February 2007

Santa Monica

AMONG THE FIVE CORE DEVOTEES OF REECE MAYALL’S parenting support group at the Nurtury, envy was a serious problem. Not of one another but of parents of “neurotypical” children. Parents of kids on the “trad track at school,” as Reece called it—the traditional, general-ed path.

Dawn would always remember the enormity of her relief when, sometime in her second year of attending meetings every Thursday morning, Mia had stood up during WOW (Wide-Open Words—Reece’s name for the “judgment-free invitation to share anything on your mind”) and declared, her voice forceful but shaky at the edges, “I’m so fucking sick of being jealous of other parents. This morning, my neighbor, who’s got three kids, including a son who’s eight, just like Nate, casually tells me that they’re taking a trip to fucking Europe this summer. The five of them are going Eurorail. Which is something I’ve always wanted to do! But now I’m thirty-five and divorced, and I can’t even take Nate shopping at Trader-fucking-Joe’s without—” She covered her face and burst into tears.

Reece knelt beside her, looping her arms around Mia’s narrow, quaking shoulders.

Soon the rest of the group was crying too.

One by one, the other parents spoke, confessing their own locked-away anger over the limits their children had placed on their lives. How jealous they were of the freedoms that families with neurotypical children took for granted.

When it was Dawn’s turn to speak, she said the things she’d never dared utter to anyone. Not even to Craig.

She told the group that some days—okay, at certain times nearly every day—she resented Quinn. How some days, as much as she loved the girl, and god, she did love her, mothering her simply felt too hard.

How sometimes, she felt she could not go on.

How she felt like a permanent failure of a mother.

Of a human.

When she finished, Dawn wept with a relief deeper than any she’d known. She let Reece hold her, and she was not ashamed, thinking, as she so often did lately, that the Nurtury was saving her life. That without her new friends—especially Reece—she might die.