Kit and Walter are home from school this week. It’s spring break. Archie, who is also enjoying time off from his activities, is happy to have them here. Or at least he was for a few days because all they’re doing now, toward the end of the week, is bicker. I blame myself for that, their bickering. I intervened too often when they three were small.
Before I sat down at my laptop to write, I grabbed a piece of tablet paper from a drawer on Archie’s side of our shared desk and scribbled on it with a black marker, “Writing – Do not disturb.” I underlined the “Do not disturb” part before I ripped off a piece of blue painter’s tape to affix the sign on the outside of my office door.
I’m at home during the kids’ break because I left my job in January, the one at the same University I worked before Archie was born. I bowed out when intuition told me it was time. A week later the Board of Trustees called for the President’s resignation, their motion confirming another thing I’ve learned through experience – hunches are harbingers. Learning to listen is liberating.
The morning after I left the University, I picked up here at home exactly where I’d left off. After walking the dogs and emptying the dishwasher and collecting the laundry, I helped Archie part his hair and tie his shoes and remember his lunch before he and I drove across town. He’s enrolled in a Y.M.C.A. program for adults with diverse abilities, an activity in which he loves participating. It operates out of the branch near Kit and Walter’s old school, the one they attended through fourth grade. I drove the same route that morning with Archie as I’d done one-thousand mornings before, and it struck me as I crested the hill on Hudson right before the hard left turn into a subdivision that it’s true after all. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
During one of the mornings Archie was at the Y.M.C.A., I convinced myself it was time to put together my home office. It had become a place to hide away everything our family wanted to ignore. Bags of clothing I’d intended to donate were crowded into a corner of the room. Archie’s worn textbooks, some with torn covers, were haphazardly stacked on his side of the desk. Kit and Walter’s collection of college prospectuses, propped up against a wall, had toppled and spilled across the floor. I couldn’t shut a couple of the desk drawers because they were stuffed full of broken crayons and wrinkled notebook paper, forgotten stationary and capless markers, things we should’ve thrown away but saved, just in case.
Two days later, I unpacked the bag filled with stuff I’d brought home from the University. I’d saved that task for last. I put up on my shelves the framed photos I had displayed on my desk: Kit en pointe in front of Dickinson College Law School’s copper wall; Walter and Archie at Gilbert’s in Portland, Maine; and all three kids on the side of a hill at the Boyd Mountain Christmas tree farm. I filled three mugs with pens and pencils and scissors and placed them beside an orchid I’ve neglected for too long. I pulled my composition notebook from the bottom of the bag and flipped through its pages, all of them filled with scribbled notes and ideas, before I tossed it in the trash.
It’s time to start writing again, I told myself. Maybe write a manuscript and apply to an MFA program, I thought before wondering if I had the discipline to do it. I’d been thinking about blogging again, I reminded myself. I’ve missed reading posts that surpass the superficial introspection of social media and maybe other people do, too. In one of the desk drawers I’d emptied earlier that week, I’d found a three-ring binder filled with printouts from my old blog, the one John built when Archie was born and I’d kept up until he and the twins went to elementary school. When I read through the printed entries, I realized I’d forgotten so many things.
I don’t want to forget what’s going on now. Kit and Walter will graduate from high school later this spring. They’ve both committed to colleges, one in the Northeast and the other in the Upper Midwest, and right now they’re looking forward to the end of the school year. For them this ending is mostly sweet, I can tell, but for me it’s a little bitter, too. Not in a negative way, just in the way a parent feels when she knows her people are ready to leave home.
I may be preparing to let the twins go, but John and I recently petitioned the County for guardianship of Archie. This is something many parents of disabled people choose to do for a variety of reasons when their son or daughter becomes a legal adult. For John and me, it felt like an important step to take. After home visits and evaluations, a court date and a bank check to attorney and ad litem, a manilla envelope that had been scotch-taped closed arrived in the mail. In it was a Certificate of Appointment from the Greenville County Office of the Probate Court declaring John and I Archie’s legal guardians. As such, we are now responsible for his “care, comfort, and control.”
They may say differently, but I never wanted to control my kids. When they were small, John and I determined schedules and set expectations, corrected the wrongs and praised the rights, but eventually all three kids assumed those responsibilities themselves. That transfer of power wasn’t planned, rather it just happened, each time the moments’ significance passing by unnoticed. One day I held each of their hands, pulling them along behind me, and the next they took their turns standing in front of me, each hand inside mine until they were ready to let go, exactly as I’d raised them to do . So, no. Controlling Archie nor his siblings, be they here in our house or far away at school, isn’t something I’ll do. But the care and comfort part? After nearly 20 years on the job, I’m already good at that.
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