him. I bit back and said, "Oh, honey, that's not true!" Because it sort of is true. I opted to pull him onto my lap and give him a giant hug and tell him we could talk about it more later, but that right now he just needed to know that I love him so much.
Last year, when he was finally diagnosed, we were in a dark time, here. Monkey was in The Pit. (You know The Pit. It's not that you can't see the light waaaaay up above you, it's just that you have no possible way
