I've found my way to a remarkable book, The Boy Who Loved Windows by Patricia Stacey. When it was recommended to me, I was warned that many parents found the book emotionally overwhelming at times. So I've been reading it with a sense of inevitable emotional breakdown, wondering exactly where, and why, my turn would come.
It has certainly been a compelling read. The little boy who is the subject of this book had fairly easily recognisable difficulties right from birth. I make that point, because I have struggled painfully with the apparent invisibility of my own child's impairments, even though I recognise so many points of similarity, the main difference at times being in the degree rather than the type of challenge. I have wondered constantly as I read this book how I can make people understand that my own experience of motherhood to my oldest child is on the same paradigm as this woman's, if not as extreme, why it matters to have trodden this goat path instead of the developmental freeway, for parents and children alike. And so I recognised so much of what this family went through. A great many peaks and troughs resonated with me, but I guess I'm seasoned enough that they didn't overwhelm me.
My turn came, most unexpectedly, when Stacey describes a volunteer student who comes to work with her son. Her gratitude to this young woman caused me to tear up. Within pages, that helper, after her invaluable contributions, has to move on. The struggle for assistance continues, and eventually, unexpectedly, the response to their pleas actually exceeds their expectations, when the public health system digs deep and not only increases the hours of the therapists they have, but adds a new one. Tears progressed to full-scale crying. By the time her social worker has offered to come on Sundays with her teenage daughter as a kind of work experience project, I was a puddle. There was nothing much left in me for the piece de resistance, when the family accepted organised offers of food, which, Stacey's narration makes clear, were inseparable from the care and generosity of the multitude of women who brought their home-cooked meals to her door.
This all hit me very hard. Such a yearning for connection, help, and understanding. I've been desperate for it for so long that I'd stopped recognising it, until I saw it in someone else.
Something to think about.
