Preparing

As a mother you become the architect of the grief of your children, the cartographer of their experiences, and the invisible survivor as they assign meaning to things outside of you.

When the day arrived for Luke to start kindergarten I didn’t send him. I had spoken with the interventionist and we had a plan: start him with the least amount of restrictions and then have the team evaluate him for a week. Despite the careful planning, a great school, and an interventionist who was incredibly talented at working with children on the spectrum - I wasn’t sure he would be able to handle it. He had elopement issues, and would slip away toward anything that caught his fascination. He wasn’t able to regulate his emotions and had violent outbursts. I told the interventionist that I feared for the safety of the staff. He had bloodied my nose before, thrown heavy objects, and busted my lip. After the morning bell rang out (at their school the bell is Aretha Franklin’s Respect), the interventionist noticed Luke was not there.

“Hello Miss Miles, it’s Miss Morison, we were expecting Luke today.”

I launched into my speech. I had already planned it. Once I finished I paused and said, “He’s just not ready.”

“Miss Miles, I know you’re worried. Let’s just do the week. Let us observe him. Then we decide. Nothing bad will happen during this week.”

I chewed the inside of my cheek, “Okay. We’ll be there tomorrow.”

There isn’t much I remember from that first week. Just my nervousness. My constant messages to the team and the teachers. The quiet exchanges at drop off and pick up.

When your child is autistic you spend a lot of time preparing your child for small things. Minor interactions, socializations, and coping skills. Suddenly, the day arrives when you have to go out and start preparing the world for your child.

The next Monday I pulled into the parking lot. It was misting rain in that way that it does in the lowcountry in the fall when summer still stretches out its legs, not ready to leave. I stay for a moment trying to prepare. As I approached the door ready to buzz the front office the door swung open and Miss Morison held it for me.

“Miss Miles, you need to know: he belongs here.”

I think about that week often when I remember the film Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

The film presents itself as a story about a boy trying to remain connected to his dead father. He creates a secret place where he keeps things of his father, including the answering machine where his father had left messages as he was trapped inside of one of the twin towers on 9/11.

A year after his death Oskar accidentally shatters a vase in his father’s room and finds a key inside of an envelope with the word “Black” written on it. He becomes convinced that finding the lock it belongs to will somehow preserve the relationship between them. The movie follows him through New York as he searches for answers with the kind of obsessive determination grief often produces.

But the older I get, the less I think the film is really about the father.

Oskar’s mother, Linda, watches him struggle through grief and his new obsession with the key. Linda knew that Oskar’s father often created intellectually dense riddles for him to solve as a way of practicing venturing out into the world and practicing social skills. In Oskar’s mind, this must have been a puzzle that he was intended to solve, and now he must do it alone.

After finding that there are 479 people with the last name of Black in the phone book, Oskar lies to Linda about his outings. They have become increasingly distant since his father’s death. He keeps a scrapbook where he keeps Polaroid photos and notes on each Black that he meets. One day, Oskar ventures into his grandmother’s apartment, but instead of finding her there, encounters the reclusive elderly renter that has been living there, whom his grandmother had warned him to avoid. The renter does not speak, communicating instead with the words “yes” and “no” tattooed on his hands and a writing pad. Oskar confides in him, and the man offers to accompany Oskar on his outings.

As they explore the city together, Oskar learns to face his fears, such as those of public transport and bridges. Eventually, he concludes that the stranger is his grandfather. Oskar plays the increasingly desperate answering machine recordings for him, but the man becomes agitated. He refuses to listen to the final one, and tells Oskar to stop his search. Later, Oskar sees him arguing with his grandmother and packing to leave, so angrily tries to confront him as his taxi pulls away.

Oskar eventually finds a number on the back of a newspaper clipping of his father’s which leads him back to his first contact in the search. Her ex-husband, William, is the owner of the key. He confesses to William that on the day of the attacks, he was home when the phone rang a sixth time, but was too afraid to answer. After witnessing the tower collapse on TV as the phone call cut off, he bought a replacement answering machine so his mother would never find out.

Back home, overcome with grief and the crisis of feeling as if his journey was pointless, Oskar begins destroying materials from his search. Linda reveals to Oskar that she was aware of each of his searches and had gone ahead of him to visit each person to prepare them for Oskar. Realizing how much his mother cares for him, he is finally able to accept his father’s death.

As a mother you become the architect of the grief of your children, the cartographer of their experiences, and the invisible survivor as they assign meaning to things outside of you. There are mothers everywhere moving quietly ahead of their children, softening edges they will never see, preparing strangers for their arrival, constructing paths through impossible things.

Most children will never know how much of the world was rearranged for them before they arrived.