Proud mom. Happy mom. Content mom.
Diver just went off to a job interview.  Not just any job interview but an interview for the job of his choice: firefighter for our hometown.
There he was, calm and composed in his suit, shoes polished, tic tac in his mouth, ready for what lies ahead.
It's hard for me to look at him, this quiet 6'4" sylph of a man and connect that person with the chubby, noisy, joyous, tortured boy who used to run around here.
It's like day and night: boy to man, short to tall, chubby to slim, tortured to calm.
We are one of the lucky ones; a family whose child came out of autism.
Diver once heard me say, "He escaped the prison of his autism," and insisted it wasn't a prison.
But I was there. And it was a prison.
We are so fortunate. I am so grateful.

Letting Go #3

Today I dropped him at the airport to fly off to Israel, which requires a whole new level of letting go.  I remembered the first time I experienced this as he rode off on horseback on a Mexican vacation; in fact, I blogged about it in 2009 on the occasion of another letting go moment:
"Let him go, let him go, let him go.

Physically, I did.  Mentally, not so much.

Just before midnight, Diver joined a crowd of other teens waiting to board a bus at a satellite YMCA site in the city.  

Bye!  Have fun!

Not even a backward glance.  We'd already had our talk about the right way to behave, not getting drunk on sugar and pop, who to turn to for help. 

I remembered the first time I waved him off alone.  We were on Stone Island in Mexico, and he went horseback riding with a group.  I don't ride.  I grimace and worry, so I waved him off through gritted teeth and angst'd for the next hour.

Which is pretty much what I did last night.  Nine hours have passed and I am so tempted to call the youth leader on her cell.

Then I remember all the things he has successfully navigated.  Snorkeling, scuba diving, diving boards, flying, skiing, customs, bar mitzvah parties; things I could never do, not just alone, but ever.

So he can do this trip.  Even if the phone rings right now, with the cry  "Help.  Come get me!"; calls I used to get a lot, he's already succeeded.  He got on the bus alone last night and journeyed to an unknown world.  He'll come back stronger and more confident.

Maybe I will, too. "

I'm glad I revisited this, because it's the same thing: letting go.  So he can do this trip.  He's journeying to an unknown world, and he'll come back stronger and more confident. I believe I will, too.

Graduation Day

The tears flowed like rain and I cleaned up cat vomit.

That's what I do. That's what any special-needs mom does.
We'd gone to graduation #1 this morning at the special school my son actually attends and it was lovely.  Every graduation should be so thoughtful, personal and affectionate.  After the ceremony, the 18-year-old formerly known as Diver (honestly, I need a glyph like Prince) and his Dad went to Target and then to see Bubby.

I went to the gym and began to cry in the pool.  Because I had worked so hard for so many years for this day; and typical of any day during the last 18 years, I'd had to bend over backward to take care of things. And really nobody knew - nobody but another special-needs mom.  And on the spectrum of special needs parenting, I'm one of the lucky ones; still, today, after the last week of high-wire tension about the graduations and volunteer duties and work and preparations for glyph's leaving the country on Sunday and my back injury - and the broken phone and the cat vomit, I wept.

Then I came home and cleaned up the mess.  I had picked up and discarded the actual hair balls and left the spots covered with Borax for the last 48 hours but could leave it no longer. So carefully lowering myself to my knees (oh, that sore back!), I got down on the carpet and scrubbed.  And vacuumed.  And wept crocodile tears.

Almost 18

Well, well. Here we are on the cusp of 18, blogging again.
Maybe we should make this an annual event?
It's been a good year, with exponential growth for the young-man-previously-known-as-Diver.
He's 10 days away from 18, with so many plates in the air that my head is spinning.  Last night, they started to slow him down.  After a heady afternoon - picking up his suit at the Men's Warehouse, then grimacing through trying it on for Mom and Dad, only to hear that it was badly altered and didn't fit well - frankly, he looked like a punch line in a comedy sketch about a hayseed in the city - then, returning to the Men's Warehouse to try to get it rectified, while I harangued corporate customer service about their appalling work -
I know this is the run-on sentence of the century, which just gives me a glimmer of what's going on his head.  So in three weeks, he's leaving high school - the small, intensely personal school where he has spent the last four years. Last weekend, he crammed in a state convention for law enforcement exploring, where he won a first in hostage negotiation.  His advisors have asked him to be chief next year. Then we were informed that he won second place in the stock market game in the entire midwest and will be honored at a luncheon next week.  He (along with me and his teachers) are scrambling to get him set for community college in the fall, an effort we should have started 9 months ago.  We're hosting a family reunion in two weeks involving 30 out of town family guests and multiple social events.  On June 5, he has two graduations; one at his small school and one at the high school in his home district.  Three days later, he leaves for 10 days in Israel on a Birthright Israel trip.  Then he's home for a week before going off to be on staff at his beloved Camp Kodiak. Then home for 10 days and he starts at a still-to-be-determined community college.
And this is a kid who doesn't like change.
Last night, after returning from his second trip to Men's Warehouse, he retired downstairs to do some "processing". At 9:30 he told me he was heading into the garage. He said yes, there was a lot going on but he didn't want to talk.  He was still sitting there in the dark at 10:30, when I urged him to get to bed as soon as he could.
This morning he did not go to school.  "Yes, I do have a lot going on and there's something else but I don't want to talk about it" he told me.  So I withdrew, and have stayed out of the way.  Which I think is what I need to do.  Because he is almost 18 and grown, and can and will work these things out on his own.  I'm backing off and writing about it here.