Sometimes, my husband and I start talking about the first place we ever lived after we got married. We found an apartment in Fort Worth close to Benbrook. It was ten minutes away from Borders book store, Hulen Mall, and TuttoPasta, our favorite Italian restaurant. It was also ten minutes away from movie theaters and any other place that might strike our fancy. We both worked full time. I was a travel agent and he worked for a vending company.
We ate out every night. We hung out at Borders when we were bored. On the weekends we went shopping.
We bemoaned our lack of funds.
Eating in and cooking for ourselves was an adventure and a treat. So was renting a movie.
Do we laugh at ourselves now? Yes. Do we shake our heads at our younger selves and comment on our extreme naivity? Sometimes. Do we wish we could go back to those days and do it again? Often.
We don't often ask anyone to babysit our children anymore. If Logan is a handful for us, we can only imagine what foisting him off on someone else is like. But, we were jazzed about the new movie Priest that opened this weekend. Sci-fi is our candy. So we made a phone call to my mother and she agreed to watch the kids. The movie started at 745 pm. We were also hyped about getting to spend some time together-alone-without the patter of little feet or the melodious mingling of three little voices. (Do you hear that, your Highness? Those are the shrieking eels! Thank you, Princess Bride.)
We spent the morning and early afternoon cleaning up the front and back yard, cleaning out the van, and just hanging around the house. About 645pm we left. We weren't five minutes into the trip to Mom's before the keening started.
What is keening? There is more than one definition: An eerie wailing sound. Intense; piercing. Having a fine, sharp cutting edge or point. They all fit what Logan does when he is overtired, overstimulated, hungry, or just plain uncomfortable. And he was doing it in our van, on the highway, on the way to my mother's house.
We always cringe when we hear this noise, because we know it means that he has reached his limit; he is overtaxed and cannot take anymore. Something has to change in Logan's environment at this point before he will calm down and stop rupturing our eardrums.
"Just turn around," I tell my husband. "We can't do this. Let's just go home."
We turn around. We stop by Taco Bell and get him some food. Did we feed him before we left the house? Yes. But he's still hungry.
We call mom on the way and tell her it's not going to work. We get home, he eats, he's fine, the keening stops.
I look at the clock now and it's 741pm. The movie starts in four minutes. I don't waste a lot of time in my life thinking about what might have been "if". I've learned, the hard way, that that way of thinking only brings on a lot of grief and dissatisfaction. But do I ever think about how things might have been if we had not had Logan, if he did not have autism, if I had kept my forty hour a week job, if if if if??
Yes, I do.
Do I wish I could go back and change it?
Never.
Some things are precious and valuable, and some things are made that much more so by the prices we pay for them.
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