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.

If you had asked me, before Austen was born, if nearly every detail of my life was fixed in routine, I would have said no, and I would have thought that was quite true. After all, I had free will and all that. If I felt like picking up a doughnut on the way to work today, then, damn it, I could do that. I could drive all kinds of alternate routes to the grocery store. I could drink from the pink glass and not the blue one. I could get away for the weekend or even pick up and fly to another country.

But the fact is, most days I didn't do that. And I never noticed it until Austen pointed it out. I wouldn't notice I'd always served Austen his baby oatmeal in the orange bowl until I put it in the blue bowl and he refused to eat it. I wouldn't notice I'd always driven the same road to the grocery store until I had to stop along the way at the post office or the gas station and Austen would howl with confusion and outrage. I wouldn't notice that always sorted the mail by the mailbox and muttered "junk, junk, junk..." under my breath until Austen started saying "junk" whenever we went to get the mail. There were a thousand habits I didn't notice until I broke course and found that, for Austen, my habits had become compulsions. They were part of The Way Things Must Be.

A few days ago, Austen was playing with Mark while I arranged a playdate for Janie. "Ok, bye. Great, thank you. See you then," I said as I hung up. "No!" Austen shouted, "You said it wrong!"

"What?"

"You said the wrong thing on the phone!"

I struggled to remember what it was I said and realized I'd said something after "bye."

"Oh, did I say something after I said bye?" I asked.

"Yes!" said Austen, "What's wrong with you?!"

"I just don't always think about the rules when I'm talking, buddy. That's the way my mind works. And that's ok. I like being a little flexible, and the other person knew what I meant."

"No, it's not ok. What's wrong with you?!"

"I'm different?"

"No," Austen was getting increasingly upset, and I could tell he didn't want to let go of this question, "What's wrong with you?!"

"I'm crazy!" I said with a smile.

"No, you're not! What's wrong with you?!"

And suddenly, something clicked. I broke a routine, but this question was part of a routine too. It wasn't the exact same question -- it certainly wasn't the same tone of voice -- but I could hear myself asking Austen, "Hey, what's wrong, buddy?" And I knew the answer. Because Austen has an extremely limited diet and is extremely particular about how his food is served, it can be a struggle to get him to eat enough.  He also has difficulty recognizing his hunger (although we can always recognize it based on his behavior), and he can go long periods of time without realizing he needs to eat.  So, when he's at his most anxious and upset, as he was now, the solution has nearly always to ignore whatever he was upset about and feed him.  We also diligently point out to him that his anxiety and frustration are hunger signals, hoping that this will help him recognize his body's cues.

"I guess I must be hungry, buddy," I ventured.

"Ok," he said, "I guess so."  And returned, immediately and peacefully, to his game.

My husband and I looked at each other, eyebrows raised.  Interesting.  In Austen's view, I had done something wrong, so there must be something wrong with me that caused me to misbehave that way, and what he (and we) had linked to misbehavior in his mind was hunger.  I know of other kids who have threatened to put their (seemingly) misbehaving parents into time-out, but only Austen would think to feed us.  I was thankful that he didn't follow me into the kitchen to make sure I got a snack, because I'd just eaten lunch, and frankly, I was stuffed, both with food and food for thought.

On my wrist is a bright yellow rubber bracelet with LIVESTRONG imprinted on it.  I plucked it from a small wicker basket on a table next to a guest book at a memorial service where one of the loved ones spoke about the task of sorting through everything left behind -- the clothes, the music, the souvenirs, the tchochke, the scraps of paper -- and of how each item had meant something to the person who kept and carried them. The meaning they had held was a mystery, forever emptied out of them, and yet the temptation to hold those items, like still fragments of that lost friend, was strong. He spoke of how how he was inspired to value love and live lighter.

Thousands of miles from where I sit now with the bracelet on my wrist, there is a white shingled house with a bedroom that was once mine and remains a shrine to my childhood self. In the bedroom sits a sturdy set of Ethan Allen bookcases painted a soft sunshine yellow, because that was my favorite color when I was three.  The top of the bookcases are open shelves; the bottom, cabinets with slatted doors.  When I was a preschooler, my family moved to a new city, and one day, while my mother was unpacking boxes, I crawled into the bottom of the one of these bookcases, shut the doors, and fell asleep.  My mother spent what must have seemed to her to be frantic hours searching our new home before finding me there, while I have no memory of it at all.

Now too small a space to hold all of me, the cabinets hold (among other things) an old cardboard shoebox filled with odd scraps that formed the butt-ends of my days and ways: a chewed up old pencil, a single crumpled page from a Far Side daily calendar, a bent nail, a quarter and numerous other things I've forgotten. There is also a sheet of notebook paper in the box that explains what each item is and why it is important to me.

Each item was carefully placed in the box and labeled after I spent a summer helping my mother clear out her parents' house. There were shelves and closets full of things. There was an attic and a basement crammed with dusty boxes.  There was furniture and photographs. There were old letters and old bank statements and old receipts and piles of Playboy magazine. There was a child's baseball uniform for a grown man already in his grave, old 78 records with nothing to play them on, a doll dressed as Little Red Riding Hood and a round flowered tin full of tobacco. What ought we to keep? What did it all mean: to them or to us or to anyone?

But far from being inspired to live lighter at the time, I was inspired to document, to label a box of detritus so that someone sifting through it could see the meaning in a bent nail and not wonder at it with a sigh. But as I think of that box, of that crumpled paper and bent nail and all the other things I can't recall, I don't remember the meaning they had myself. And that sheet of notebook paper? It's a letter to me. I'm the beneficiary and the executor of my own estate. And I think, the next time I visit that cardboard box, it may be time to honor myself and let go: to learn that lesson of loving strong and living light.  Well, except that chewed up pencil.  I might not be quite ready to part with that yet.

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.

As I write this, I have a cup of tea beside me, and I am trying to get myself to drink it.  I'm not hesitating because I don't like tea or because I think it will be unpleasant.  I'm hesitating because I'm trying to drink it out of a Pyrex measuring cup, which feels... Uncomfortable.  Weird.  Challenging.

You see, my mugs were all dirty and I had forgotten to start the dishwasher.  Now sure, I could have hand washed a mug, but why not use the more readily available measuring cup?  It has a handle.  It can hold hot liquids.  It's no heavier or more unwieldy than some of my beloved oversized mugs.  But I recoiled a bit at the thought.  Was it sanitary? I wondered.  Um, yes.  It's been through the same dishwasher as the mugs I usually drink tea from, and I use it to make lots of food that I safely and happily eat.  Would the tea taste ok?  Why wouldn't it; the measuring cup is just glass, and I drink out of glasses all the time.  But still, it just seemed... Wrong.

Of course, my son Austen is very familiar with this sensation.  Austen (as those of you who visit regularly may know) is autistic and has to eat his yogurt with a plastic spoon.  It can't be silverware, because those spoons are heavier and will (if left in the yogurt container) sometimes tip the carton.  Disaster!  But even among plastic spoons, not all spoons are created equal.  Austen's plastic spoons must be clear plastic, and not just any clear plastic; they must be the kind I buy (in bulk) from our local grocery.

This has been frustrating.  I've carried a lingering resentment over it.  After all, I once forgot to pack a spoon in his lunch, and the school called.  Austen completely refused to eat lunch without that damn spoon.  The school has plastic spoons of course, but they are white, not clear.  He insisted on a clear spoon.  So, the teachers looked through their own lunches and his classmates lunches for one to trade, but their clear spoons weren't the same brand as our clear spoons.  Their clear spoons had little swirls on the handles, making them totally different.  And because he couldn't eat his yogurt, he couldn't eat anything.  He was stuck on yogurt and couldn't get past that to the rest of lunch.

So, I ended up driving a package of spoons over to school, muttering to myself the whole time, "A spoon's a spoon, damn it!  Why does it have to be this spoon?  There are a hundred spoons at school.  There are even clear plastic spoons at school.  For crying out loud you don't even need a spoon.  You could drink it.  Or lick it off your fingers!  Why do you have to eat the yogurt with this particular type of spoon?!"

But I know why.  Autistic engineer and author Temple Grandin explained it in her recent interview on NPR when she said, "If I say to you, 'Think about a church steeple,' I only see specific ones and I can tell you exactly where they're at. And I was shocked to find out that most of the people see a generalized sort of vague, generalized, generic steeple. For me there's no generalized one. There's only lots of different specific ones."  There is no Platonic ideal of a spoon in Austen's mind, there are only specific spoons.

And I can say that's crazy and troublesome and that I just don't get why it makes eating yogurt at school impossible some days.  I can say that, that is, until I sit here unable to drink out of a clearly very mug-like object, complete with a handle and an ability to hold hot liquids simply because it doesn't fit my idea of what one ought to drink tea from.

I went to a great 12 Step meeting this week. A lovely group of women, some of whom I'd never met, sat together and shared the kind of things we usually share as partners of sex addicts. We share about things like incest, physically and verbally abusive relationships, using sexual relationships to escape from or buffer ourselves against painful realities, using food and alcohol to help dull emotional pain, and contracting sexually transmitted diseases from our partners.

We share about how it feels to have your life fall apart and to realize you never had that life in the first place. We share about our sex lives. We share about how we've wanted to feel beautiful and to feel loved and how we've looked to other people to make us feel that way because we didn't feel quite beautiful or lovable as we were. We share the secrets that we'd hidden from others for years, the secrets we'd hidden from ourselves. We share the kinds of incredibly intimate details most people never share with anyone, and we share them with total strangers or with people whose last names we didn't even know.

When my meeting ended, we stood around chatting. We talked about some of the same thing, but we also shared little details like how far from the meeting we lived and how we'd found it. We talked about the kinds of work we did during the day and whether or not we had kids and how old they are.

It struck me that we did things in a way that was nearly the complete opposite of the way I'm used to getting to know people, the way I get to know other moms at the park or new neighbors or new coworkers on the job. Sure, we start off with "hi, my name is..." in meetings as well as out, but inside that church meeting room, we followed that right up, not with "I'm a teacher" or "I live up the street" or "I just started in accounting" or "I have three kids," but with our deepest vulnerabilities and fears and shame, the kinds of things we're supposed to keep locked safely away from the world. We cut past the details that define us, but don't say who we really are, and we filled those parts of the picture in later.

And I realized that that's one of the things I find most refreshing about situations like 12 Step meetings; I can take down the defenses I carry around to protect most of my vulnerabilities, because they are out there and understood already. When I walk into a meeting. I'm not Austen and Janie's mother or a writer or a stay-at-home mom. I'm me. Imperfect, improving me. And that feels good.

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."

This weekend, for the first time in my life, I had the opportunity to hear a sex addict from my husband's recovery group speaking about his experiences. I know my husband's story, about as intimately as anyone else can; in a way, it's my story too. Mark read his First Step — the narrative of his life in his addiction — to me the night before he presented it to his 12 Step group, and it moved us both to tears. I've read the stories of other sex addicts in books and on blogs. I've had the chance to hear Patrick Carnes and other experts on sex addiction speak. But hearing someone else's story of sex addiction and recovery — live, with all the nuance that comes from facial expression and vocal inflection — was new to me.

I can't share the story here, as it's not mine to tell, but I did find myself wishing, as I listened, that everyone could hear — really hear, with minds and hearts open — a story like the one I heard. I wished that everyone could hear the pain and the shame and the compulsivity behind years of sexual encounters. I wished everyone could hear the remorse and regret for the pain caused. But most of all, I wished everyone could hear the gratitude, the joy and hope of recovery, the promise of change.

As my husband and I were driving home, he said, "I'm so glad that you got to be part of the kind of amazing sharing I'm privileged to witness every week." And I told him that I was so glad too. The power and beauty of the journey I heard was the kind of thing that almost made me wish everyone could go through the pain and shame of addiction to experience the gift of living a life so full of love and grace.

Austen's babysitter quit.

On the one hand, I don't blame her. Austen has the ability to terrorize his babysitters in a way he does no one else except delivery people, to whom he is like a very loud and aggressive dog; he wants none of them on his territory (unless they are bringing presents for him, of course). However, with babysitters (unlike delivery people), the problem tends to originate in his desperate desire for them to love him and be his particular playthings. He can become insanely jealous of any little attention paid to his sister Janie, and he combine that with a swirling dose of anxiety over having someone not quite intimately familiar in the house (while his intimate familiars are gone) to create his old familiar, rigidity, and roiling clouds of foul temper.

We've been working with him to manage his anxiety and change his behavior, and he's making progress, but sometimes a tempest brews nonetheless. The storm builds as he adamantly insists that the sitter pay constant attention solely to him and perform every minute action his way. And his way involves a thousand intricate OCD tics that I can't begin to document fully and in fact, rarely see myself, as they aren't present without the heightened anxiety of someone different around: Set the microwave to cook things in intervals of 30 seconds. Move this chair to that place in the room before you turn on the TV. Don't sing. Don't talk to other adults. Don't write anything down. Don't say any of an ever changing and expanding list of no less than fifty common (but upsetting and forbidden) words, which may include your own name. And for the love of all that is good, don't ever refer to the cat as "she!"

If he's reached a steaming height of frustration with the sitter's inability (or perfectly healthy and acceptable refusal) to perform the impossible task of soothing his every anxiety for him through constant attention and a meticulous perfection in every action and word, he'll melt down. He'll scream. He'll stomp. He'll take jealous swipes at Janie. He'll demand attention. Add to this hunger or tiredness or some recent disruption in routine and it will create the perfect storm of insatiable, unreasonable demands and desperate, endless howling when they are not met.

Mark and I came home several weeks ago to a babysitter who informed us it had been a very bad night. Austen -- exhausted from the disruption of spring break -- had screamed at her for more than an hour until he collapsed, fully clothed, on his bed and fell sound asleep an hour before his usual bedtime.

It sounded like the sitter had handled the situation well. There's an art to working with Austen: a fine balance of knowing when to be strict and not allowing his whims to rule you, while knowing when to bend yourself.  A misstep can create unnecessary pain for all parties, but there didn't really seem to have been one in this case. Even those most skilled in navigating Austen's needs will eventually find themselves stuck in a meltdown maelstrom with nothing for it but to batten down the hatches and ride out the storm. And such seemed to be the case that night. Austen threw carefully predetermined rewards to the winds, knowingly braved all the consequences we laid out before we left and threw the mother of all fits.

While Mark paid the babysitter, I went upstairs to change Austen into his pajamas. He half woke up and said, "Mama, I have something to apologize for."

"What is it, buddy?"

"I was mean to the sitter. Well, I think she thought I was mean. I should say sorry, but she wasn't doing things right. She should do things my way. I was so mad," he mumbled drowsily, before falling asleep again.

The sitter let us know a few days later that she wouldn't be coming back. I know it's what's best for her, and ultimately what's best for Austen, but on that (long-awaited) other hand, I took her leaving with a pang. Austen liked her and wanted her to like him, but in trying to get her to reassure him of that, he had done the very things calculated to push her away. He felt sorry (I believe) for how he'd treated her, but couldn't fully express that nor stop himself from doing it in the first place.

I thought of all the people in his future -- bosses or caretakers or potential lovers -- whose attention and affection, like the sitter's, will be conditional. I thought of all the people he'll need in his life or want in his life who will be pushed away by his behavior. And I felt panicky and sad. We mamas don't want our babies to be rejected, but they will be. At some point, they will be. We want the whole world to love them the way we do, but the world won't. Not everyone. For some people they will just be too difficult. Too much trouble. Too hard to understand. I can only hope that enough people understand him, and he is able to understand them enough to get along.

For a few minutes, I let myself cry over the secret fear that it won't happen, then I said, "Austen, come here, buddy. Let's work some more on how to talk to babysitters."