you’re okay
I glance at Zoe and sigh, looking through the garage to the open door, past the concrete gray and the exposed beams, the chrome of bikes against the walls, the chain and track of the automatic door, to the warm light coming from the living room windows. The garage, with it’s steel shade, looks like a shadowy portal between outdoors and in, like a channel between one world and another. “Maybe I should have closed the door,” Zoe says, searching with me for any sign that Riley is on her way out.
“I’ll go get her,” I say, sighing again, already climbing back out of the car. That sigh, it’s like the shadow of an old frame of mind, the loss of breath a suggestion that I have failed already. “We’ve got to go.” Frustration seems too tame a word for what I’m feeling, having roused Riley two full hours before go time, having debriefed her thoroughly about the need to leave on time lest we encounter traffic on the way to the dentist. How is it Zoe climbed out of bed 15 minutes ago and sits in the car now with Adam, and Riley, still captured by her many rituals, remains stuck inside?
I walk in calling her name. “Ready to go?”
“Oh, is it time already?” She asks the question as if we’ve not discussed the situation, as if she’s been flitting around the house oblivious.
“More than time. We’re late,” I say, gazing around the room, wondering exactly how to motivate her.
She’s standing in the door to the bathroom, moving her feet in tiny steps as though she has no toes. It looks more like a waddle than a walk, and with it goes some mantra she’s saying under her breath, probably some invisible boxes she’s checking over and over about what she’s done or what she’s going to do. It’s these trips to drive-the-rest-of-us-nuts land that slow her down; she gets trapped and can’t quite find her way free, sometimes starting over in the middle of some recitation.
I walk toward her, not sure what I can do to move her out the door that won’t end in a waterfall of Riley’s tears and the reiteration–all the way to dental office–that she doesn’t like to be rushed. But we’re late, and our calendar so full of medical appointments I don’t want to reschedule and repeat this again another day. It is always this way. It will always be this way.
I take a few purposeful steps toward her and catch a glimpse of something unexpected in the window–a flutter, a warble, the rustle of restless wings. A bird. I stop, turning my attention fully to the window, that glistening sunlight pooling, only to discover that my mind has it right. A bird, small enough to rest in the palm of my hand, sits inside on our window sill. Up close, it’s a stunning creature, with feathers in variegated shades of brown, here and there with hints of black and lines of white. From where I stand, I can see the elegance of its eyes and beak, the delicate lines. But in the moment I discover that bird, it also discovers me, hears my voice and all its hard edges, sees my eyes flashing urgent, feels my purposeful steps. The bird freaks out and flings itself at the window with a dull thwang, then takes flight toward the ceiling, the walls, the closed glass door out to the porch, thumping futily against it all, trapped.
In the bathroom, Riley has begun to have a similar reaction. “I don’t like to be pushed out of the house,” she says, and I hear the warning wetness in the valleys of the syllables as she speaks, as her movements become jerky and tossed wild.
All these years, and sometimes, especially in moments like these, what I know doesn’t help me much at all. I know that Riley’s OCD is triggered by anxiety, that repetitive over-diligence gives her the illusion of control. I know this isn’t logical; it doesn’t matter that I explain to her why we have to leave on time, why we have to leave right now. I know that it doesn’t work to tell someone with anxiety that they have no reason to be anxious. She’s like that bird, just freaking out, not sure how she got trapped or how to find her way out of this mess. The panic just multiplies.
I call to Kevin, watching the bird, lifting my voice with the hope that it will rise to his office upstairs. “There’s a bird in the house!”
A few clicks and I hear him say, “What?!” and in a moment, he’s down the stairs, hand on hip, looking around the room. “Where?” I nod with my head toward the kitchen, where the bird has begun to fling itself repeatedly against the door to the porch.
I stride toward Riley, talking to Kevin as I go. “And I’m so sorry, but we have to leave right now. We’re late.”
Kevin says nothing, just walks toward the bird and starts swinging his hands, trying to steer the creature to safety without hurting it or causing more fear. He opens the door to the porch, talking softly as though the bird can understand. “Come here, just come this way.”
I put my hands on Riley’s shoulders. “We have to go right now,” I say carefully, steering her away from the bathroom toward the door to the garage.
“Okay,” she says, a chirp, “but I really don’t like to be pushed out the door. I just don’t like to be rushed. Rushing is not my thing.” Every time I think she has finished expressing this sentiment she says it a slightly different way, as though knocking against it one more time will change things.
Sometimes the only way forward is the way we don’t want to go, the way that’s scary, uncomfortable, unknown. And courage is a habit, a response we learn when repeatedly someone leads us to freedom and we discover again, for all the anguish it takes us to find the way out the door, that, once free, we’re not only okay, we’re soaring.
One of the treatments for anxiety involves cognitive reprogramming, the reinforcement that you’re okay, after someone refuses to let you beat your head against that wall one more time, after someone turns you, usually against your will, toward the way out.
“You’re okay. You’re okay,” I’m saying now to Riley. “Do you see? You’re okay. You didn’t finish your ritual and we are on our way, and you are okay. Everything is okay.”
“Mmmhmm,” she says, sounding entirely unconvinced, but nonetheless recovering. “I just don’t like to be pushed out the door, though.”
I inhale, more sharply than I intend, and then begin to explain to her what she will have to do if she doesn’t want me to push, how frustrating it is when after two-whole-hours she is still not ready to go. I say all the things, like she can just choose; I exhale defeat, feeling trapped, tapping my finger against the steering wheel in time with the words. Thwap, thwap, thwap.
For a few minutes, Riley says nothing. In fact, my tirade has silenced the car, but Zoe slides her eyes toward me, and on her lips I see the hint of a smile. Then, from the backseat, Riley begins to pray.
“God, if you could get us to the dentist on time, that would be great. I would greatly appreciate it. And, also I still don’t know when I’m going to get a car or learn to drive.” That’s it–no amen, as though the conversation isn’t over, as though it never ends.
A pause and then she says to me, “Mom? I’m so glad God is my best friend.”
And God, he says to me, You’re okay. You’re okay. See? You’re okay. It’s like I can feel his hands on my shoulders.
