WHO WILL SING?
She gets older, this daughter of mine,
as do I, and the heavy question behind
each day, and woven now into each year:
what about when I’m gone?
She can’t live with you forever
I’m told, and I know this to be true.
Some of her peers, twenty-ish,
thirty-ish, middle aged,
have gone to group homes,
happily or not so,
and still the world spins,
and more questions arise,
for the options aren’t
pretty or plentiful,
and my imaginings vacillate
between dark and bleak.
Who will sing to her, mornings,
and guard the rituals
that define her boundaries?
There are the questions she asks
of songs, or objects, or days,
or other people, some of them dead,
some she has no contact with,
and I am to answer them
as if I am that person, that thing,
ten a week, typed up by Friday at 3pm.
There is the morning question or statement, often cryptic,
and she anxiously awaits my videotaped response,
though I am in the same room.
There is the crucial, long enough pause
between activities,
the deciphering of scrawled dreams,
decoding her language
in time to understand
she means This
and not That,
planning the next day’s snack,
next week’s lunch,
offering the hair,
two sided and girl shaped,
reminding and re-answering
a hundred times a day,
why him and not her,
why people say this,
do that,
what it means to advocate
in front of people,
in real time,
rather than to the air,
in a corner, hours later?
You say
she will adjust.
You say
she will deal,
must learn to cope,
and if I weren’t so damned appropriate
I’d ask you what it would be like
if someone took control of your every activity
because it’s easier that way,
(for them),
because they don’t understand
what you need,
because there are four or five others
living with you
who need things too,
what if the notes, the records,
the story of your life,
were left in a drawer somewhere,
unread, or read only once
by a supervisor
in an office somewhere,
and
what would it be like
if your clothes were too
rough against your skin,
and you didn’t have the words,
or, if you did,
they came out a month, a year later,
and so you had to wear these garments
that sandpapered your tender flesh
and then when you scratched your arms
til you bled,
what if you were given
a behavioral plan to curb
that thing you were doing to cope?
I’d ask you what it would be like
if the proverbial walls of your house ,
the very things you count on
to be there, day after day,
your schedule, your calendar,
your To-Do list,
were erased one day,
and the people you count on,
let’s call them staff,
changed every few months,
and didn’t read the notes about you,
or forgot what was in them,
and you were expected to be compliant,
do as you’re told,
and deal with it,
even if you didn’t like
the food you were given,
the activities you were driven to,
the staff who you relied on
for food, for a bath,
the others who shared the place
you are now supposed to call home?
Too attached, you say?
Am I melodramatic, or just well read?
You do the research,
ask around,
go check out the houses
you say she should live in,
be the fly on the wall,
and the report back to me, please.
I distract myself
with the gifts, the burdens,
the details of her life.
Tea too hot,
song too rough,,
packed lunch was uninteresting,
everything needs more salt.
In the land of Autism
the tiniest thing
can make or break a day,
and when it breaks—
the day, or my heart—
when it breaks
the healing is slow, uneven,
and the memory of every assault
on the nervous system,
hers or mine,
seems imprinted on the walls
of her cells, of this place
she calls her home,
but here we incorporate it into the décor,
write poems about it,
scratch an itch against the rough
patch in the plaster.
We make it all right.
All right then,
Tell me true—
Who will sing to her
When I’m gone,
Who will sing?
-Melinda Coppola
This mother is speaking for them all, those people who love and care. The people who live it, who bend to the unbending. The people who see the pain, and sometimes the joy, and have it also. The people who understand, through time spent, hands wrought and brows furrowed. Another day. Please. Let it be, let it always be, for the people who would sing forever, but they can’t.
Thank you, Louisa. I suspect you sing in your own way for someone very special? Thank you for reading and commenting.
No, thank-you. And your very special one.