Each year, we run a week of essays from Kate Hopper’s Motherwords class at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. This year, the class is going online, all the better for you folks who just can’t get out of the house because you’re watching babies. Details of upcoming classes are on Kate’s web site.

But first, here’s the first student essay by Elizabeth Verdick.

I love to hug my son to me and inhale the scent of his bristly hair and soft, pliant skin. Zach is seven but tolerates this.

When he comes in from the outdoors he carries that little-boy smell—sweat, sunshine and fresh air, with an undertone of something earthy and metallic. In the morning, while he’s buried in the warmth of his blankets, I catch the scent of the shampoo I washed his hair with the night before.

I can’t resist this strange, primal urge to bury my face into him like a mother cow nosing her calf. Perhaps it is my attempt to hold him tightly while he’s still willing to be cuddled. Or perhaps I pull him so close to me now because when he was a baby and toddler I could not.

As a baby Zach cried often, arched his back as I held him and pushed away my face with a tightly clenched fist. He learned to crawl away from me, then to walk away from me, then inevitably to run. I took this desperate need for distance personally, thinking that I only knew how to mother a girl and not a boy.

My daughter Olivia, Zach’s older sister, had clung to me as a baby. She said “Mama” early, held my hand as we walked, stroked my face and spent hours in my lap. We could have whole conversations, it seemed, while simply looking into each other’s eyes. So I thought I was a good mother—one who loved deeply, nurtured, supported, and treasured the gift of raising a child. I thought I understood something about the mother-child bond.

But with the birth of my son, the Universe gave me a wake-up call—no, a smack down. Suddenly I had a child who rejected nearly every attempt to bond. Zach ordered me around, not with words (he had none) but with screams and cries. When I didn’t understand his needs, he’d thrash his body on the floor or bump his head against a wall. I jokingly referred to him as “The Little General” but I was worried. The doctors I consulted said that boys tend to talk later than girls and advised me to “wait and see.” I waited.

And I saw a boy steadily retreating from me as time went by.

Autism. The diagnosis now seems obvious to me, even inevitable. But five years ago, I knew nothing of the CHAT (Checklist for Autism in Toddlers), CARS (Childhood Autism Rating Scale) or other screening tools. I had no knowledge of Early Intervention or special programs based on ABA (Applied Behavioral Analysis). And I certainly couldn’t have imagined that someday I’d become well-versed in such terminologies or witness firsthand the gradual unfolding of a child who couldn’t say “Dada,” or ask for water or accept a hug.

Why? Why did this have to happen to my son? Some people, in an effort to say the right thing, have suggested that God only gives you as much as you can handle. Others have told me Zach is lucky he got me as a mother because I’ve worked so hard to bring him back from the brink. These people mean well and I don’t blame them for trying to put a positive spin on something that has no explanation. But in my most private moments I still wonder why. Not “Why me?” but why on earth should a child have to suffer so? Why should a baby be denied what he naturally craves—a mother’s touch, her comfort, her ability to hold him close and protect him from the world? That is part of the mystery of autism, and perhaps the mystery of life itself. There is no answer to the question of why. There is only a child, his parents, and a family striving to be whole.

I’m learning not to dwell on what “might have been” and to be grateful for what I’ve got. To have once had those blissful moments of motherhood, looking into my daughter’s eyes and seeing the world anew, is a wonder. To have breathed in my baby’s breath, to have clasped my child’s tiny hand, is a gift—one not given to every person on earth.

Tonight, I received a gift from my son, a note written in invisible ink that he shined a special light on: Mom, I ♥ you. He was fresh from the bath wearing his oversized fleece bathrobe, and I was breathing him in once again. He then told me something so utterly, quirkily Zach: “Mom, I really want you to be hope-etastic.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s a mix of hopeful and ectastic,” he said, mispronouncing “ecstatic.”

I guess some days you could say I am hope-etastic. And that too is a gift.

Elizabeth lives near St. Paul with her husband and two children

This entry was posted on Monday, February 23rd, 2009 at 1:42 pm and is filed under Guest Bloggers, Mother Words Essays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.