The essay, “Flood Plain” by Bruce Mills is taken from his memoir, An Archaeology of Yearning, a book that “explores memory, story, and desire in a home transformed by autism.” In this entry, Bruce moves us in and out of his own boyhood memories as he moves through his routines with his four-year old son Jacob:
At the end of the week, I again arrive shortly after mid-day to pick up Jacob from Croyden. I sit upon the bench along a wall in the front lobby and lean back against the red brick. Children are arriving for the afternoon. I hear the whir of the elevator of the first bus. From its side emerges a young girl in a wheelchair. Her head tilts against the sparkling plastic head cushion. Her smile unsettles me. She is glancing somewhere where I am not, but I sit up, eager to greet her at the door. I am learning to look into her eyes.
Outside a few flakes of snow begin to suggest themselves, lingering like the descending ash of the burnings of late fall. As I try to make out the snow from the gray sky, another memory urges itself forward. I am twelve and on my Stingray bicycle pedaling through an empty street to a 6:30 a.m. basketball practice. It is mid December. A night snow has covered the street with a blanket of white; except for the shadows cast by the intervals of streetlights and the predictable angles of houses and sidewalks, the landscape has few boundaries. For a moment, I close my eyes and ride blind, until, feeling the thrill of pedaling just beyond some imaginary limit, I stop to look over my shoulder. Behind me, the wandering indentations of my tires, like the frozen paths of small streams, fill with snow, the more distant banks diminished to thin creases of shadow. The street stretches forth like a flood plain fertile with the meanderings of past river channels. It is a world that I had not seen, and so I let myself linger in the space between past and present, this borderless landscape of beauty and loss.
More buses and cars move up to the curb. A few parents enter with their sons or daughters. One child catches my eye; he seems older than the others. After the boy leaves to go down the stairs to his classroom, his mother takes a seat on the other end of my bench. When our eyes meet, I introduce myself and am about to tell her about Jacob just as she is called into the office to talk with the school psychologist. She hesitates a moment, and I sense that she does not want to do the unkindness of not hearing about my son. But I glance toward the office to divert her eyes and assure her. “Perhaps another time,” I say.
After she goes, I can feel the vibrations of my son’s unuttered name on my tongue and the way my lungs had filled to hold the beginnings of an unformed tale. For a moment, I see myself through her eyes—an eager father whose son now plays in a place previously unimagined and who pauses on the threshold between a world just opening up and another seemingly canceled out. I glimpse with sadness the distinct outlines of that person that Jacob has begun to erase.
(The essay continues in the book.)
It’s true that parenthood changes us and even more true when we are parenting children on the spectrum because we are brought into a world that is not typical, not what we imagined or expected. There are difficulties and frustrations, yes, but as Bruce writes beautifully in this glimpse of life with Jacob almost fourteen years after the time of Flood Plain, “we know this immense love that comes from living so intensely together amid our different ways of knowing.”
In the other room, I hear Jacob sorting through his videos. It is early Sunday morning, my wife Mary is away to be help with her brother’s recovery from surgery, and I have let Jacob break the 8 am rule by having “TV freetime” earlier on Sunday. My daughter is sleeping in the other room, getting the last home rest of spring break before heading back to the University of Michigan. In a couple hours, we will frantically gather all her washed clothes, negotiate with Jacob about his necessities for the trip, and drive her back to Ann Arbor.
As I let our dog, Gypsy, out for the morning, I note that last night, my daughter Sarah must have slipped Jacob’s many, many videos back in their boxes and gathered and stacked his many, many drawings, lists, and print-outs of Disney or Universal characters. In the kitchen, the counter is clear of the dirty dishes—which she loaded into the dishwasher some time in the early hours of Sunday morning. As I write, I feel that twinge of already missing her, of feeling that I did not have enough time to visit with her over the last two days when Mary was gone. Last night, after watching Jacob’s Mary Kate and Ashley movie, we started Wall-E, but I could not stay awake. To say that I have learned to accommodate this sense of sadness over the years is not to say that I feel it less.
Jacob will be eighteen in one week. Much has changed since the Croyden days. He is a junior in high school, developing work skills, going to Art and Computer classes, participating in gym, and always looking forward to Common Bond events, the program that helps foster friendships with neurotypical peers.
Much has not changed. The frustrations are different but, at times, still worked out physically. My son is now two hundred twenty pounds. Mary and I literally absorb his inability to apply the right “coping skills” for an unexpected change (like a snow day that cancels a Common Bond excursion). We now have new strategies for how to provide space; we bring Gypsy with us to the garage and sit without speaking in our car.
And we know this immense love that comes from living so intensely together amid our different ways of knowing. In this story that is our lives, after all, there are many ways that we are touched. Last night, when taking Gypsy out for a walk, Jacob put his hand on my shoulder. It was a kind of tether, a cord that enabled him to walk while still looking at his “papers” beneath the intersecting glow of the street lights. But, in the end, I felt that he was the one leading me home.
Bruce Mills teaches literature at Kalamazoo College. In his field, he has authored two books, including, most recently, Poe, Fuller, and the Mesmeric Arts: Transition States in the American Renaissance (2005). In the last few years, he has turned to creative nonfiction, which has been published in The Georgia Review and New England Review. He and Deb Cumberland of Winona State University have co-edited a book on siblings and autism to be published by Jessica Kingsley Press in the fall.
Bruce is active in his local autism society and presently serves as a board member on The Gray Center for Social Learning and Understanding. He lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with his wife, Mary Holtapp, daughter Sarah, and son Jacob.
