Extreme Mothering
In my bottom drawer underneath everything else lies a plan to start seeing gnomes digging about in my garden. It lies in wait, in reserve, for when I really get fed up trying to communicate what I see with my 20/20 heart-felt vision. It will be bye-bye Kansas.
Minimalist Week. Day 2.
A series in which I prove how clever, right or the genuine article I am in short(er than they could be) and topical writings.
I was thinking, (no, really?), yes, really, actually chatting to the voices in my head, evaluating my chances of getting parole the next time a hearing comes up, and concluded who wants to leave prison after 50 years of it, anyway. Didn’t the Birdman of Alcatraz die in prison? Don’t so many, actually having a life notwithstanding the imposed confines? I don’t think any of us recall, off hand, the crime this Birdman committed. I certainly don’t remember mine (by the laws of Karma this could be two thousand years ago), but they all call me an extremist. Ugly word. But I accept my sentence – what can you do when you are out of advocates?
I think it is a prison status that makes for extreme stand points. Quite literally, ways in which to remain standing and true to you mission to undo bad karma, this life. I suppose once you are over 55 (or “retired”) you renounce yourself to standing in this business utterly alone. Maybe with a couple of dogs (birds in cages are not of this time).
Developing the thought
Friends have to make you superficial. They would rob you of all your time to read and think and solve the riddles of the world. Indeed, we all know the price most poets, painters and authors have to pay or prefer to pay for lives of relative solitude. Creative souls need creative space uncluttered by the likes of you (and you and you).
You will have to be born with the character for it. It is not without good reason astrologers advise those with many planets in Gemini or the ninth house (let alone that combination, groan) to choose journalism for a job, instead of getting stuck in the archives. If you are not a natural born loner, but sentenced to life without parole, then you’ll simply have to do your exercises to become one.
Examining such an exercise
I don’t have a lot of voting power, here, at the minute. And that’s okay for now. This reflects my WAFS‡ situation. It shows me who my true friends are, scratching my back when I can’t scratch theirs.
Not that it sits well. Going places empty handed is not how I was raised. It sits like the uncomfortable clothes I force myself to wear sometimes. I know they don’t look much good on me, but that goes for comfortable clothes no less – could I liken myself to a clothes horse? Unsightly, clumsy object taking up too much space ... but then the metaphor falls flat, because they are (rather slight and) made to have clothes hang off them unlike myself. It is not out of frugality or some kind of environmental consciousness that I make sure all items of clothing once purchased will be worn threadbare. It is one of my exercises in my extreme exercises book.
It falls into the category of you've made your bed (chosen your skirt) and now you have to lie in it (try to zip it up).
It is also a yoga practice for solidarity. So many people are condemned to feeling uncomfortable clothed, or naked, in anything that is not delusional. The examples I could give. And I am only thinking of my family. There is the anecdote of my father hoping I would turn into a boy.
There is the more recent anecdote of my mother hearing me out on my strategy to save my son and countering it the very next day. She apped me seven whole sentences, flawlessly typed, to suggest I be less extreme. She understands I am consumed by disappointment (read irrational and over-emotional). I app her back, very unlike myself in one sentence that she is probably right. There is no better way to conserve one's energies. It means the exchange has come to a final halt. Mantra 4: nobody understands me. When I heard it in my head, I found it very OTT. Why! it was almost arrogant! But it prooves the more incredible but necessary mantra to keep always in the forefront of my mind. It is the spinnaker I will need as the stategem calls for letting everybody go out to sea as they please.
Once you stop being angry you leave things behind; you forget about them; they could be S.O.Sing but you have thrown out your transmitter and you barely switch on your receiver because most people abuse the SOS signal anyway (only to be used in the event of grave and imminent danger to the loss of life. I am not an ambulance service.)
From now on you are happy for them in their rowboat on their golden pond. You are happy for your son on the same pond in his Honda aqua trax 12x turbo charged ski. How happy we will be out for a row and run, while I change tack to find an up wind.
Do you think working out a rational step by step plan is easy for a mother? It takes the stamina of a runner in the Marathon Des Sables. But go ahead undermine it: it’s all only sand. Can’t blame them. Never blame your parents. Waste of time. And time is all you have got inside your cage.
The bit where I am right
I am not complaining about anyone taking him off my hands. More free time for me. But there is noone who knows him like I do. There is noone other than I who was appointed to guide him through his autism. It was a higher degree. This is not to say there is anyone who can save him, not even me, from the autism, from the pits of life, but I am still right about who he is, where his potential lies and, above all, how it can be brought out of him. I am not the one to the job, fair enough. But they certainly are not!
No harm done, if he does not meet his potential, most of us are perfectly happy on the back burner of McSlurries and Jeopardy. But if it is to be that way, then, I am very black and white, indeed extreme, and I will be no party to it. I did not balloon up and split open to put another one of those on this planet. Goes to show, one is systematically undermined in one's tactics to change the world.
I have given up explaining autism and I it will cost me my head to explain my son any further. It is impossible to show you the true picture of this "King of the World" in his own words. His true self is a fata morgana. I can only describe him concretely in three imaginative pictures.
His head
His heart
His metabolic-limb system ‡ World Away From Steemit
--Credits photos: a little tricky. The bridge is somewhere in Nepal, but years of looking to find where I found it has not lead me to accredit the photo duly. It is however the best one for the very unreliable bridge between inner and outer worlds my son has to work with. The door without a balcony, cracks me up as much as it makes me weep and is my own photo. The Figure 8 Race – Raceway Park Shakopee, MN has to be indirectly credited to @onnovocks who brought the insanity of such a race to my attention. I recognised my son's dysfunctional lemniscate system in it straight away. Arguably good out-of-the-box fun, till it no longer is and the pile up starts (no that's not the fun part, trust me).
--The photo of the Marathon des Sables is from Ben Fogle's Ultimate Adventure bucket list
I couldn't resist, WAFS would have robbed me of sleep anyway.
GO TO BED!
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