courage, he said. chin up. soldier on.

The first thing you should know about my oldest son is that he’s really bright. I tell you this because it’s almost always the first thing people tell me. From the moment he was born he had a curiosity, a way of looking at the world that kept me scrambling. Barely three, I teasingly handed my son a book and asked him to read it to me. He did, word for word. Then he wrote his name. In the narrative I constructed for how his life would unfold, this is exactly how everything started. I make smart kids, of course I do. Nobel laureates, maybe, or Pulitzer winners. The stuff of Lake Wobegon.

It’s part of the promises you whisper against their skin when they’re born. You are amazing, you say, you will be amazing. Anything you want in the world, it’s yours. We don’t admit to ourselves that few of those promises are in our power to keep. That we can’t give them happily-ever-afters, no matter how hard we try, because life is made of twists and turns and curveballs, no clues as to how any of it is going to end.

I was so excited when he started 4K, knew he would love school as much as I did. Except he ended up in a class that was massively overcrowded, kids learning their letters while he tried to negotiate Internet time with his bewildered teacher. He seems overwhelmed, she said. He’s acting out, he interrupts, he can’t relate to the other kids in his class. I went home, sobbed in the kitchen against my husband’s chest. It’s not him, became my mantra. It’s not him, it’s them.

He’s got an eidetic memory, have I mentioned that yet? Which basically means that he retains what he sees, what he hears verbatim, whether he understands the context or not. Think about that, about everything we hear and see in a day and all the various things a kid can overhear that you don’t actually want repeated.

Anywhere.

Ever.

There was the time he lectured a totally baffled looking kid in the candy aisle at Target about the Easter display being “a commercial perversion of Pagan fertility rites.” Or Election Day, when I got a call from a weary administrator because he’d been lecturing everyone about politics. “If your parents don’t know who to vote for,” he told his classmates, “you should tell them to ask themselves What Would Joe Biden Do?” “C’mon,” I said to his principal. “It’s a little bit funny.” She didn’t see the charm.

We started therapy, grudgingly, because I was worried that he would get branded a troublemaker at age 5. He started telling me he was stupid. He would curl up with me on the couch at night and tell me how badly he wanted friends to play with. He got so anxious about going to school he made himself physically sick, more than once. I decided it was the school’s fault, and looked into open enrollment elsewhere. The classes were too full. The teachers were subpar. Those were the only logical explanations.

“Your son is such a bright boy!”

I think I physically cringed the first time I heard this from his first grade teacher. We weren’t even a month into school before the first of these conversations happened with her, an educator who is amazing, and wonderful, and who I kind of wanted to reach through the phone and strangle. He won’t do his work, he’s hiding under tables. He won’t work at all if there’s a sub.

I hated how absolutely helpless I felt during these conversations, like there was something I was missing, something I was doing wrong. Why aren’t you doing your work, I would ask him. I don’t know, he’d say with these big, mournful eyes. I stopped asking.

We’d started seeing a psychiatrist before school had even started, a summer’s worth of social awkwardness and anxiety and bullying and I’d looked for someone ostensibly to help work on his self-esteem, but. If I’m being honest with myself, which is sort of the point of this exercise, there’s a reason I looked for a psychiatrist and not a therapist. We’d been seeing her for maybe a month when she mentioned, with heartbreaking casualness, an autism spectrum disorder. I couldn’t breathe. I started researching, irrationally reassured because most of those kids didn’t sound anything like mine. I found all the things he wasn’t in a desperate attempt to ignore all the things he was.

And then.

The day before Christmas break, I stopped at his elementary school and I could hear him, from two hallways away. Shrieking, crying, and I almost tripped over myself running to his classroom door. There he was, between two teachers trying to calm him down. He looked up and saw me and I froze as he started to cry harder. I’m still not sure if his reaction was born from embarrassment or relief.

“Love,” I said, reached for him, dropped my forehead to his like I had when he was a baby, held his hands. “Sweetheart, can you breathe with me? Baby, please, in with me, yeah? Now out, slow and steady.” In and out we breathed together, forehead to forehead until his breathing matched mine and he could steady himself again. I went home and cried, my face pressed into the pillows. I tried to figure out what I had done wrong.

The next phone call from school was about interventions failed, about the need to meet, parents and teachers and the special education team leader.

I am embarrassed about my reaction to that, the rush of shame and disappointment and grief at being forced into a room to acknowledge what everyone else had seen but me; I have a special needs child. He is smart, and he loves politics and comic books and Clint Barton, computers and bugs and Legos and his baby brothers more than just about anything else in the world.

I’m scared. This isn’t something he’s going to grow out of. It’s not going to magically get better and the reality of that is exhausting.

I’m terrified, because I would give anything to make this easy for him and all I can think about is how long this road is going to be, how bumpy, and how there’s so much I can’t do to make this better. Welcome to humanity. Welcome to motherhood, to the dirty secret that no one is actually capable of fixing it all.

I can’t keep kids from picking on him. I can’t sit next to him in class and try to keep him on task. I can’t make friends for him. All I can do is accept the reality of where we are and do everything I can to be patient, to be steady, to help him figure out how to harness that powerful mind and find the balance that enables him to interact with the world around him. I hope I’m up to the challenge. I have to be.

He is my beautiful, bright boy, and maybe I cannot protect him from all the things that hurt, but I can still try. I can be there, forehead to forehead and hand in hand, breathing alongside him, giving him all the courage and strength and tenacity he can take. Because that’s what we do, we mothers. We’re not perfect, and neither are our kids. I don’t know how this story ends. I’m working really hard on accepting that. But moms don’t give up, right?

Our kind of love doesn’t have that kind of vocabulary.