A few months ago, Mark and I took the kids to a "sensory friendly" movie showing.  Autistic individuals, and others with sensory processing difficulties, can find a typical movie going experience overwhelming.  Movies are loud.  Theaters are dark and often crowded.  The screen is huge and the images on it are flickering and fast paced.  There are previews and commercials before the show that switch rapidly from one theme to another, while we wait impatiently for what we actually came to see.  Then when the movie does start, its story and situations are designed to evoke strong emotional responses: to scare or thrill or amaze us.  And did I mention they're LOUD?

Most of us go to the movies to be a little overwhelmed.  But for some people, all of that can be too much.  So, at sensory friendly showings, there are no previews.  The lights are dim, but the theater is not dark.  And the sound is turned down.  And not only that, it's ok to sing or talk or to get up and walk around, dance or jump if it all gets to be too much anyway.

At the showing we went to, some kids got up and paced the aisles.  Some rocked in their seats.  Some grunted or chirped.  My son commented on the movie at full voice.  (Whispering is only for secrets.)  And we all had a fun day out doing something different while nobody stared.  Nobody glared.  Nobody shifted uncomfortably in their seats and made little "hem" noises in their throats.  The air didn't buzz with electric hostility.  And nobody had to worry that, at any moment, it might.

I don't know about the other parents in that theater, but I felt like I'd been able to put down a hundred pound weight.  The kids and young adults in that theater could all be themselves, and we all understood.  No one said anything or did anything, but there was a palpable sense of acceptance in the air.  It hung there, invisible but enveloping, like the drowsy smell of honeysuckle on a warm afternoon.  What a relief.  Which made me realize just how guarded I am and how much weight, how much fear and tension and worry, I carry every day.

This past weekend, I went to a convention for my 12 Step group.  Hundreds of sex addicts and their partners or family members gathered in hotel conference rooms and ballrooms.  There were meetings and workshops and outings.  There were speakers who shared their experience, strength and hope.  At each banquet iced tea was served instead of alcohol.  No one gossiped about the latest infidelity scandal in the media.  People openly shared their pain and their weaknesses and their gratitude.  And all weekend long, I had nothing to do but connect with my Higher Power in a group of people who was supporting me in doing just that.  All weekend long, I felt I had nothing to worry about and nothing to fear.

Again that love and acceptance enveloped me.  Again that hundred pound weight dropped off my shoulders. Again the relief washed over me.  And again I realized just how guarded I am and how much weight, how much fear and tension and worry, I carry every day.

On the last day of the convention, I wept with gratitude for the gift of having been there.  (If you were one of the lovely ladies sitting around a hotel banquet table with me on Monday morning at breakfast, yes, that was me crying and smiling at you all crazy.) We were asked on that last day if we had picked up any burdens that we wanted to leave behind, and I couldn't think of any.  All I could think was that I needed to try not to reshoulder the burdens I'd set down when I entered.

A few days ago, a columnist I generally like wrote a satirical piece on sex addiction rehab (one I won't link to here, due to its triggering nature). He's a liberal columnist, so the comments were populated with lots of LOLs and virtual eye rolling at the concept of sex addiction as a creation of the religious right: people who are uptight about and don't know how to enjoy sex. There was lots of mocking of the "higher power" concept, lots of atheists sneering at the superstitious nonsense that is God.

Of course, the conservative flip side of the "sex addiction is a joke" coin is to sneer at therapists: people who are forever trying to write off weakness and lack of willpower as "diseases" in order to bilk people out of money.  Either way, treatment for sex addiction is seen as misguided and useless: so called "sex addicts" either "just" need to loosen up and learn to accept and enjoy their sexuality or "just" need to have more willpower and moral fortitude.

And either way, as someone married to a sex addict, it can be both hurtful and maddening to feel the world is ringed around us in a circle, pointing and laughing, saying that we've been duped when, for the first time, we feel we're seeing clearly. It's one of those things that is likely to draw me back into that crazy place I used to occupy: where, like a six-year-old, I yell "NO!" at someone else's "Yes!" only to have them yell "Yes!" back at me in an endless cycle; where I feel panicked and crazy, as if someone's telling me the sky is red when I see it's blue; where I spend my time and energy fruitlessly trying to convince someone else that they're wrong so that I can feel right again.

I wanted (desperately) to pull out my credentials and yell into the comments section, "Mark and I weren't some crazy, uptight religious fanatics who just couldn't embrace our sexuality!  And I'm not some uptight, frigid wife who can't please her man!  I was a really good atheist who really loves sex!"  As if the columnist, or any of the commenters, would read that and suddenly say, "Oh, some random stranger on the Internet says that wasn't her experience. Now I've totally changed my view on sex addiction!" rather than, "I bet she actually sucks in bed and her husband is an asshole."

Deep breath.  Step 1.  I am powerless over other people.  I am powerless to change their perceptions of me.  And trying to do so anyway makes my life unmanageable.  Followed by Step 2.  Help from that much maligned higher power.

I didn't leave the comment.  I stopped reading, made the column disappear in a flash of electrons with the click of my mouse and I did something I never used to do before.  I prayed.  "God, let me see the world through your eyes.  Let me not be threatened by people whose experiences are different.  When I mock others, I am usually scared and hurting.  In every place that this columnist and his readers are scared and hurting too, open their hearts to love and peace.  Help me on my journey, and help all of them follow the path they need to, so that we can find love and understanding for each other."

In the past, I wouldn't have prayed because my God is not a separate being who controls the world, but I've found that prayer isn't (as I used to think) some useless, crazy, superstitious ritual predicated on achieving results with the help of a supernatural power.  Prayer is a tool I use to ground myself, open my own heart and let go of my own pain, fear and anger.  Prayer is a way of connecting to my higher power, my better nature, my Buddha nature, the God part inside me.  Prayer is a way of feeling love and compassion and connection to others, rather than distance and anger and fear and resentment.  When I pray for someone who requests my prayers, it connects us, and lifts us both up.  When I pray (quietly, secretly) for someone who doesn't request it, it helps me love and forgive.  I've learned that even if prayer never produces any tangible results in the world, it's not useless -- not to me -- because the purpose isn't to change the world to get what I want, it's to help me be in line with and at peace with what is.

Earlier this year, I read an article about technology that would allow us to record and store every moment of our lives. Imagine: our whole lives stored in a single searchable archive. We could settle those arguments with the boss by replaying what was actually said. ("See, you did tell me you wanted this by Thursday, not Tuesday!") We could go back to that first kiss over and over again. In fact, if I were recording my whole life, I'd even be able to figure out where the heck I read this elusive article (The New York Times, maybe?) and link to it.

Maybe it's the year (and the first decade of the 21st century) drawing to a close, but the idea of a life archive was on my mind the other night.  My memory is flawed — as memories are —and ever since I was a child, I have wanted the ability to go back and reconstruct the past if I need to.  It's one of the reasons I write so much: not just here on my blog, which is a relatively recent occurrence, but in the thirty plus years of journals I have stacked up in my closet and in the copies of letters I have in file drawers (yes, years ago, back in the days when people did things like write letters on paper and send them to people in the mail, I started fastidiously making and keeping copies of my outgoing correspondence) and in the e-mail archive I have dating all the way back to the early 90's.  And I'm not just an obsessive chronicler, as Mark can attest from the paper laden state of our bedroom/office, I keep nearly every scrap of information that passes through my hands: from calendars to holiday letters to post-it notes.  And it's still never been enough.

My craving for a complete record of every moment of my life reached a height when I discovered Mark's sex addiction.  I went back over what I had and found it scandalously lacking.  How could I not have written anything at all on what turned out to be several major dates of acting out?  How could I not have a copy of some of those suspicious receipts that caused me so much angst?  And how could Mark have deleted all the e-mail in the secret accounts he used for contacting other women, so that, when at last I discovered them, I would have no way to verify dates and times?

I wanted to weigh every word he had written to someone else.  I wanted to compare each date and time to other events in our lives so I could thoroughly revise our history together based on what I now knew to be the truth.  I wanted to go back to each instance of his acting out and see what I had missed.  Did he look different when he came home after having sex with someone else?  Was there some way I could have known?  Now that I had all the information about what was happening at the time, would our lives together look different to me?  I wanted to go back to those sections and play them over and over again, like a detective in a crime drama, ready to pause it and say, "There!  See that!  The way he raises his eyebrow right there.  That's the tell."

I believed that somewhere out there was some objective reality that I'd failed to completely capture, and if I just knew how to access that, if had a more complete picture, if had more information, everything would be different; I'd be safe.  I would have something to point to in my self doubt and say, "I'm not crazy!  There was something there, something wrong, I just didn't know how to look for it."  I believed the whole truth was knowable by me if I just tried hard enough, if I had all the pieces to the puzzle.

What I didn't realize at the time was that the information alone was not enough.  The security of some objective truth is an illusion.  I still need the ability to interpret what I know and the confidence to believe in my own interpretation, my own truth, in the face, not of contradictory facts, but of contradictory interpretations.  There were times I did have evidence of my husband's addictive behavior, but I didn't have the ability to understand it or the confidence to hold to my feelings in the face of contradictory spin from Mark.  If I could play back the movie of my life, it wouldn't appear the same to me now as it did then or as it will in ten years or twenty years, not because of new information, but because of new experiences.

Still, I'm pretty sure that, given the chance, I'd totally buy something that would record my life.  After all, the fact that I still don't know where I read about all this in the first place is going to bug me for at least the rest of this year.  And wouldn't it be nice to just look that up rather than do all this tiresome letting go?  Maybe if I check my e-mail...

I sort of want to write a post today, but I sort of want to curl up under a blanket and watch the leaves fall more. Of course, I say that, all romantic, with this great image of myself curled up with a cup of tea and a cat on my lap, but have you seen my house today? No. Thank goodness, none of you have. Nor have you smelled it.

Do you have kids? Do you know what a house looks like when they've been home for the weekend, generating dirty lunch dishes and taking stuff out of the Goodwill box to play with and leaving army men on the floor for people to step on? (Note to self: e-mail son's teacher to ask if he's limping.) A better mother and woman than I would put the kids and the husband to work cleaning up their own messes, but let's not get into that. Really, let's not. Well, ok, let's, but only if I don't have to hear about how you'd do it better.

In this house, your mother does live here and she's way more worried about contracting salmonella and falling to her death tripping over Legos than you are. So, yes, I could employ "natural consequences," leaving the dishes for someone else to do, until they reach up — in a stinking, fetid pile — to the ceiling, but then I have to live with a mountain of putrid dishes (and with the years of therapy it will take to bring me out of a state of catatonia when I find them covered with roaches) while my family cleverly fills the kitchen with discarded paper plates instead. (And yes, my husband has actually gone out to the store and purchased paper plates. You think I haven't tried?)

I could employ those old mothering standbys of nagging and punishing, rounding up family members and standing over them, poking them with the underwire of the bra that's currently on the kitchen floor until the dishes are done. (How did a bra get on the kitchen floor? Excellent question. It is mine and believe me I wasn't doing anything sexy in the kitchen with it. Somehow the dirty laundry migrated there this weekend. Yes, it really did. I don't know.)

I could ask for help, appeal to my family's better nature, institute a sticker chart or any number of other things (and don't think I haven't from time to time), but you want to know the truth? All of those things — the consequences, the nagging, the poking with bra underwire, the yelling, the endless sticker charts — take way too much energy. There are three people in the house who are happy to live in squalor and one who can't rest easy looking past the ping pong paddles on the sofa and the carrots and ranch dressing still on the table from last night's snack, who can't bring herself to kick the sleeping cat off the quilt that's currently on the floor and who can't quite enjoy drinking tea from a paper cup while looking at the leaves.

So that one person either needs to learn to look past the mess (and buy a noseclip to block out the smell of, whatever that smell is...) or she needs to get up and do the damn dishes. If I'm lucky, I can finish it all 5 minutes before my daughter comes home from school. And I did manage to get a blog post out of it. Thank goodness the glow of this computer screen blocks out that... Um, ew... Did someone actually leave a snotty tissue in the middle of the living room floor? I have to go clean that up.

I'm pretty certain that everyone who passed my daughter Janie's elementary school at dismissal time a few weeks ago now knows me by sight. Yep, I'm that woman whose daughter threw a tantrum so gigantic and so spectacular that it took us over a quarter of an hour just to move to the front of the school and strangers felt moved to ask if she needed medical attention. I'm the woman who stood there for more than a half an hour next to a six-year-old girl who was sprawled on the sidewalk, as people passed by with nervous glances asking if everything was ok.

Yes, everything is ok. First grade is just hard, and tiring, and this has caused our mother/daughter relationship to devolve into a hostage situation. The hostage being me. Her demands are: 1) a juice box right now, 2) that I carry her backpack, 3) that I carry her, 4) ice cream upon arrival home. Otherwise she is not moving, nuh-uh, no way; she's going to sit here and cry until it gets dark and then sleep on the sidewalk. (This is her actual plan.) My position is that I do not negotiate with terrorists, I do not have a juice box anyway, I have neither the desire nor the ability to carry a six-year-old anymore, and I'm not rewarding a hissy fit with ice cream. As you can imagine, this produced a standoff.

Now I know that some of you are thinking, "Well, make her move! You're the mom! You're the boss! Demand it!" And believe me, that's what I was telling myself. I'm the mom! I'm the boss! She ought to do what I say! She ought to be enticed with the (non-ice cream) snack that awaits her at home, and she ought to be mortally fearful of the consequences of her behavior. Yet she didn't care at all. Have you ever seen a donkey just refuse to move? You can yell at it and beat it and push it and drag it and still it stands there stubbornly. I had a little donkey and had neither a stick big enough nor a carrot tasty enough to induce movement.

So there we stood, until we were each able to bend just enough to reach a mutually agreeable settlement: I would not carry her but would let her lean on me, and I would carry her backpack, but in return she would have to downgrade for a week to her preschool backpack which was smaller, lighter and much less cool looking. So, an hour later than usual, we staggered through the front door looking precisely as if we'd just fought a war: me, sweaty and disheveled and Janie with debris clinging to her hair and her grimy face streaked with tears.

As expected, a snack and a rest on the sofa greatly improved the matters, but the ceasefire ended at bedtime, when Janie refused to get into bed.

"Time for bed."

"No."

"Janie, get in bed now."

"Or else what?"

Or else what? Who did she think she was talking to? Or else this!

Now, we must pause for a moment to allow you to imagine "this." I find that whenever I divulge my specific parenting methods, it distracts from the story I am trying to tell. People get caught up in the details. So at this point, don't think about what I did, imagine what a good parent (whatever your definition of that is) would do. Imagine what you would have done. If you would have spanked her, spank her in your mind. If you would have told her "no story tonight," then no story. If you would have made a sticker chart for nice talk, go make a sticker chart. If you would have lifted her firmly into bed and left the room, go do it.

I did what you would do. I did what I thought was going to have the effect I wanted.  I called on the examples of parents I knew and admired and did what I thought a "good" parent (whose children do what they are supposed to do) would do. Furthermore, I did it calmly and firmly. I even used what Janie calls my "stun voice" (which I think is a variation on "stern voice").

But here's what you have to imagine now (and this is the hard part): imagine it didn't work. You spanked, she cried louder and refused harder. You told her no story, and she screamed, "I don't care! I'm not going to bed!" You offered ice cream or stickers, and she told you she wanted that plus fifty thousand dollars right now. You put her in bed and and she jumped back out and tried to run out of the room. Whatever you did, the situation escalated, she got more adamant and more upset and still was not in bed.  And if you tried again, she escalated the situation still further.

That was where I was.  We were getting nowhere, and I was in despair.  Here I am doing what everyone I admire says a good parent is supposed to do and my child is acting like a complete nightmare, thus proving that I am a bad parent.  I don't get it.  Why am I so bad at this?  What the hell am I supposed to do?  What have I done already to make things this bad?  I can't even ask anyone for help, because then I'd have to admit to how much I've clearly somehow screwed up already.

That's when the answer came.  Beyond the point where Janie was kicking and screaming on the floor, a book on her bookshelf caught my eye. Actually, a single word in the title caught my eye: God.  Cheesy, huh?  The old me would want to punch me for something like this, but I thought "No, wait.  That's it!  God's will, not my will!" I knew what my will was: I wanted to be a good parent by bossing Janie into bed. (She's tired! She needs to be in bed!) But what was God's will?

So I took a deep breath and said, "Janie, this isn't working.  I'm going to try something different.  Right now I'm worried because we're fighting over bedtime.  Bedtime isn't something I'm trying to make you do to be mean.  We all need enough sleep so our bodies can be healthy, and it's my job as your mama to protect you and help take care of you and help you learn to take care of yourself.  I don't want to fight about this, but I don't know what else to do right now.  I'm stuck.  So, do you know what I believe?  I believe there is a God part inside each one of us and if we are quiet and still we can hear that part of us tell us the right thing to do.  So I'm going to be quiet and still now and see if that God part can help me figure out what I need to do now.  And maybe you can be quiet and still and think — not about what you want me to do — but what you should do for you right now."

Janie stopped crying.  She turned away from me and scooched across the floor to where her beloved stuffed animal Gigi lay, and she sat there for a bit, hugging her knees.  Then she turned to me and said, "Mama, I think I can go to bed if I show you something."  So I joined her, and she showed me a bead she'd found on the floor: "It's pretty, isn't it?"

"Yes," I said.

"Can I make something with it in the morning?"

"Yes."

"Ok.  I'm ready for bed now."

"Sweetie, can I give you a hug?  I think we've both had a rough day."

"Yes."

So, I gave Janie a hug that felt like melting, like walls dissolving, like peace.  Then she climbed into bed.  I smoothed her hair, and she smoothed mine, and she was asleep in minutes, holding my hand.

We took the kids to a pool party at the home of some friends of mine recently. The hosts, as well as several guests, moved a fair drive away from us several years ago, and several more guests were visiting from out of town. As a result, none of them had seen my children in quite a long time, but they are all old enough friends to be familiar with our family dynamics and with Austen's quirks.

They knew him when he was an infant and his colicky wails had me edgier than that time a car backfired in the movie theater parking lot right after Saving Private Ryan. (And let me tell you, if it had been up to me to storm the beaches at Normandy and such, Hitler would totally have won World War II.) They've been there, sometimes live and sometimes by phone or e-mail, through the autism diagnosis; through speech, occupational and behavioral therapies; through all our concerns about his limited diet; through trials and triumphs in school. They know he's a sweet kid, skilled with numbers, blessed with a fabulous memory and an encyclopedic knowledge of his particular interests. They were all aware that parties can sometimes be overwhelming for Austen, that meeting new people (and many of them were essentially new to him after all this time) can provoke anxiety, that he'll often refuse to eat outside our home and that we sometimes have to cut visits short if all of these factors combined prove too overwhelming for him. And they all accepted him (and us) as is.

We went to the party, as we always do, with a "let's see how it goes for all of us" attitude. And what we saw was: Austen and Janie having a great time in the pool. Austen and Janie playing video games with the other kids at the party while we chatted with adults. Austen happily eating his dinner in a new place. Both kids begging not to have to leave yet and asking when we could come back. Yes, the pool party went, well, swimmingly. (It would take a stronger willpower than mine to resist that pun.)

Everyone marveled at how much Austen enjoyed himself, and even thrived, on that particular day in a situation that he's had difficulty tolerating in the past. And when it was all over, for one brief moment, I thought, "Everyone is going to think I'm some kind of crazy Munchausen Autism by Proxy mama, making up lies about a completely typical child to get attention. Exhibit A: he's a happy kid who enjoyed a party. And that is not part of what people think autism is supposed to look like."

But then I thought back over the party: how the event centered around two of his favorite activities (swimming and video games), how everyone pleasantly addressed him by his chosen nickname, how no one offered him food or pressured him to eat with the rest of the people there, how he got a quiet room to eat his preferred food peacefully by himself, how the hostess quietly alerted me rather than chastising him when he undressed in the middle of the living room and started walking around the house naked, how when a birthday cake was produced everyone refrained from singing knowing that "Happy Birthday" drives Austen to howling tears (I think this should be part of the autism diagnosis personally, because Austen is far from the only autistic child I know who feels that level of antipathy for the song). This variety of little things took no real effort and detracted from no one else's enjoyment, but added greatly to Austen's.

And I thought, "Then again, maybe a happy kid enjoying a party isn't what people expect autism to look like, but it is exactly what autism is supposed to look like."

An Al-Anon friend and I were talking the other day about how frustrating it can be as we progress on our journeys, to see what that next healthier behavior looks like (just a step beyond where we are currently), but not be able to actualize it quite yet.

"You know, I've gotten more forgiving of myself around this," I told her, "I'm trying to think of it like yoga. There are times when I'm not actually flexible or strong enough to do the full pose. I know what the full pose looks like and where I'm heading, but I can't get my body into that position yet. So, I accept what my body is capable of now, use blocks and straps to extend my reach in the meantime and do the best pose I can today. I think there are times I can see what healthy behavior looks like, but my emotional and spiritual muscles aren't strong or flexible enough yet to handle it. I have to try to do the same thing I do in yoga: know what the full pose looks like, but accept what I'm capable of now and use my spiritual and emotional blocks and straps to help me as I work on building my spiritual and emotional muscles."

"And that's what we are there for," she said, "Program friends are our blocks and straps. I'm there helping you and you're helping me. And over time, with practice, we're both getting a little closer to the full pose."

"Ha! So true!"

"I'm glad," she said, "to know you are one of my straps and blocks, and that I am one of yours."

"And I'm so glad you're one of my straps and blocks and I'm yours too."

I shared in a meeting recently about my fear around my husband's business trips and how that fear is a reminder to me to connect with my Higher Power. After the meeting a newcomer asked me what I'm going to do now: I mean, he's going on a business trip soon, right? So what do you do now? Check his phone records? How can you make sure he's not acting out in his addiction?

Of course, I had already said what I was going to do: recognize, accept and take responsibility for my own emotions, pray and meditate, work my program, let go. However, as I watched this woman's brow cloud with genuine befuddlement as I repeated this, I remembered how hopelessly inadequate that answer seemed to me in the frantic struggle of those early days. There I was, standing in the wreckage of the-life-I-thought-I-had thinking, "What the hell just happened? And how am I going to rebuild this?" And the "answer" didn't even register as a solution at all. I'd think, "Ok, ok, I know you said something about some useless, flaky spiritual stuff and keep coming back. Blah blah blah. But what do I DO?"

It was as if my home had just been leveled by a natural disaster. Pray? Sit around meditating? That's not any kind of an answer at all. What was that going to do? I knew what I needed to feel better again; I needed my house back or rather a better house, one that wouldn't fall down again. I couldn't envision a world where my happiness was not dependent on that house. And to get that house back, I had to do something: get on the phone with the insurance company, get the Red Cross and the National Guards in, interview contractors, analyze where the structure had failed and build reinforcements to ensure this could never happen again. All the spiritual mumbo jumbo in the world wasn't going to help with that, and there wasn't any God out there who was going to make a new house magically appear with the wave of an invisible hand.

Likewise, when I first started recovery, I simply couldn't yet envision a world in which the answer to my problems didn't involve having an husband who never acted out again. As long as I could make sure he would never act out in his addiction again, everything would be ok, right? And I could achieve that by somehow doing things the "right" way. In pre-recovery that meant being sexy and passionate and sweet and smart and just generally amazing and perfect enough to fully satisfy him. And when that didn't work, I moved into early recovery, where it meant somehow learning to do this recovery thing (whatever it was) right enough.

And oh, was it annoying when people told me the answer was God, as if God were the ultimate addict to please. I'd tried that game before, the one where God held the key to my happiness but wouldn't give it to me until I did everything perfectly according to some arbitrary and unspoken set of rules. But God hadn't given up the key any more than any of the other people in my life had. That's what made me lose faith in the first place. And now I was supposed to believe things were going to be different? Ha! Those 12 Steppers were deluded! Give up trying to control my husband and try to control God into controlling him instead? I thought to myself, "No, I think I'll stick with controlling him myself rather than handing that over to some non-existent magical being, thanks."

It took years to see that all the flaky spiritual stuff wasn't about changing the world and the people around me to make it all more comfortable for me; it was learning how to be comfortable in the world as it is. My God wasn't going to rebuild the metaphorical house of my life or make sure it would never fall down again; my God was going to help me let go of the pain of losing the house and be ok whatever happened around it in the future. My God doesn't control the things I can't; my God helps me let go of the need to control them in the first place.

Each week we read the promises of our 12 Step program, and my favorite is: "We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us." And I realized, when I saw myself reflected in that look of pain and confusion in a newcomer's face, that I didn't used to know what to do when I was filled with fear at Mark's actions, but I do now, even if it doesn't seem much like doing anything at all. When Mark gets on that plane, I'm going to try to stay connected with my Higher Power: not so that he doesn't act out or so that I can find out about it if he does, but so that, whatever he does or doesn't do, I can stay present and centered in my own life.

It's summer, and my kids have been begging to spend every free moment of their time (and there are more free moments at this time of year than any other) in the nearest body of water that will hold them. Ok, that's not quite true. The nearest body of water that will hold them is the bathtub, and they have no desire to spend any time at all in that, as evidenced their howls of protest when I tell them they will need to relinquish their sticky hair at the end of each day. ("What, Mama?! We spent all day in the water and we can't even swim in that tiny little tub!")

I'm not entirely comfortable with their swimming skills, so I spend each day in the water with them. (Although I'm more than happy for a shower at the end of the day. This is probably the cleanest I've been since I had kids.) I see other moms (moms who have greater confidence in their little ones' swim skills), sitting by the water, enjoying the sun as they tap away at on portable electronic devices (to steal a term from the airline industry).

Those moms look so industrious and engaged, that I have found myself thinking, "Oh, if only I had one of those things, I could be posting to my blog right now rather than letting it languish in the summer heat! I could be scheduling swim lessons (which I haven't scheduled because we're too busy being in the water, leading to a vicious cycle of continuing to not be able to swim well). I could be setting up OT for the fall. I could be answering e-mail, and I could be tweeting about how we're sitting here in the water and... Hey wait! I'm sitting here in the water. On a sunny day. With nothing else to do. Ha ha! Suckers with their iPhones and Blackberries!" Then I wiggle my toes in the water and watch my kids not quite swim.

Yesterday, I took my kids out to the park and watched my son, long and lanky, swing his way to the top of a climbing structure formed from a maze of ropes. Like many autistic individuals, mastering motor skills can be a challenge for him. He was late to walk and it took months of assistance before he could learn to use a playground ladder. Now he jumps and hangs and grasps in a way that's astonishing to me and is the result of hours of single-minded and obsessive climbing. His hands are roughly calloused, as if through a lifetime of heavy labor, from spending the entirety of his recess time each day hanging and swinging, monkey-like, from various ropes and bars.

My daughter Janie, like any younger sibling, has been tagging along after him almost since she was born. The walking that had taken him so long to learn, she mastered confidently without ever stopping to crawl and she was behind him on those playground ladders, making her way up the rungs without having to be guided hand and foot, time after time, like her brother. So, when she saw him reach the top of the structure, even though he was older and his ascent was born of years of practice, she was determined to do the same.

He had tromped off, sweaty and tired, to the car with my husband as she wavered, unsure of the of the best path up through the maze of ropes to the top. She would climb up for a bit, then find a point where she was stuck, too small to reach the next handhold. She'd try going straight up again, only to find herself again in the position of having to back down. Finally, she called out, "Mama, can you help? I can't figure out how to get up."

I stepped closer and could see a path, something like a spiral staircase, by which I thought she could make it, slowly and indirectly revolving around to the top. So, instead of straight up, I told her to go sideways a bit. She did. The next big step up she'd have to take was straight in front of her, and I pointed to it. She made a grasp and missed. I could see (too late) that she'd have to go sideways again a step to get closer, but instead, focused on the goal I'd pointed out, she leaned further forward, lost her balance, did a spectacular flip around a rope, scraping her arm as she went before deftly catching herself.

I felt terrible. In trying to help and figuring things out for Janie, I hadn't made her journey easier; I'd made it more precarious. I'd jumped further ahead of her than she was ready to go. I'd forgotten that although she learned to walk or climb a ladder more quickly than her brother, they both had to learn to put one foot in front of the other or one hand over the next. I'd gotten caught up in the goal, rather than trying to be with her where she was in the process.

And it struck me that this was so much like my tendency to help other people in other areas, the helping that's tied to my codependency. I focus on the goal: newcomers want to sweep past the anger and hurt and I want to help sweep them there. Sometimes I can see a path, one that looks promising or like one I followed. And rather than letting them be where they are and climb as far as they are ready, I point them on a little too far ahead, in a direction that's actually not the right one for them at all. If Austen got to the top of the play structure, Janie will too. It took practice for him, and it will take practice for her. And it will take practice for me to help her (and others) in a way that respects both where she wants to go and where she is now.