Saturday, October 10, 2009

Dirty Dancing


Spartan Girl Dancing - 450 BC

Last night I went to a benefit for a division of a local children's hospital. The benefit was at a beach club, right on the ocean, and it was a casual affair. There was beer and wine to drink, and you stood in line for delicious sausages and french fries cooked on an open grill. The air was clean and southern California cold, and we sat under heat lamps at white picnic tables. A couple of my friends were there and many friends of friends, as well. At some point, I learned that the prestigious private girls' school in my neighborhood was having a dance, and my friends' children, both boys and girls were all going to be there. I found myself caught up in the conversation, listening and laughing to the stories about how wild it was to have children already going to dances. How do they dance, I wondered aloud. Do they slow dance like we used to? I'm pretty sure they dirty dance, one of my friends said. They stand in small circles, shoulder to shoulder and bump and grind around the center. Evidently, there are chaperones at the dance, but their job is to monitor the comings and goings, make sure that no one leaves, that no one is off in some corner making out or worse. And no girl wants her mother to be a chaperone. There doesn't seem to be much interference with the actual dancing, because that's just the way it is.

I found myself nodding and chatting and listening and laughing, almost as if I were somehow a part of the scene. At around 10:15, these women all whipped their cell phones out to check on their girls and make sure that babysitters and dads had picked them up or that they couldn't go out afterward. I made an idle comment about how different it was than when I was a girl when there were no cell phones, and we just had to be home at a certain time, how we were set free in a different way. I could have said that this was certainly a good thing for which to prepare myself; after all, Henry will be in middle school in a couple of years and just last week he went to his first Cotillion. But actually, I was having almost an out of body experience, doing all that nodding and laughing I'm just like you, I know what you're talking about. 

Because actually, I'm not. Just like them. I, too, have a daughter who is fourteen and technically in the eighth grade. She has long curly hair and beautiful eyes and skin. She has breasts and long, albeit too-thin legs and wears skinny jeans and tee-shirts that her younger brother says are "cool."  But she'll probably never be invited to nor go to a dance. She'll never be embarrassed to have me as a chaperone at a dance. And I'll never see her dance with someone or share with her those rites of passage. And when I look into her eyes I wonder whether she knows that, whether she yearns for anything in particular, whether she is bored or waiting  for her life to begin.

I don't feel like this often, but when I do it's as if a sledgehammer has caught me by surprise. Wow, I think. I thought I was done with this. 

18 comments:

  1. I so understand. And, I don't think we are ever done with this. Unfortunately.

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  2. No, I wouldn't think that you are done with this. Perhaps it comes and goes. We are not like other families, either.
    I hope you still enjoyed your time out in the California evening, at the beach, and I hope you have a good weekend. XO

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  3. I know that longing/pretending from a different story.
    Is it ever done? Probably not. But you have gathered a community around you--people who understand what it's like to walk in your shoes and I think that's a really good way to do it.
    Wishing you a beautiful beach day for you and Sophie sometime soon.

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  4. I wish I could say something wise or encouraging, but I can't. Some things just simply suck. But I wanted to let you know that my thoughts are with you.

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  5. What a thoughtful post on adolescence! And yet that sad note towards the end is a wake-up call to our human complacency. Many thanks for sharing. It was a very honest, bare-to-the-bones post.

    Greetings from London.

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  6. I don't think it ever really goes away. There will always be something. Graduation. First job. College. Losing her virginity. Marriage. Babies.

    When Katie was born and we had to name her because the name we had chosen for her didn't fit her, we named her Katherine but would call her Katie. In my mind she was dressed in a suit, sitting at a desk with her nameplate on the desk. That dream died a long time ago but other dreams I didn't realize I had still sneak up on me.

    So often people tell me how beautiful Katie is and she is. But they say it like my mother does, isn't it a shame. Because it would be easier to have an ugly disabled child? Another friend expressed shock that I would shave Katie's legs. Why not? She's seventeen, seventeen year old girls shave their legs and their pits. Katie's not just handicapped, she's also a teenage girl and that's a difficult balance to strike.

    Your post struck a chord with me this morning.

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  7. Just when you think you're in that place of acceptance,the "stark fist of reality" slams back in. I don't think it ever gets easier to take, but I have found that I've become more philosophical about it as time goes on.

    Maybe children are like art. Joseph Beuys is as beautiful, as opening,as spiritual as Cezanne...just different. It takes courage to dive in and be open to seeing the beauty despite the complexity and divergence.

    You are courageous, Elizabeth.

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  8. I just want to hug you, and hug the mermaid. A late friend of mine, a wonderful painter whose only child was born deaf and blind once spent a weekend with me at my house at the coast.

    She sat and talked for hours about her child never being able to see her paintings, listening to her music, allowed to become a painter or a musician herself. Both mother and daughter were utterly beautiful inside and out, just like you and the mermaid.

    She told me how early on she decided to become her daughter's eyes and she learned how to "punch" Braille cards to tell her about colors and how she spent hours trying to find the right words to describe them. She said that her frustration at times was so immense that she learned to bite into a spoon until she had to have correcting surgery for her teeth, since she didn't realize how badly she had damaged her teeth.

    This was back in the sixties and my heart was filled both with love, compassion and admiration because as I have told you before, the strength of those with disabled children earns the utmost
    respect from me who doubts I could do any of the things you do. I guess there are no words I know of or want to learn to say to someone:
    "You are right. She will never know that" because somewhere inside my stupidly optimistic spirit I believe that some day reason will prevail, that those who have the power to change things will look upon the needs of the frailest of us all in this world and make things right, by making help and science serve them as they deserve. And their parents.

    Sophie dances in ways neither you or I are able to perceive. Her inner dance of beauty is shared with others invisible to us. Of that I am certain. Don't ask me how because I don't know how. I just know it. As I know that I love you and admire you to the Moon and beyond.

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  9. It seems every traditional milestone that comes with our children being a certain age brings up that feeling again. That loss. My Clay will be 13 this year. I'm just bracing myself for what I might feel. Maybe I won't this time, or maybe I will. Anyway, thank-you, once again I can relate because you have opened it up.

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  10. It continues, punctuated by the milestones of adolescence and adulthood of others. Definitions and losses shapeshift; the ingenuity it takes to enrich the life of someone who cannot go out to make her own is stretched by the complexities of age, my own as well as my daughter's. We're long past the time when, in the NT world, parenting is an active daily engagement. Deb's remark that people note her daughter's loveliness with the implication that it would be easier, less of a loss, if she were ugly, rings sadly true. The severely handicapped kids I see receiving the best care have something going for them, an attraction. For those who can neither speak nor move, like mine,
    physical appeal is crucial. I remember reading this in one of the books I devoured, driven and horrified, when my dear one was just a curly-headed babe in arms. I tried to shake it off, but it stuck like a burr. Sophie's striking beauty serves her well yet will always contribute to that depthless poignancy of the what if....

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  11. Been meaning to ask you for a while: have you heard of Neurofeedback/Biofeedback for the treatment of Epilepsy?

    We may be starting this treatment with my son soon. His neuro kept going higher and higher on his Depakote, yet my son's blood levels never reveal him as taking in a therapuetic dose (the neurologist doesn't know where the medication is going. scary!)
    As a result, my son's seizures are only partially controlled and since they are 24 hour a day Petite Mal seizures, this is disruptive to learning.

    I'll keep ya posted. If you want to chat about this feel free to write me at autismmomrising@yahoo.com
    I'm having such bad computer problems that a few of the blogs in my list won't open and unfortunately yours is one of them. I'm reading at the library now.

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  12. As long as you have a heart, you will never be done with this.

    I love you Elizabeth.

    xoxo

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  13. Elizabeth. I honestly do not have the words to give you here. I try to figure them out but they fly out of my head before I can capture them.
    Mostly they sound something like this- let us sit down and let me hold your hand and let me look into your eyes so you'll know how I feel about you.
    I think that's as close as I can come.

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  14. I'm sorry - but maybe some of these women didn't need to be so oblivious to that sledgehammer hovering over your head? I would have maybe kicked you under the table and then ordered up another glass of wine for you ......

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  15. It hurts because it's too hard. No matter how long, it's still too hard.

    Thoughts and hopes to you and Sophie.

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  16. Wow, Elizabeth. Wow.

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