sick

Sometimes, there aren’t words.  Instead, there are smells–rotten and sour and wrecked.

“Mom Jones?  Oh, where is she?” I hear Riley before I see her, hear her thinking out loud down the hallway, peering into rooms, twisting that rope of sun-gold hair absently into an uneven bun.  Her hair captures so much light I expect her head to feel warm to the touch, toasty like the towels I smooth into plump thirds with my hands.  The neat stack pleases me.  The peaceful hues– soft browns and grays and creams–remind me of bits of salty shell rubbed down and bleached.

Those smells though, they waft into grateful spaces.

“I’m here, Riley,” I say, saving her the trouble.

“Oh,” she says.  I imagine the purposeful way she turns, amending her course.   “Oh, there you are,” she says.  “I was trying to find you.”

I say nothing, only smile, selecting another towel to fold—russet, like a slice of sunset.

“Umm, Mom Jones?”  Riley says very little without making it an announcement.

“Yes?”

“Umm, I think there’s a really bad smell in the bathroom downstairs.”

I pause in my folding, considering her.  Because challenges exist for all without bias, we all have disparities in the acuteness with which we sense the world.  If I have hypersensitivity to anything, it’s smells. “You think?”

“Well, it’s just when Adam came out, it smelled really bad in there.”

Ah, teen-aged boy.  “Just tell Adam to go back in there and flush again and/or spray some air freshener.  It’ll be okay.”

Riley lifts her hands in front of her, knotting the fingers together.  It’s as though I can see anxiety twisting, growing, sending out suffocating shoots.  “It’s just that when I went in there, I saw some white stuff on the floor, and it smells really, really bad, and I think you should just come look.”  Mid-sentence, she pulls her fingers free and begins stabbing the air with them to drive home the consonants.  Her eyes begin to fill, but slowly, as if her grief leaks from a hairline crack.

“Okay,” I say slowly, stuffing the towel back in the basket.  “I’ll come check it out.”  I’m a detective.  Surely every mom must be, and autism moms especially.  Before I get to the bathroom, I deduce that my day has slipped, that I’m teetering on the edge of a slope.  But white stuff?  Riley’s anxiety offers a significant clue, and the smell–pungent and recoiling, turns out to be one I recognize.  It is the odor of sickness.  Well, he made it, at least, to the bathroom.  The white stuff  I quickly recognize as bits of balled-up tissue.  I imagine Adam on his knees, scrubbing the rough, stone tiles.  Together we have made it, at least, to this.  I am hard-pressed to describe the process involved in teaching a speechless boy to run to the bathroom, quick;  nor even the steps we traveled to teach him to clean up his own ruin.  So even in this ill place, I have reason to give thanks.

“Adam?”  I turn away from the door, looking for my son.  Here, I assume, begins the unhelpful interview, though I have learned to anticipate the possibility of surprise.  Behind me, Adam wanders slowly from room to room, lost in a script I can’t well discern.  He mumbles, bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet.  But when I call his name, he stops in front of me, reaching up to flick my ear with his fingers.  When did he get so tall, I wonder, noting the long, lean line of his arms.

“Are you sick?”

“No.”  He arranges his mouth into an unconvincing smile, dropping his hand from my ear to give me a thumbs-up.

“But I heard him,” Riley says, suddenly skirting closer to the truth.  Ah, so she knew.  Sickness feels to my concrete, structured, schedule-driven children like an impossible evil, like a shameful error over which they can exert no control.  It lurks and pounces, an unwieldy and sinister foe that exposes their weakness, betraying their all-too-human proclivity to chaos.  Sickness defies their well-orchestrated, easily anticipated routines, hanging out like an uncooperative shirt tail or a bit of toilet paper obnoxiously stuck to the bottom of their shoes.  They would deny it sooner than own the truth.  The one, unable to lie, talks around the problem.  The other flat out challenges the truth.

“You can’t help being sick,” I say out loud to them, maybe a little louder than necessary, touching Adam’s cool forehead gently with my hand, thinking how much easier this might have been if Riley had simply said, Mom, Adam’s sick, or if Adam himself had called for me or told me or even just said yes when I asked.  But no matter how many times I tell my children this, it’s the messiness of illness that makes them want to hide it.  These days, Adam has grown so literally stealthy about sickness that I dare not miss the clues if I want to help him heal.  Together, we fumble through love.

And why, I wonder, turning now to assess the evidence on the bathroom floor, do we do this to each other?  Because the way my children pretend not to be sick or see sick or hear sick is the same way the rest of us carefully cloak our brokenness, our weaknesses, our mistakes, in denial of unavoidable human imperfection.  Some of us talk around the problem; some of us flat out challenge the truth.  Wouldn’t love come more easily if we’d just own up?

I’m sick sometimes.  And sometimes, when I try to clean up the mess by myself, I make an even bigger one.

“Rest,” I say to Adam, turning back to him.  With my two loving, working mama hands, I hold my son’s face the way I did when he was small.  I try to speak in language he will understand.  “I love you.  I’m proud of you.  I will take care of you.  And this,” releasing him, I gesture to the bathroom floor, “it’s okay.  Good job trying to clean up.”

This time, his smile comes real and full.  “Good job,” he repeats, and lifting one kind hand, he gives me a thumbs-up.