The meltdown
I always feared our autistic son could lose his school over a meltdown. I never thought the meltdown would be mine.
“I’m not going to say anything unless I first confer with you,” I told Rob on our way to the meeting. It was the annual general meeting at our kids’ school, and we were expecting it to be a tough couple of hours.
I’d spent the previous two weeks leading a massive effort to organize the large number of parents who were unhappy about some of the board’s recent decisions, and even more, with the way these decisions were made. We were both convinced that the fate of the school rested on the outcome of this meeting, and as much as I’d tried to get into a calm, peaceful state for the evening, it was hard to shake the anxiety that had accumulated over months and months, and especially, over the past fifteen days.
Rob and I had been talking for at least seven of those days about the fact that the meeting would go a lot better if I said as little as possible. People needed to see that this wasn’t a one-woman show — they needed to see and hear that there were many parents who were upset. And to the extent that I did speak, it would be my job to put a human face on the conversations that had been happening online: to let people see that even if our emails were critical, the parents who were challenging the board’s approach were caring, smart, likeable people.
My restraint lasted for all of thirty minutes. As soon as the first round of questions got underway, I was on my feet. And I was terrible. I mean, deeply terrible: Emotional. Hostile. Inarticulate. I could not have told you what I was trying to say, even as I was trying to say it. There were words — I think — but it would have been more accurate (and probably more effective) if I’d simply let out a guttural moan of grief and outrage.
I wasn’t alone, however. There was a lot of outrage in the room, and pretty much all of it was a lot more articulate than mine. We were sitting near the front, so I couldn’t really gauge how the room was reacting overall, but almost every speaker was standing up to question the board’s decisions. I felt increasingly hopeful that we had the strong majority we’d need to show the board they needed to back down.
But my own outrage kept getting the better of me. I shook my head at comments I didn’t agree with, or didn’t believe. I snorted. I groaned. I interrupted one board member to challenge the accuracy of his remarks, and got a stumbling correction. I interrupted another board member, clearly to the annoyance of the the room. To those of you who are thinking, oh, it probably wasn’t as bad as she thinks, believe me when I say that it was. Even Rob, who is the kindest and gentlest husband in the world, has reluctantly admitted that I was not at my best. So let me just say it: I was a disaster.
Finally, I took one of the Ativan I carry in case I need to keep my calm during a Peanut emergency. If anyone recorded that meeting, you’d probably be able to clock exactly when I popped that pill: about five minutes before I stopped being the absolute worst campaign spokesmodel you could possibly imagine. Eventually, I even became effective — though not before I’d thoroughly botched the motion I took over when another of my campaign-mates had to go home to deal with a kid crisis. If the only thing I’d said or done in that meeting was the speech I gave just before our final vote, I’d have been very proud.
But that speech — and that vote — came after three hours of sheer agony. Something like a hundred parents got a taste of the board’s opposition from my rude, hapless stammering in the first part of the evening. By the time I reached a state of pharmaceutically assisted coherence, the room was half-empty, and people were tired. Tired of the meeting, tired of the complaints about the board, and I’m sure, tired of me. We lost the symbolic vote that I had persuaded my team to pursue, 31 to 44.
I walked out of the meeting, numb. We got home — it wasn’t far, but I have almost no memory of how we got from there to here.
“We lost,” I told our 14-year-old Sweetie as we walked in the door.
“You lost?”
“Yes,” I said. And I started crying.
“Please take Sweetie downstairs,” I told Rob. I knew what was coming.
As soon as Sweetie left the room, it hit me like a tsunami. This giant wall of Here we are, again. Back to finding a new school for Peanut, a so-called “high functioning”, highly gifted autistic child with anxiety so intense he can barely walk into school, much less into class. Back to finding a new set of care arrangements, a new way of balancing parenting and work. Rob and I had already agreed that since Peanut’s barely been able to make a go of this school at its best, it’s hard to imagine how things could improve for him if the school proceeds in steering away from the values, approaches and people that brought us here.
The anxiety, the despair, the overwhelming sense of how am I going to do this? — well, you might think it’s easier because I’ve been through it so many times now. Instead, it’s harder, because it slams into me piled with the weight and sorrow of the last eight or ten times I had to reinvent both Peanut’s schooling and our family arrangements. I think about somehow returning to public school, and I remember the principals and teachers who shouted at me over Peanut’s behavior. I think about returning to homeschool, and I remember what it was like to hear Peanut say he wanted to die because he didn’t fit in anywhere. I think about just giving up on school, and I wonder if that means giving up on work, too.
Before I caught my breath from that familiar wave of parental despair, I was hit by another storm that was just as familiar. I had failed. I had failed Peanut, I had failed the parents who had trusted me, I had failed all the kids who need this school just as much as Peanut does. Not only had I let everyone down, but I’d done it in the most humiliating way possible: by behaving emotionally, rudely, and stupidly. And that was just at the meeting itself: I had failed in dozens of ways before that, perhaps going all the way back to my first email to the board. I had listened to the wrong people. I had made the wrong strategic decisions. I was so busy playing hero and working myself to the bone that I didn’t let other people see how much they were needed. I burned myself out, and it was my own fault I burned myself out, because I knew better and I did it anyhow.
I berated myself with every weapon of self-recrimination in my large arsenal, each of which carries its own load of historical ammunition: You were underprepared, just like the time you played piano at assembly without really practicing. You were undisciplined, just like the time you embarrassed yourself in your grad school class. You burned yourself out, just like you did when you caused that crisis in your business. Except this time, it means there are going to be dozens of quirky, sensitive kids who no longer have a school that makes them feel safe.
The thought of all those kids brought the third wave of despair: the despair at social injustice, at political naiveté, at the widespread psychological dysfunction that drives so much of the world’s social and political ills. How can people believe this? How can people think like this? How can people act like this? How can people talk like this? It doesn’t matter whether I’m looking at the governance of my kids’ school, at the last year of American politics, or at the arc of Western policy over the past fifty years: it’s easy for me to see any and all of it as an exercise in futility.
This, too, carries decades of echoes. My mom loves to tell the story of how I called up all the unpopular girls in my grade 5 class, pointing out that there were more of us than there were popular girls, and that we should therefore decide that we were the popular girls: my sense of outrage goes back to at least age 9, I guess. I spent more than two decades working in politics and with social change organizations, and I can still taste the bitterness of every electoral or campaign defeat. By the time I was pregnant with Sweetie I was so full of grief at the world’s bent towards self-destruction that I had nightmare after nightmare of apocalyptic scenarios in which the world was ending, and I couldn’t save my baby.
The world isn’t ending. But I still can’t save my baby.
I have spent the past 48 hours riding these waves of grief, waking up crying, fighting this deep sucking well of despair. In my first hour, I mapped each wave as I cried into the phone with a dear friend who has talked me through some of the fiercest crying jags of my life.
“It’s like three of my most painful, deep, persistent hurts are colliding,” I told her. “All my fear and sadness for Peanut. All my fear and shame around failure. All my outrage and sadness about the injustice of the world.”
These three waves, converging. It reminded me of something a close friend told me when we went for a restorative walk, just a few hours before that horrific AGM. She had just returned from a month in India, where she had visited the tip of the continent and traveled to a rock that sits at the junction of the Bay of Bengal, Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea.
“Can you see the difference between them?” I asked her.
“The first time I went there, I thought I could,” she told me. “This time, they all just merged together.”
The longer I sit here on my little island, in the middle of my three oceans of sadness, the more they seem to blend together too. The deep grief and fear I feel for Peanut is inseparable from my fear of failing to help him — inseparable from the fear that he is suffering because of all the ways I’ve already failed him. And of course, the reason it feel so urgent and essential to help him is because I’m scared of what will happen to him otherwise, in a world that can be so hard and cruel to people who are neuro-typical, let alone those who have invisible disabilities.
Fear, fear, fear. Why even bother to describe and categorize its nuances, when it all bleeds together into this one mass of despair?
Because fear isn’t what he needs from me, and despair is a dead end. Soon, I will have to turn and swim through these waves, fighting the current until I get to the next island where our family can stay for a while.
But not yet. For now, I can only float here, on this ocean of all my colliding sadness, resting until my energy returns. Because it takes all my energy to swim ahead of the fear, pulling a life raft for my beautiful, loving, brilliant, impossible child.
