I recently went on my younger son’s week long field trip to Southern California.
I wasn’t a chaperone exactly; more like his plus one, an accommodation kindly offered by our very accommodating town; there to be my son’s roommate in the hotel and to be onsite if he had a seizure.
I was the only parent on the trip, making me feel like an embedded journalist traveling with an unreasonably big pop band.
If you’re thinking what a drag to be the only one with a mom on the cool week long school trip, you are alone. My son loved that I was there. He held my hand willingly as we strolled through theme parks, introduced me avidly, and generally hyped me to a very unimpressed tween demographic.
The plan was that I would follow his bus in a car to give him some semblance of independence for the ride. This is what we do for my son—we seek, we lend semblances.
Before it departed, my son staged himself at the door of the bus and gave every boarding kid a fist bump, as if he was off on a junket to get elected to some office or other, and this was his campaign team. Then he turned and boarded himself.
I watched his back as he climbed up the stairs and disappeared into the body of the bus, about to travel the furthest he ever had without my body beside him. I thought, because these kinds of thoughts about my healthy-presenting boy plague me, of the other times we’d been separated this way, him leaving me. I flashed through my collection of hospital images, him being wheeled by strangers behind NO VISITOR double doors in to the deep bowels of too many ERs.
But, hey, this was for fun! And would be a much better ride (right?). Shouldn’t I kill the killjoy? Shouldn’t I celebrate how incredibly typical this was? That, finally, my youngest was the source of that pang, that cleave I’ve felt sending my other kids in all kinds of exciting directions. Heart-tugging, sure, but victoriously appropriate. To get to feel this feeling about this kid was an unlikely win for an underdog team. If anyone should know this, it would be me.
Trying to caravan with three giant tour buses proved too difficult. At a point early in the drive, I went on ahead of my would-be pop band, knowing my son was rolling along on the highway behind me, unused to my empty back seat, and worried about what he might be doing in that other seat he was filling.
When I arrived at the hotel, my son was already in the function room for the first of the week’s speaker series. He has what I would diagnose as a highly selective sensory issue, which is to say he can watch a movie of his choosing at close range and high volume unbothered, but he does not like a crowded setting with someone speaking instructionally in front of it. For the latter, he chooses headphones.
No matter. Much of the content was about kindness, and my son doesn’t really need this information. He lives by it innately. He came this way. It would probably surprise him that people need to think about acting kind, that it can take effort and intention and a speaker reminding you to do it. It would probably surprise him that kindness doesn’t flow forth like so many knock-knocks.
Since he was distinctly uninterested in consuming the talk or the mexican buffet, I picked him up from the meeting and we went to In n Out. And hey, kids, who else wishes their mom was here now?
The next day we went to Sea World. Again to give that independence vibe, my son went ahead with his teacher and classmates and I met him there.
When I got to the park, I spotted him holding a giant ice cream cone, and he greeted me like he always does: as if we’ve been separated for many, many years. More, this time my arrival was even more heralded because I’d brought myself AND a credit card. This meant he could now “play” games to “win” prizes. After spending a small fortune, he was the proud owner of a stuffed koala of a blue so irritating and bright, I checked to see if it was plugged in somewhere. He named it Animals of All Kinds. I pushed this thing I didn’t want to think but feared was filled with a mix of asbestos, trash and old penguin feathers into his backpack, and thought about how we might go about mistakenly losing it before he made it into a steadfast bedtime lovey.
To get away from the wallet-sucking games, my son’s teacher, aide and I (read: entourage) convinced him to go to a dolphin show. The performance was midstream as we took our seats high in the amphitheater. The dolphins did any number of their splashy tricks, and 0.0% of them impressed my son. He stared down at the pool from our high perch, unmoved, unblinking. The dolphins jumped in unison, flipped in the air, splashed the crowd. Um, okay: if you were a dolphin, you could no doubt do the same.
As an adult, you can hear the crafters of Sea World’s messages straining to make wild animals confined to small places sound not just right, but admirable. Conservation. Eco-friendly. Fighting extinction. Nursing back to health. Lots of words to help you forget you’re staring at a pod that should be out frolicking in the sea and ganging up on pirate ships. To make captivity even more palatable, the trainers really play up their relationships with their animals. Like taken out of context, one might wonder if this spiel is about an animal they met at work or a person they met on Hinge.
Before the finale, or as my son might call it, Is It Over Yet, the trainers talked about the treats that these dolphins do all this nickel-spitting to earn. The trainers shared that dolphins don’t have taste buds, so the motivating factor is just texture. They can’t get enough of these small fish slopping out of buckets on the deck of the pool, but they do everything they do for a feeling.
This felt important to know.
Having paid his dues looking in the general direction of live animals, my son was ready to live. He was ready for the roller coaster.
I wasn’t. I have never liked roller coasters, even when I was younger and my brain actually stayed affixed in the proper position in my skull while getting hurled about. But my son can’t do this kind of ride, this kind of life, alone—so it was my turn to do something I preferred not to do.
As the bar lowered around our shoulders, locking us into our fate for the next 90 seconds, I started to panic. I’d been on this same rollercoaster with him last year. I remembered fighting all things centrifugal, trying to keep my head turned to him as we whipped around, looking for signs of trouble. With his neck and head rolling around wildly, the difference between extreme thrill and a seizure was not at all obvious. It was only after we survived the ride that I realized he’d had an episode of pure joy.
So that was why we were back here, strapping ourselves in again, resigning all control of our bodies. Could it go so well again? This is another kind of thought that plagues me.
It did go well. It usually does, right? I mean holding aside the rash of people I’ve seen on social media recently, stuck upside down on roller coasters for hours on end at multiple theme parks, these rides are safe. Unlike life, these rides are only pretending to be dangerous.
We rolled to a stop, my brain and hair still on the loop de loop three loops ago, still working on catching up to the body they were born to.
My son turned to me, “I’m so proud of you, Mommy. You were really brave.”
Walking out, I stopped to look at the pictures they sell at prices that force the question—should I send my kid to college or purchase this 8x10 theme park photo? My face looked to be melting in terror a la Raiders of the Lost Ark; my son’s looked placid, as if he was sitting on a park bench feeding pigeons. It reminded me of something: you can get as close as you want to someone and stay there.
You can hold their hand at all times.
You can track their every move, every input, every output.
And still: experiences are individual.
To that end, and to more semblances, I let my son go on the teacups by himself. I stood behind the gate watching him turn the wheel to spin, watching him do what all kids end up doing, on rides, in life: rotating away, waving as they go.
After his hotdog lunch which, because of his eating pace, ended up being a Pigeon Encounter, we went to the Penguin Encounter. For some reason, the penguins were the only animals my son had a legitimate interest in seeing.
This encounter is set up in an eery, subterranean-feeling room that, like a movie theater or Vegas casino, is unmoored from time of day. Visitors step on a moving belt, to be conveyed before the glass enclosure holding what I’d loosely estimate at 10,000 penguins, give or take 1,000. The space looked very over populated, and though in the actual South Pole penguins may choose to cluster despite their expansive world, here the clustering felt mandated, and therefore very claustrophobic.
Additionally, many penguins were going through their molting, giving them the unhinged look of Frank Gallagher on Shameless, wild-eyed, disheveled, some level of drunk. The penguins were facing the other way en masse as if to say Don’t Look At Us, and appeared to be in a covert meeting they were desperate to keep private, possibly planning some destined-to-fail escape.
Even out of captivity, penguins are different from other seabirds. Other seabirds can fly. Other seabirds don’t experience catastrophic molting, a wholesale change of feathers which makes them feel as uncomfortable as they look while enduring it.
In captivity, these seabirds at Sea World live under a bright cerulean basement ceiling that feels like a tease, somehow making the confinement more intense instead of lending an illusion of freedom. The whole encounter felt too close of a kind. It made me panicky, and I wanted to be conveyed faster past the sadness. I couldn’t shake the thought: aren’t unflighted birds entitled to the sky too? Just because they can’t get up there, does it mean they shouldn’t get to see the hope of it every day.
Shouldn’t everyone get the sky?
The moving walkway ended in a gift shop, naturally. We bought a snow globe because when he doesn’t shatter them immediately post purchase, my son collects these. He picked one with three little penguins stuck under the small dome, Sea World in a cursive-adjacent script stamped on the base. It felt a true representation of what we’d just seen, penguins locked inside a man-made bubble, excepting that these little figurines were luckier than their real life counterparts. At least in their little world, it still snows.
Sea World also boasts an arcade which my son, like any tween boy would, remembered well from our trip last year. As we were entering this room of flickering lights and beeping machines, my son spotted a classmate walking out.
“Hey!! Want to play some video games with me?” he asked in his how-could-you-say-no way.
“Oh, we are going to meet our friends…” she answered in a trailing off way, skipping off, eager to not get separated from her group.
I pick my son up happy from school most days. I hear tales of his hours of learning and growing and socializing at his fairly magical middle school—the classes he joined, the pick up basketball game he played, the kids he sat with at lunch.
But being with him on this trip, seeing how he integrates or doesn’t, seeing how he’s understood or isn’t, was a different experience. I remembered something his neurologist told us after he was diagnosed, when we were still in a zone of disbelief, trying to prove he was hitting milestones, trying to prove he could buck the reality of his genetics: I think when you see him with his peers, you will see that he is not keeping pace.
To be clear, my son is in a very friendly class. No one’s teasing him or making him feel different.
But he is different (though, if I may: everyone is!). And a seventh grade ecosystem is one of scarcity. There is only so much goodwill and popularity to go around, and getting either of these things creates an environment ruled largely by self-preservation.
This is a comment on life stage, not my son’s classmates. I have raised other seventh graders. I know the boys who maraud a mall like pirates; I know the girls learning dances in the food court. I often wonder how teachers keep kids straight year after year. I mean, yes—every kid is special and singular, etc., but aren’t there distinct commonalities class to class? Doesn’t a teacher just teach a kid early in their career who becomes the prototype: this year’s Jane, this year’s Jack?
On our way from Sea World to Universal, we stopped for lunch at an outlet mall. I arrived after the bus, to find my son sitting with his teacher, a boy who’d recently moved to our town from another country, and an extraordinary empath of a kid who throughout the week, went out of his way to not just say hi to my son, but to be his friend.
The boys sat in a contented silence, chomping away on lunch, limited by a variety of language barriers. The boy from another country started showing us Google earth pictures of his hometown—his house, his bedroom window, even his family car, the one that used to take him all the places he knew and loved. He alit in the telling, as if he’d been plugged in, but my son wasn’t much interested in pictures of random buildings on a phone.
My son, ever perfecting his tight five, had a better idea: he could tell some jokes.
“Want to hear a knock knock?” he asked expectantly.
“We do not have knock knocks in my country,” the boy answered, no longer looking at his faraway home on a phone, and therefore unplugged again.
Sometimes, my son would ride on the bus with his peers, and sometimes he’d choose to ride with me in the car, because again, he thinks I’m totally awesome. On our long car rides in traffic, he told me over and over again that he didn’t have a license.
“I can’t drive a car yet. I’m too young!”
“Yup, not yet. You’re too young!” Of course, age will never be my son’s biggest barrier to driving; his neurology has played a trump card here. So it’s unlikely he’ll ever drive, but recall I’m a fan of romantic thinking. And who am I to say? Technology keeps meeting him where he’s at, even running out in front of him and waiting for him to get there sometimes. He might drive.
We passed under the Hollywood sign. I told him that here, under this sign, was where most of his tv shows and movies were made. The commerce and car littered view from the highway made this feel abundantly unlikely. But he didn’t need proof—he trusts me.
“Thanks for all the channels, Hollywood!” he shouted out.
When we weren’t talking about driving or singing along to a Sesame Street album, which I’ve concluded were all written with little lyrical oversight, we talked a lot about what my son wants to be when he grows up: an uncle.
“Mommy, I’m not like you. I’m not a girl, and I don’t want to be a mommy. I want to be an uncle.” He guesses each of his siblings will have approx. twelve kids—his brother will have all girls, one sister all boys, one sister six of each (note: if you’re a child of mine reading this, I cannot commit to helping with these sorts of numbers…).
I don’t know why my son considers uncle the counterpart to mother, why he’s bypassed father (maybe he looks at my husband’s gig and thinks does it come with the battle axe wife? Dear god no thanks!). I don’t know why he’s decided uncle is a career choice either. Yet in it he’s naturally found an aspiration that fits.
Because while I assume he will have a job of some kind when he’s older, I also assume he will not be a father.
But by all the stars above: he will be a really good uncle.
He’ll show those nieces and nephews the sky.
Jen.
Oh Jen, so beautifully written, and lucky are the kids who will get L. as an uncle!
To battle axe/bad ass mothers! This was amazing. Thank you for being such good company with your writing, Jen. And keep going.