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 started keeping a journal semi-regularly when I was in middle school.  My very earliest journal entries are a thrilling roller coaster ride through the life of a suburban tween: from the heartbreaking lows of the cancellation of my favorite TV show to the giddy highs of eating raviolis from a can for lunch.  But by high school, my journal had become my closest confidant, not because I had any terrible secrets, but because the secrets I did have became so tiresome to the friends who had to hear them again and again.

I've never smoked, never done drugs and never drank a drop of alcohol in high school (and not much even beyond that).  But I did grow up to marry a sex addict, which means I had my obsessions and I had my own drug of choice: other people.  Like most schoolgirls, I had crushes, but unlike most schoolgirls, my crushes were epic fantasies that rocked me to sleep at night and sustained me moment to moment during my days.  They were the refuge I'd escape to when loneliness or stress or fear crept too close.  They were the rock I'd cling to in an unstable world.  One day my true love, my knight in shining armor, was going to catch me as I fell, swoop me up and save me, make everything perfect.  And until that day, I'd block out the dirty imperfections of this world by drifting off into the next in my mind.

My journal didn't care how many times I described the way that boy's hair fell across my math book when he leaned back or the precise shade of his eyes in the sunlight outside.  And unlike my friends, who grew bored with the unflagging nature (or perhaps just vaguely uncomfortable with the intensity) of my interests, my journal was quite happy to watch me carefully craft each intricate detail of those moments, happy to sit quietly receptive as I painted the same scene over and over from a thousand different angles, and happy to replay all of it for reuse in future fantasies.

And replay it I did.  For years I would go back and touch those pages, softly, like a lover and live that thrill again: here he taps my shoulder, there brushes my hand as he borrows a pencil.  Then in the moment that never came, yet always sustained me, he falls down on his knees and begs me never to leave, and he never leaves, never hurts me, but makes me (finally, impossibly) whole.

Now I see something different in those pages: the sling that gently cradled an unseen brokenness and held it safe for a time, the coma that protected the injured patient who could not have coped with consciousness.  And I'm grateful, both for the service those pages rendered and for the fact that I've healed enough not to be in danger without them.

It started off innocently enough years ago. She would forward me the usual stories warning me that I should watch out for snakes in McDonald's ball pits or people out to steal my kidneys or serial killers who would lure me out of the house using a baby's cries.  And I would research each item and send back the Snopes.com link to everyone on the mailing list, politely informing them all that this was another urban legend, please don't forward.  I was going to shine the light of white hot truth and logic upon these horrible misconceptions put an end to this wretched chain now.

But of course, I didn't stop them.  The e-mail messages continued to arrive, unresearched.  ("Whatever to your research, Ms. Smartypants.  I totally know someone who knows someone that that happened to!  So there!")  It was annoying and frustrating to know I hadn't fixed this particular problem, but still I knew it didn't matter so very much.  So people stopped traveling or letting their kids go into ball pits or helping the odd baby who showed up on their porch (what were the chances?).  Was the world really going to end if that happened?

Then the political messages started coming.  Need I repeat them?  I'm sure you remember well enough the smears and falsehoods about your preferred candidate that passed through your own inbox.  Those messages I took more seriously, spending my days on FactCheck.org and refuting misinformation point by point, with anger and sarcasm.  After all, now we weren't talking about the merits of fast food play areas, we were talking about elected officials and positions on issues that were really going to affect our lives.  Surely now it was important that I set people straight, make them see the error of their ways and change?  Still, when I pointed out that John Kerry didn't actually cite the wrong Bible verse in a speech, it didn't suddenly make people like him any better.  (I know, it was hard for me to believe too.)

Then there were the endless messages about vaccines causing autism, having caused my son's autism, not a word of which I have ever or will ever believe.  But the studies and the arguments did nothing to stop the "information" from coming.

Then came the flat out conspiracy theories.  The moon landing was faked!  Elvis is alive but Paul McCartney is dead!  The British Royal family are shape shifting reptilian aliens!  Microsoft advocates killing New York Jews through secret messages in its Wingdings font!  (I am really not making these up.  Someone else did.)  These I found I couldn't respond to because, well, how do you prove the Queen of England is not a shape shifting reptilian alien?  But I did inwardly fuss over (but never quite settled on) how to voice my mental health concerns in a way that would fix things.

Enter recovery.  I am powerless over other people's behavior.  I am powerless over their thoughts and opinions.  I am powerless to change them and fix them and make them do things right, see things right, be right.

Finally, most recently, after a period of silence imposed by lengthy lack of computer access, came word that not only do vaccines cause autism, they also don't cure disease.  (Apparently, smallpox was not eradicated by vaccines but by improvements in nutrition, sanitation and health.  Yep, our healthy modern world caused it to spontaneously disappear, even in poverty and famine stricken locations where people drink the same water that is used for bathing and sewage.  All of which makes me shudder to think about what kind of unhealthy lives my parents must have been living if they spent their childhoods in fear of contracting polio.)

And I really don't want to let this one go.  Because there are so many things that trigger my own fear and anger: from serious consequences to our group immunity to disease (because when people fear vaccines, they get sick, and yes, they die) to the implication that my son would be better dead than autistic to (yes, now we get to the heart of things) my plain, old codependent anxiety in the face of someone else's reality.  It's that same feeling of disorientation that I would get when my husband would very calmly, at the height of his addiction, tell me something completely crazy and seem so rational about it that I'd be angry and frightened at the same time that he could possibly believe it was true.

I know the person passing this information along is living in a whole different reality.  I know there's nothing I can do to change her.  I know I need to let go and let God.  I know the best thing to do is to cut her out of my life.  And yet, my first and deepest impulse is to throw myself wholeheartedly into making her crazy stop, thinking that really, this time, if I can finally make it work, if I can chase down and stop every arrow of delusion that's been shot out into the world, that's what's going to stop my crazy.  And ping!  That's me shooting my own arrow of delusion out into the world.  I wonder if it will hit Elvis, wherever he is?

I have spent my share of time cyberstalking the women my husband has acted out with. (Hey, I'm codependent; I'm really, really good at focusing on people who aren't me.) And I'm not alone. Focusing on and obsessing about the activities of acting out partners is an unhealthy behavior nearly every partner of a sex addict engages in at some point. During my last binge googling the name of one of my husband's former lovers I realized I was engaging in a form of emotional cutting, purposely causing myself pain (and getting something from it).

Since then I have been tempted a few times to just check in, you know, and make sure his old lovers still have fewer Facebook friends than I do (because we all know what an important measure of a human being's worth that is), but thankfully I've been able to recognize that I'm standing there, ticket in hand, ready to jump on the crazy train, and have stopped each time. (Actually, just writing about it has me itching to do it. "What harm could it do?" the little voice in my head is saying,"You can just check real quick. No one will even know. And then you don't ever have to look again. Just this one last time." Yep. Craziness. Still.)

But in spite of being cut off from the good stuff, that little crazy part of me has been weaseling its way around the rules and getting some cheap thrills lately anyway. You see, if you're in recovery around your relationship with a sex addict (go figure!) you tend to meet other women whose partners have been unfaithful and you tend to be the one that your existing friends call with they're dealing with infidelity. This week, a friend fresh in the pain of her own cyberstalking adventures shared some of the information she found with me. And I found myself thinking, "Looking up my husband's lovers is obviously bad for me, but it doesn't hurt to cyberstalk someone else's lovers a little, right? After all, they didn't do anything to me. So there's no harm in looking at their pictures and bios and résumés and Facebook friends and tweets. I'm just getting enraged on my friend's behalf, and that's not nearly as bad." So I poked around beyond what I had been given already.

But spending time googling other people's lovers is obviously (when you're not off in Crazytown) a healthy way to spend time. In fact, in a lot of ways, it seems crazier than obsessing over my husband's lovers. At least when I'm focusing on his acting out partners, I'm feeding off my own pain rather than voyeuristically engaging in someone else's drama. And I'm seeing that the fact that something like this feels like a safe way to indulge myself only shows how deep the need to indulge is. But spending my time googling people in my friends' lives can't really be a harmless new diversion for me, any more than beer would be a smart recreational choice for an alcoholic who has given up hard liquor. It's a simply a crazy new twist on the same old unhealthy behaviors.

Yesterday I wrote about the possibility that Karen Maezen Miller could be a serial killer. (In case you're wondering, the chances are small.) To be honest, I was much more concerned with the more real and terrifying possibility that she or Shawn somehow knew my mother and would, upon learning my name, call her and say, "Hey, do you know that your daughter is writing a secret blog about being married to a sex addict?" But I left that part out because it's not as entertaining as the thought of a Zen priest Unibomber. However, while that was a bit tongue in cheek, the thought really did occur to me.

It occurred to me because I think about serial murder, hm, rather more than I should. My husband and I recently rented DVDs of Dexter (a TV series about a serial killer). Halfway through the second episode, I began blathering excitedly about the serial killer subgenre of crime dramas, when my husband paused the show and said, half teasing and half genuinely exasperated, "What is your deal with serial killers?"

What is my deal with serial killers?

Well, it's true. I do have a deal with serial killers; in fact I have a longstanding morbid fascination with murder in general and both mass murder and serial murder in particular. When my son was born, I would record true crime shows and watch them, holding him through the long, lonely hours of his infanthood. He was breastfed to documentaries about the Night Stalker and Ted Bundy the Son of Sam and John Wayne Gacy. And well before he was born I'd voraciously devour books and newspaper articles, studying each case. Always I wanted to know the same things: Why do they do it? How do I tell the difference between serial killers and the billions of other non-serial killers on Earth? How do I know who to trust? What makes their mind different from my mind? How does their mind work? How does my mind work?

At the time I found out about my husband's sex addiction, when my son was a few years old, the story of Laci Peterson's murder was all over the news. She had been pregnant, her husband had an affair and he'd killed her along with their unborn son. I was pregnant at the time too and my husband had also been unfaithful. When I thought about how much I had trusted Mark and how much he had hidden from me, I didn't know what was real anymore. I felt an aching connection to Laci and the parallels were strong enough that I wondered, in all earnestness: What made me different from her or my husband different from Scott? Why was I alive while she wasn't? Who was to say my husband wouldn't murder me? After all, I wouldn't have thought he could cause such unimaginable hurt he did. I remember how Laci's family supported Scott, until they learned of the affair. They changed their minds in an instant, thinking (as I did), "Well, if he could do this first horrible wrong I thought him incapable of, what is to keep him from doing another?"

Murder is the most extreme form of violation and betrayal. The ultimate trust we place in one another as humans is the trust that we will not kill each other. Murderers break that trust, and serial killers break that trust again and again. When my husband betrayed me, I asked why. When someone is murdered (or murders themselves) I ask why. There is no rational reason for either, yet my mind pursues it, trying to make sense and form understandable patterns from the irrational ones.

When Mark asked me what my deal is with serial killers, I paused before saying, "Well, I suspect it's the same reason I'm drawn to addicts. I think there's something there that resonates with my own life, there's something in the stories I relate to, there's something about me that I need to figure out. And I think you," I said, tickling him under the chin, "are sort of like my own serial killer." He frowned, rolled his eyes and went back to watching the show, not at all pleased with the analogy.

As featured in the New York Times blog Motherlode

I

A mother and her son are in line at a grocery store. They boy looks like he’s about nine or ten. The mother looks a little tense as the boy starts to fidget in line. At this age he really should be able to stand still. And watch where he’s going. He almost bumped the person behind him. His mother does nothing.

“When are we going?” he asks.

“In about two minutes. We’re almost done, buddy,” she says.

“No, not about. Zero minutes! I want to go now. Right now! Right! Now!” he says and stomps his foot.

Again, his mother does nothing to make him stop his rude behavior.

Fortunately, the cashier has finished ringing up the groceries and now the boy starts hopping up and down in place as the mother reaches into her purse for her credit card. He practically snatches the card from her and then after he swipes it, he starts shouting at her, “No! No! You do it my way!” She leans down and whispers something to him and he stops yelling, but he still hops up and down again, glaring at her and pulling on her and making those grunting noises rude teenagers do when they’re disgusted with you. No doubt she’s told him she’ll give him the candy she bought if he keeps quiet: rewarding and reinforcing his unacceptable behavior as bad parents do.

The cashier hands her the receipt and says, “Thank you, Mrs. Jones,” and the boy screams at the cashier as they leave, “No! You’re terrible!” The mother leaves without a word as the next customer in line rolls her eyes sympathetically at the cashier.

II

Today, I’m going to take my son Austen to the grocery store with me. It’s school break, and we need milk, the only thing Austen drinks.

Austen is autistic, which can make these trips hard for him. As a result, I schedule the bulk of my grocery shopping for times when he is in school or being cared for by someone else. However, sometimes I plan short trips like this one to help him get used to grocery stores (a skill he’ll need if he is going to live independently) or, like today, because we need some essential item at a time when I have no childcare options for him. When he does come along I make every effort to keep the visits to what we can both handle, so that they remain a positive experience for him.

To prepare for the trip, I’ve made sure that he is well fed, and I’ve arranged for his sister to play at her friend’s house so that I can focus on him. Since he thrives on routine and predictability, on sameness and scripts, I’ve reviewed what is going to happen when we’re in the store, so he knows what to expect. I’m also keeping the visit short; we’re going to get only what we need and then leave.

As part of his autism, Austen has sensory integration issues, which means that the way that his brain processes the information from his senses can turn a whisper into a scream or a tickle into a burn. Because of this, so much that goes unnoticed by others on these outings is painful to him: the store’s softly flickering fluorescent lights can look like a strobe and the incessant piped in music can sound like a rock concert, the aisles can seem breathlessly crowded with people, and the sight and smell of all these different foods can be nauseating; his own diet is self-limited to just a handful of items.

In spite of this, he does really well as we walk through the store. He stays close to me and doesn’t run off. He even talks about some of the items he sees on the shelves and points out some candy that he knows his sister likes, so we add it to the cart to bring home to her as a treat. He wouldn’t eat the candy himself even you bribed him with an XBox, so it’s wonderful that he thought of her. In fact, there are some who posit that autistics have no “theory of mind” at all — that they are incapable of realizing that others think differently. For Austen, it seems to be difficult, but not impossible, to see things from someone else’s point of view, and I celebrate it when he does.

As we pass through the produce section on our way out, a clerk says ‘hi’ and asks a question about the cartoon character on Austen’s t-shirt; they have a brief, polite conversation, although Austen has to pause a bit to gather his thoughts between sentences. At age two, Austen was not speaking at all and doctors first began to tell us that it was possible he was autistic. It took intensive speech therapy in his preschool years and the work of several loving and dedicated special education teachers to get him to the point where he can have this conversation today. Austen is tall for his age and the clerk is surprised to learn he’s only seven.

He’s handling this whole trip really well. All the work we’ve been doing to help him get comfortable is paying off. “You’re doing such an awesome job of helping me today, buddy,” I say.

All we have left to do is pay, but I get tense when I see there’s just one register open and the cashier is engaged in a complicated transaction ahead of us. We do the best we can, but even after a short, positive visit, waiting in line is hard. I think (hope) we can make it through the line without a meltdown. If we leave now, we’ll have to come back again later to get what we came for and the second trip is unlikely to go this well. After a little while, Austen starts circling me, which is what he does when he’s tired and anxious. He’s not hurting anyone by doing it, and he’s keeping himself calm. So, I breathe and hope the line moves quickly, since I can tell he’s used up almost all of his resources to make it this far. If we were finishing up and walking to the car now, as I had expected, the trip would have been perfect for everyone. I try to remind myself that sometimes, in spite of all my best planning, life happens.

At last he rolls his head back and sighs, “When are we going?”

“In about two minutes. We’re almost done, buddy,” I say. Oops, I’m tired and anxious too now, and I slip. This is the wrong time to say “about.” That’s a trigger word. Austen craves precision. We can work on estimates and inexactness like this at home, but the grocery store is the wrong place for it: just as running across a busy freeway would be the wrong time to stop and work on tying your shoe.

He also — as is the case in so much of the obsessive compulsive behavior that is common with autism — reacts to anxiety by becoming even more rigid and insistent on rules and routine in order to quell his rising panic. The more chaotic and unstable he feels his world becoming, the more he clings to the solidity and familiarity of the rules he’s created to soothe himself. That means the very public situations in which he’s expected to be most flexible are the very situations in which he most desperately wants the world to conform to his rules. Predictably, he protests my vagueness.

“No, not ‘about.’ Zero minutes! I want to go now. Right now! Right! Now!” he says and stomps his foot. Damn, he’s really had more than he can handle already. I didn’t think we’d have to wait so long in line. He’s been working so hard to make it this far, and I know he’ll feel better once he’s back in the quiet, familiar car away from the people and the lights and a whole store full of nauseating, offensive foods.

Fortunately, we’re at the front of the line by now and the cashier rings up our groceries quickly. Obsessive interests are another hallmark of autism, and a longstanding passion for numbers is one of Austen’s. He loves to work the ATM/credit machine, so his participation in this process is a way to end trips on a positive note. After some practice, we’ve gotten pretty smooth with it. He likes to push in the PIN numbers, and has finally reached a point where he no longer feels compelled to say my PIN out loud as he types it. We only run into problems when we have to use the card as credit, because he doesn’t like to see my signature. It’s incomprehensible and extremely upsetting to him that the bank wants me to scribble instead of printing my name in block letters like at school. Everything goes well at first, he takes the card eagerly, swipes it just right and gets ready to enter the PIN, but the cashier makes an error and we have to reprocess the transaction as credit.

Austen, overwhelmed by the wait, anxious that things aren’t going as planned and distraught at the thought that I’m going to have to sign rather than punch in a PIN, starts shouting, “No! No! You do it my way!” I lean down and remind him that when he gets upset in these situations, he’s supposed to signal me and let out his anxiety by squeezing my hand really hard instead of yelling. So, he hops up and down again, frowning and grunting slightly with the effort of squeezing my hand tightly.

At last, we’re almost finished. The cashier hands me the receipt and says, “Thank you, Mrs. Jones,” and I do my best to rush us out. Austen, exhausted and triggered by the formal use of my last name (“only teachers are called Mrs. and you’re not a teacher”) is practically in tears as we move toward the door. Unable to soothe himself with the hand squeezing any longer, he screams at the cashier as we walk away, “No! You’re terrible!” I smile weakly and shrug an apology from near the door.

All in all, it was a very successful trip, and once we’re clear of the store, I say, “I know that was really hard, but we’re all done now. You did great this time, buddy, even better than last time. High five!”

"Knock knock."

"Who's there?"

"Yah Wah."

"Yah Wah who?"

"I didn't know you were Mario!" (That's your cue to fall down giggling until you can't breathe then get up and tell the joke again. Repeat until you fall asleep tonight. Wake up and start again first thing tomorrow.)

And yah wahoo! It's a holiday here in the U.S. tomorrow. Happy Independence Day to all. Enjoy the joke and the fireworks!

Now, I may not be one for much crying, but I did cry (I'll admit it, I did) the first time (ok, ok! few times) I watched Finding Nemo. Even before I lost track of my son a few times, I related so much to the anxiety, the overwhelming desire to keep one's child safe from harm, that Marlin (a.k.a. Nemo's dad -- see, I've watched the movie enough that Marlin and I are on a first name basis) felt.

In one of the DVD features about the making of the film (oh, yeah -- I read instruction manuals too), one of the writers said he is often asked why Nemo has one gimpy fin. He said that they were going to make Nemo learning to swim with this disability a bigger part of the plot line, but even though they didn't, they left the gimpy fin in. Why? Because it symbolized that weakness or that difference in your child that every parent worries about. It's different for every parent and every child, but there's always a worry there.

Jay's great fear centers on adoption; she worries that her daughter feels the pain of that first loss in each subsequent loss and fears being abandoned. And Jay was right when she said that my fear centers on autism, although it's been there for far longer than I have been able to apply the word autism to my son's differences.

When my son was an infant, he would scream these painful, horrific screams. In those screams, from the very day he was born, I always heard him saying, "Mama, please, please help me. I'm scared and I'm hurting and I need you." They were screams like he was being tortured, but when I held him and nursed him, he'd calm down. He seemed so much more vulnerable, so much more helpless and so much more susceptible to fear and pain than other children.

In my postpartum state (in what I now recognize as the extreme anxiety of postpartum depression), I used to have daily panic attacks, daily waking nightmares. I would think about taking him out for a car ride, and I would slip into a vivid picture of us crashing. And the very worst thing that would happen would not be that he would die, but that I would be killed or pinned somewhere unable to reach him. I knew he'd be screaming those screams of pain and terror that I heard every day. And my absolute worst, gut wrenching fear was that there would be no one there to soothe him or help him, because he couldn't help himself and I was the only one who knew how to help. I worried that without my breast, he'd stop eating. I worried that he would live the rest of his life in pain and terror.

I understand those cries better now. I know that his senses don't take the world in the way other people's do, and that everyday events can overwhelm him to the point of pain. I know that he needs everything in his life to fit within the rigid pattern he's defined, not just in order to feel comfortable, but in order to survive.

After Hurricane Katrina, I had some of the same panic attacks. We don't live in the path of that storm, but I saw what it did and wondered what happened to children like my son. I pictured what would happen if some disaster struck us. My son only eats three things, each of which have to be prepared and served in extremely specific ways. If I can't get his special foods, an emergency ration bar isn't going to cut it. He's going to starve. And I would picture him starving, screaming, writhing, with food available, food he was unable to eat. And I pictured myself stuck and helpless to get him what he needed.

Or much, much worse, I pictured him without us, unable to help himself. Or even in the care of strangers. After all, he can't communicate with them. Yes, my son can talk -- technically, his verbal abilities are within a normal range for his age, which is just fabulous -- but that doesn't mean he can communicate.

For example, he likes spaghetti, but he doesn't call it spaghetti. He calls it spinach. Why? Because Popeye likes spinach and he went through a phase of being obsessed with Popeye. Imagine he's suddenly in your care now, with no instructions on how to help him and no idea how to speak his language. He grunts. He cries. He hasn't eaten anything all day. He pushes away everything you offer and screams at you. If you're lucky, he'll get desperate and tells you he wants spinach. You bring him spinach and he looks at it in horror and screams, "No! That's not spinach!" Now, if he's lucky, you're a nice, caring person with transportation to a working hospital, where he'll have to be sedated or strapped down due to his fear of needles and then force fed through a tube. If you're someone with bad intentions or without access to medical care, there continues my nightmare...

In the days since losing him, I've found that I've had a few flashes of these vivid paralyzing fears again. The fear that he will be alone, scared, unable to care for himself and unable to communicate who he is or what he needs to anyone else. The fear that without me or his father or the rest of his close family, he won't survive, or he'll live in pain and terror. I know that I'm taking all the practical steps that I can to protect and prepare him (from ID bracelets and a stock of almond butter to working with him on what to do and say in emergencies), but practical measures take time and aren't foolproof, and fears aren't always rational. That same vulnerability, helplessness and extreme susceptibility to fear and pain that I saw in him as an infant, I still see in him as a first grader. And that's the gimpy fin that spins this particular mama into worry over this particular child.

Now any parent with a child old enough and mobile enough to reach such an entertainment center can describe to you the carnage sure to ensue when you introduce a baby or toddler into the scene. So, needless to say, when the child arrived, the predictable happened: The beleagured mother tried to smile and say thank you while wrestling the squirming child, eager to destroy those pretty, shiny, eye-level boxes and discs. And Thom, the very person who designed this disaster-waiting-to-happen, stood rolling his eyes as the situation unfolded and whispering snidely to the camera, "Control your child!" (As if a firm "no" would suffice.) Of course, the child was just doing what he was supposed to do. And Mark and I laughed, because at that age (or, as evidenced by last week's fish tank incident, even beyond) there is no "control your child"; there is only "lock everything dangerous or precious the hell up and hope for the best."

I think of that "control your child" often when I'm out with my children, because I can hear people thinking it. My son is currently obsessed with things that go fast, so he has to go fast too. He does not walk, he runs: out of his bedroom in the morning, into his bedroom at night, out to the school bus, back into the house, through stores and public places. There is one place he does not run: parking lots. I try to park at the curb whenever I can, and when that's not possible, you'll know it if you see us: I am the one playing tug-o-war with my son's arm. He lurches forward, leaning almost horizontal to the ground, eyes closed and face scrunched in with straining, grunting with anger and frustration, moving his feet 1000 times per second, while I walk gripping his hand and leaning backward to counterbalance. My daughter walks serenely by my side.

When we reach the sidewalk, he's off, but not too far. Every ten feet or so, he'll stop and jog in place, looking back to make sure I'm there: his anxiety about crowded new places forming a little invisible leash back to me. Then he'll shoot off again. I'm thankful for the anxiety, because frankly, I'd be hard pressed to catch him, and would have to resort to yelling things like, "Hey, come back here and look at this Nintendo DS I bought for you!"

Yesterday, I took the kids out shopping with me (President's Day=two kids out of school) and we ended up in a seemingly interminable line. It took the kids a few seconds (and a few frustrated reminders from me) before they settled down. My son ran around and around me, orbiting like my own little moon, while my daughter stood still as a statue just in front of me. I wondered how many people were still uncomfortable, how many people were thinking "control your child!" I wondered if I was the only person there who saw two happy and well-behaved children, doing what they were supposed to be doing.