10

Dear Em,

I’m writing this on the day you turn 10. I remember turning 10, or rather I don’t remember the birthday but I remember the anticipation of turning double-digits. When I turned 10 I had a brother and two-going-on-three sisters and I hated math and read a lot (a lot) and in retrospect I was already experiencing mental illness that would wreck a lot of the next ten years and is still with me today. My biggest dream was having my own room. I lived in a town with 364 people in it and I’d been outside the province once, to the province next door.

You don’t have any brothers or sisters and you like numbers, even though they call it maths over here. You have your own room and you live in a city with 8 million people in it and I’ve stopped trying to count the number of plane trips you’ve been on. Not lately, of course. But you got a whole lot in while the getting was good.

I didn’t set out to write this as a comparison, I think I’m just trying to find a way to talk about how strange it is for me that you’re turning a 10 that’s not the 10 I was or the other 10s I have known or the 10 I assumed you would be. It’s like using the same tape measure all your life and then one day you take it out and it’s something different, some of the numbers are gone and other ones are in the wrong places on the tape and you don’t know how to use it or even what it can measure, anymore.

On your measuring tape, Em, are you happy?

If I could know one thing I guess that’d be it. I know how to tell when you’re delighted in the moment, when you see a rollercoaster or a train, or the different kind of delight when you stop to look at a patch of brick that makes a shadow you like. I know how to tell when you’re actively upset, or about to be. What I don’t know is what the underlying feeling of being you is. Does your brain hurt you, the way mine hurt me? Do you feel lonely? Do you look at us and wish that we’d do or be something different?

I’ve read a lot of things that use the analogy of different languages to talk about the challenges of communication between a neurotypical and an autistic person. That it’s like encountering someone you don’t share language with. And I think that’s fine, so far as it goes, but it’s more than that, with you. Maybe it’s the other things, the GDD or the IDD or the SPD or any of the other acronyms that trace you out on paper. But when I try to think of how it feels, for me, it’s like we’re two species. It’s like maybe I’m a magpie and I’ve spent years collecting things up in my nest I thought you might like, shiny bits of glass and buttons and bottle caps, books and riding bikes and doing science experiments and visiting castles and making friends, all the things I’m excited to watch you enjoy. But when you show up you’re a fish, not a bird, and I drag all my buttons and bits of glass to the edge of the water but instead of playing with them you bump them around with your tail to toss up the sand in the water, watch it float down grain by grain, and then you dart off into the deeper part of the lake.

I wish that I could tell you, lately, why it is that we don’t go to the park anymore or for tram rides or train rides or to the toy store to stare at the rows of plastic animals, arrayed in their pairs and triples and tens. I wish I could tell you why we can’t leave the house. Leaving — moving, jumping, walking, things to look at, watching the swish of trains and traffic go back, taking familiar routes to familiar places — that has always been the best way I’ve known to help you find your ok-ness again.

Right after lockdown started, the first few weeks, you and I would go down to the living room in the mornings and slowly wake up while you watched a video of the U-Bahn in Berlin, over and over: things pulling away and things taking off and things coming to a stop and somewhere for you, in there, peace. You’ve loved that kind of thing since you were a baby, when we lived up at Bounds Green and sometimes when you were upset we’d walk up to the tube station and just sit on the platform for an hour so you could watch the trains pulling in and out of the station. Pull up, brakes, doors open, beep, doors close, the swish of it pulling away. The repetition of it, the cadence of the station announcements.

But I wish I could just tell you why. But I just don’t have any way, maybe there’s some way and if I’d tried harder then I could talk to you, now, but there’s nothing, it’s not even in the realm of trying, trying to explain to you what’s going on or even “there’s something bad and out of our control and it means your whole life has changed”. You don’t really do concepts, or at least — well, I am sure you do, but I don’t have a way to communicate with you about them. Glass and bottle caps.

Sometimes I can see you through the water, near the surface, flickering in and out of shadow, and it seems like you’re happy. One new thing you loved this year was taking the bus to school. Every day you’d stand on the sidewalk and laugh as it came round the corner. You love lining your plastic animals up to look in each other’s faces or hold each other over precipices or gaze out the window. You love Wonder Pets and baths and giant bubbles. You laugh, a lot. Most of the time we have no idea why — maybe you’re laughing at something under the surface, down in the lake where the currents tickle your toes, some warm absurdity bursting in your heart.

I hope so. Happy birthday, monkeypants.