Take Your Baby to Paris

“No, it was easy. I’ve had worse times taking him grocery shopping,” is what I’d tell people to ease their surprise and concern. And then they’d relax and nod, understanding. Taking an 11-month-old baby who’s just discovered walking is an astounding feat anywhere, really. Why not a three-day train trip to Paris in the middle of winter?

Why not, indeed. We’d been visiting my old grad school friend and her family near Portsmouth, England. How could we travel all that way from Seattle and not go to Paris?

On the train to London, we sat in an aisle seat next to a woman preparing a resume, and I tried my darnedest to keep The Boy contained in my lap as he opened and closed the tray table with joyous abandon. He was desperate to get his hands on our seatmate’s sweet, sweet pen, and we locked ourselves in stifled combat as he reached and I restrained. This went on for pretty much the entire train ride. I was thankful for the group of raucous football fans on board, making us look downright prim by comparison.

At Waterloo station, they took one look at the baby sleeping peacefully in my arms and bumped us to the front of the line, I suppose because the risk of him waking up and wailing was simply too great to leave to chance. While we waited for the Eurostar train, I let him toddle wild in his little turtle Robeez all over the station. On the train, a French girl amused him with a rousing game of peek-a-boo.

And how amazing and sublime, seeing France for the first time from a train window, snowy fields punctuated with trees in perfect willowy lines. Mr. Black’s face lit up like Christmas morning as we rolled into Paris, remembering his last visit. We walked through the dusky drizzle to our hotel. It seemed as if the whole city were made of pastries.

I don’t speak a word French. Mr. Black taught me how to say “Je ne parle pas francais,” and I could barely even manage that. But it was a strange child-like luxury of sorts, letting the others do the talking; basking in the dreamy isolation of only being able to look, smile, and drift.

The next day was sunny and so cold and absolute perfection. I bundled The Boy into his snow suit and Björn’d him all over Montmartre, where he had his very first carousel ride ever. Later that afternoon we saw the Arc de Triomphe and wandered in and out of shops on the Champs Élysées, where The Boy laid waste to Virgin Mega Store’s punk section. We wisely decided to skip the Louvre, letting him toddle around in a nearby sandbox instead before heading to the Eiffel Tower.

He took his naps on the go – every Metro ride was like a magic snooze machine for him. At dinner in a small Latin Quarter restaurant, there were no high chairs. But a friendly waiter set a bread basket right in front of The Boy, who spent the rest of the meal happily gnawing.

“Ça va?” the waiter asked The Boy, grinning. “Ça va?”

“Oui, ҫa va,” Mr. Black answered for him in a squeaky voice. The Boy grinned right back.

The next day was less adventurous, sleeping late and devouring coffee and pastries in the hotel room. We spent the afternoon in a fancy department store, where my friend and I shopped while Mr. Black hung out with The Boy in the play cafe. Before we knew it, it was time to head back to the train station.

And that was it. My one and only trip to Paris.

A few weeks later, I was back in Seattle getting ready for The Boy’s first birthday party. He’d mastered walking and would soon move on to running, climbing, and carrying huge sticks everywhere he went. As the months went by, I found myself increasingly grateful that we’d taken that trip when we did, because this kid could no longer be contained. He was fierce and wild and free. No Baby Björn could hold him.

Even now, at a sober seven-and-a-half, it’s hard to imagine hauling him and the rest of this crew back to Europe. Legoland and the Oregon Coast were challenging enough. Between The Boy’s Aspergian challenges, Mr. Black’s recent Crohn’s diagnosis, Little Girl’s tearful refusal to use any bathroom but her own or eat anything but bread when we travel, a geriatric cat with kidney disease whom I’m very reluctant to leave behind, and my own recent bouts of raging anxiety…well, it looks like we’re just going to be homebodies for a while.

But, you know…we’ll always have Paris.

It Takes a Village, People

I’m shivering on the concrete steps, huddling in the last winter afternoon sunbeams. Halfway across the school playground is The Boy, playing an impromptu game of soccer with a dozen other boys and girls from his class. They organize themselves into teams and positions. They kick and run, argue and resolve. There are parents all around, but we’re on the sidelines – chatting, reading, or just trying to stay warm. The kids are a little society unto themselves, Peanuts-style.

I’m on the edge of my seat, of course, knowing The Boy could lose it at any moment. The other team scores and scores again. He breaks a rule he didn’t understand and a girl loudly corrects him. A little sister runs amok through the game, throwing everything off course. I brace myself. But he stays calm and keeps playing. Later, they organize themselves into a kickball game.

An ordinary scene, but it feels like a small miracle. These kids accept him. And he accepts them. He even follows their lead, acquiesces to their rules, high-fives a teammate who scores. He plays until most of the other kids have gone home, and his good mood lasts for the rest of the day. When I think about it, I realize that his meltdowns are getting fewer and farther between. And when they do happen, they’re much more easily managed.

I know we’re just going through a good patch right now and I shouldn’t get too cocky. There’s no “cure” for Aspergers, after all. One doesn’t outgrow it. I know the moods and meltdowns are lurking not very far beneath the surface. But I want to stop and give this good phase the same attention I’ve given to the rough spots. I want to go ahead and be proud of him, and proud of myself. And I want to recognize that while I did a lot (a lot!) to get us to this point…I didn’t do this myself. Not even close. Meet the village:

Parent Advocate Pioneers
Other special ed families’ struggles make ours look like a trip to Hawaii. There’s a parent at our school who’s been a particularly fierce advocate in the face of some pretty extreme adversity. But she managed to convince them that her son needs and deserves to participate in an advanced learning class with special ed support.

By the time we were reassigned to this school, I was too exhausted to fight for advanced learning placement. I was ready to back down and not push for it if they said no. But because this parent paved the way, all I had to do was ask the principal about it once and she said yes. And what an incredibly positive difference it’s made for The Boy to be in a class that truly challenges him. He’s reading classic children’s literature instead of those dry committee-generated readers. He’s learning the multiplication tables and long division. And he’s in a classroom full of kids who are psyched about math and science. (And Harry Potter. Holy moley do those kids love Harry Potter.)

I wouldn’t have fought for any of this. But another parent did, so we get to reap the benefits. I’ll remember that the next time I’m tempted to back down.

Teachers
Of course, the credit for this particular class goes to The Boy’s excellent classroom teacher. He’s the kind of teacher who calls after the kids as they’re heading for the buses “Don’t forget to watch the lunar eclipse tonight!” He genuinely likes them, and they like him right back. They have this incredible energy together.

He’s been very flexible and understanding with The Boy, and he’s been welcoming and open to feedback from me. But the really wonderful thing this teacher has done – the thing I absolutely couldn’t have done myself – is hold very high expectations. Not in a mean, Tiger Mom-ish way. Just simple and firm. “He can do this.” And most of the time he can. He’s so proud of himself. And I’m learning how to gently, kindly, set the bar a little higher for The Boy than I used to.

Special Ed Support
Words fail. These people make it possible at all. The teacher’s aide who helped The Boy through those first terrifying weeks at his new school. The special ed teacher who talks him through his meltdowns and bouts of crippling perfectionism; who gives him unbridled encouragement when he tries something new; who called me at home on the first day of school to tell me he’s having a great day. The teacher’s aide who researches topics he’s interested in so they can have conversations about it. The resource room teacher at our old school who was The Boy’s sole advocate, who wrote him a great IEP and helped us get him to a school that was a better fit. Their depth and breadth of knowledge, their empathy, their infinite patience. Where would we be without them?

Viewers Like You
I owe my relative sanity and overall well-being to every friend, family member, and reader who’s ever listened to me talk or who’s read and shared my writing about all this. So many of you have given me such generous room to vent, ponder, cry, head down a completely wrong path and backtrack to square one, worry, and ponder some more. You’ve given advice, offered resources, validated my feelings, challenged my perspective, helped me feel strong and capable. Thank you.

School…When it Works
We had a “Getting Ready for Kindergarten” parent meeting at Little Girl’s preschool earlier this week. Our parent educator asked those of us with children in elementary school to talk a little about our experiences. I don’t think any of us intended to scare the pants off the first-timers. We all love our schools, and the kids are having a great year. But it took some of us a while to get here.

We had to stand up to teachers and systems that misunderstood or undervalued our children. We had to improvise solutions. We had to teach our children even stronger coping skills, and deal with our own disappointment. It wasn’t easy. But I believe that every single one of us came out of it stronger and smarter from the experience. You don’t always get it right the first time. But human beings are incredibly resilient.

Yesterday afternoon, we gathered in the elementary school library for cupcakes and popcorn to honor the teachers who are doing special ed inclusion in their classrooms this year. The special ed teacher had prepared one of those “You Are The Wind Beneath My Wings” Powerpoint slide shows, featuring heartwarming photos of the students all working, learning, and being part of the group under the gentle guidance of these teachers.

My favorite part, by far, was watching the audience’s reactions. Some of the teachers looked close to tears. Some had the biggest smiles on their faces. The Boy was delighted to see a slide of himself, hard at work writing a story at his desk. At the end of the slide show, the principal did a mock collapse, showing how incredibly touched and proud she felt.

School isn’t perfect. Life isn’t perfect. I know there are challenging times ahead, maybe even later today. But at this moment, I’m feeling so happy for simple moments like that after-school soccer game, and so grateful to everyone who’s helped us get here.

Luck

I poured my carrot juice a little too fast at breakfast, and the flash of orange triggered a split second of memory and panic. I know this kind of thing is supposed to make you seize the day and hold your babies tight in breathless gratitude. But this morning, all I wanted to say was “Dear kids: Mommy almost burned her face off last night. Please cut the bullshit.”

I didn’t say it, of course. There were pink (NOT ORANGE!) vitamins and half a bagel with cream cheese (NOT TOASTED!) for Little Girl, and a frozen waffle (toasted! no, cold! no, toasted! no, cold!) for The Boy. Making the eggs was the biggest challenge, of course, returning to the scene of last night’s New Year’s Eve grease fire. And so we meet again, Mr. Stove.

I’d been trying to make popcorn for the kids’ movie night while talking on the phone with my mom. When I saw smoke pouring out of the pot, I stupidly took the lid off and then, even more stupidly, tried to extinguish the flames with a big cup of water (that also happened to have a sponge in it), making the flames flare up dramatically. When I started to move the pot off the hot burner, the flames shot nearly two feet in the air, in the general direction of my face.

Mr. Black came in and put the fire out as quickly as it began. The Boy was in the living room, high-pitched and panicking until we reassured him that the fire was out. But there would be no popcorn tonight. That was the last straw for Little Girl, who burst into tears and kept on crying.

What the hell just happened here? I saw the sad old blackened pot, abandoned in the backyard. My breath felt smoky and my face hurt. Mr. Black was standing on a chair, scrubbing smoke stains off the kitchen cabinets. I noticed a huge burn on my wrist, and my right eyelid felt like it was burning, too. Wait a minute, I thought. Didn’t flames just shoot at my face? Perhaps I should seek medical attention.

No waiting at the ER. You want speedy service, just have a seat at the check-in window and tell them you’ve been in a kitchen fire. There was a young, fresh-faced doctor, followed by his supervisor – an older gentleman, kind and jolly, dressed in a tux to make the most of having to work on New Year’s Eve.

“Was it smoke?” he asked, examining the burns on my face.

“Flames,” I said, and he looked at me with worry and surprise. “I was lucky,” I added. He nodded solemnly.

I had to wait for an eye exam, and wait some more while they consulted with the burn center at another hospital. And the longer I waited, the more the reality of the situation set in. This could have been a lot worse. Really, it was miraculous that it wasn’t a lot worse.

I felt a perfunctory impulse – almost an obligation, really – to thank God, or G-d, or the Universe, or Jesus, or Santa, or the spirits of my ancestors. Somebody. But the gratitude felt hollow. To believe that some divine force of good intervened to save me from my own stupidity, from an accident that I caused, is to believe that I am somehow more worthy of being saved than the next unfortunate accident-prone mother of two. And how can I believe that? What does that say about the person who isn’t so lucky? What sort of false hope does that provide? How will you comfort yourself when that benevolent intervention doesn’t happen?

The chilling fact of the matter is that this simply happened. I made a mistake. I started a fire. The flames burned just high enough to burn my face a little with their heat, and that was all. It could have had a different outcome. But it simply didn’t.

And so, I join the ranks of all the other New Year’s Eve survivors of bad choices – the DIY fireworks injuries, the drunken tumbles down the stairs, all manner of accidents that shouldn’t have been. And I go back to my life very much as before, hair and eyesight intact, living to kvetch and ponder another day. Lucky.

And yet…There’s a part of me that still very much wants to believe that I am a loved and treasured child of a universe that knows I’m here and wants me to stay. Whether it’s objectively true or not (and really, no one can know for sure), it’s a belief that can make all the difference in how happy you are to get up every morning and face the day’s fears and frustrations. It’s a belief that got me through some of the most challenging times of my life. It’s a belief that just might make it possible for me to sleep better tonight, and maybe cook again without anxiety. It doesn’t hold up to scrutiny or logic. But I think, for the time being, I just might hold it in the back of my mind anyway.

That, and some basic fire safety know-how. Best wishes for a lucky 2012!

Sub-Q Christmas

People keep trying to tell me, in the nicest possible way, that the cat doesn’t have much time left.

I know.

Really, it never takes much for me to imagine any given situation taken to its most dramatic and heartbreaking hypothetical extreme. This one doesn’t require much imagination. I’ve seen her blood work. I’ve spent the hours sitting around the emergency vet’s waiting room, sipping bad coffee and watching the accident-prone dogs and very, very sick cats come and go. And I’ve seen this all before with other pets – childhood pets, friends’ pets, family members’ pets.

I’m there. I’m ready to say goodbye.

It’s just that she doesn’t seem quite ready yet. She was overjoyed to come home from the vet’s on Thursday night. Just the way she sniffed the air was delight itself, moving her head this way and that, craning her neck and taking big enthusiastic sniffs like she can’t quite believe she’s back here. As if she’d begun to think maybe she’d dreamed the whole thing. She ran to her scratching post and gave it the scratching of a lifetime. She ran to Mr. Black and jumped in his lap. I woke up the next morning, as I have most mornings over the last sixteen years, with a sleepy, purry kitty on my head.

Once a crazy cat lady, always a crazy cat lady. In the beginning – before Seattle, before kids, before any of this – it was just me and this cat in a Philly apartment. We were like Mary and Rhoda. Anyone who knew me knew all about my cat.

Earlier this week, when she was still at the vet, when I thought we might be losing her sooner rather than later, all I could think of were those early single-girl years. Getting a pet back then was such an act of affirmation. It said “Okay, I’m here, and this is where I’m going to be for a while.” Her feisty little presence filled in the uncertain spaces so beautifully; a fundamental layer between bored loneliness and the chaos of human company. And at the end of every absurdly bad date, every exhausting day at work, every disappointing job interview, every hilarious night out with friends…there she was.

And here she is now. Each front leg has a little bald patch where the IVs were. She spent most of that first day home sleeping under my desk while I hovered around her helplessly, wishing she’d eat and drink more, bringing her little meals and bowls of water to no avail. Occasionally I’d try to put her in my lap, but she’d just give me that one-ear-back look and return to her spot.

After the kids were asleep, Mr. Black and I made our first attempt at administering subcutaneous fluids. Have you heard about this? Here, let Dr. Mike explain:



So, there you have it. Set up a hospital-style fluid bag, jab a nice sterile needle under the cat’s skin, and let those fluids flow, all in the comfort of your living room. I’m going to be honest: There isn’t a component in that process that doesn’t fill me with dread.

Mr. Black and I bumble around with it every night, just like the very earliest days of parenting when we’d team up for every diaper change. We try so hard to stay calm and professional, but we’re both in way over our heads. We had to bring a wobbly old floor lamp up from the basement so we’d have somewhere to hang the bag. Sometimes the cat lurches and squirms, nearly working the needle out, getting tangled in the line. I actually stuck myself with the damn needle tonight and had to start over with a fresh one. I just hope the floor lamp doesn’t come crashing down on my head one day.

But in spite of all the awkwardness and absurdity… we’re doing it. I think it’s working. She’s so spry all of a sudden. That first night, the minute we were done with the fluids, she walked right over to the dish of food she’d ignored all day and started chowing down. Then she hopped into our laps and the three of us all just sat on the couch in a daze.

We were supposed to be flying back east next week for the Big Christmas Visit Extravaganza. But I can’t leave her now. I want to make sure she stays well. And if she doesn’t…well, I don’t want to hear about it over the phone from a cat sitter. On the one hand, it feels a little embarrassing and very crazy-cat-lady of me. On the other hand, it feels absolutely essential.

My parents and sisters have been incredibly understanding and supportive. The kids were disappointed at first, but they quickly warmed up to the idea of spending Christmas in their own house. So, haul out the rain boots and foam up the lattes, because it’s Christmas in Seattle this year.

My Girl

Little Girl turned five yesterday, the same day as our preschool trip to see The Nutcracker. It doesn’t get much better than that.

I had a little moment there, just as “March of the Children” began, when I turned my attention from the lavish production on stage to her mesmerized face in the dark. She was perched on the edge of her seat, holding an armload of stuffed animals, clearly recognizing the song and delighted to see it come to life so vividly in front of her. I nearly started to cry.

There’s a joy in this girl that just about breaks my heart sometimes. It’s so pure, so free from the fears and self-doubt that come later in life. She throws herself into the things she loves with full force, unapologetically. She is my girl in motion – swinging on the playground for incredibly long stretches, mired in a gorgeous world of imagination. She adorns herself in mismatched pinks and sparkles. She narrates as we go about our daily business, or holds conversations with stuffed animals and imaginary friends. And her joy in her real friends is enormous, especially when they join in her story-playing. She’s even got The Boy doing it. They can play for hours, those two, just making up stories and acting them out.

I see so much of my childhood self in her, it’s a little scary sometimes. Scary, because I know what comes next. You turn all that love and imagination and intensity loose on the world and, well…mixed results, at best. There will be people who get you and love you for being your rather unusual self. Others, not so much. She has no clue yet, bless her heart, about people who want to take others down a peg with rigid standards of “normal” and “feminine,” or just plain competition. She can’t begin to fathom that there will be people who won’t love her as much as she loves them. Knowing that this awaits her is almost too much for me sometimes. Will her spirit survive it?

Well…yes. I think her spirit will do just fine. She’s got so much of it to begin with, not to mention a mother who’s been through the woods and back and could maybe help show her the path, if she’s willing. That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway. Might as well enjoy that unbridled innocence while we have the chance.

Happy birthday, Little Girl.

Beauty School

One recent rainy morning, I dragged my reluctant self to Rudy’s for a much-needed haircut. I was half-asleep in the chair when Fleetwood Mac’s “You Make Loving Fun” came on. And suddenly…it was 1979 and I was back in the old orange-and-brown, potted-plant-flocked hair salon where it all began.

After a dreadful experience in which my adorable little sister was given an unwanted and most unfortunate bowl chop, our mom was extremely selective about who cut our hair in our small town. We tried some locally famous guy’s salon at the strip mall, where I got my first-ever Dorothy Hamill. But then he got to be too much of a big shot to do kids’ hair. We found another place that worked for awhile, until our stylist moved to Texas. She referred us to a new place that was supposed to be great.

It wasn’t at all like the kiddie salons of today, with their pony-shaped chairs and smoke-free environment. This was a grown-up salon, and it was the late 70’s/early 80’s, baby! My new hairstylist was – from my childhood frame-of-reference – like Johnny Fever meets Sam Malone meets Vic Ferrari. He was proudly single, clever-ish, gregariously self-absorbed, maybe just slightly on the seedy side. My mom respected him, though, so I felt compelled to at least try to figure out what I was missing. What was there to like about this guy?

Maybe it was simply his talent. No bowl chops at that place. This guy knew what he was doing. When he got a job at another salon, we followed him there. (Goodbye orange and brown, hello royal blue and gold!) And then, in the late 80’s, he and his fellow stylists started their own place. (Hello mauve and white!)

I never felt entirely comfortable in any of the venues. I didn’t like feeling obligated to talk to him, trying to make the kind of conversation he wanted to have, trying to somehow pass as the hair salon version of “normal.” Meanwhile, your mom’s standing over your shoulder telling him to give you a haircut that’s easy to manage because of your obvious hygiene and basic-personal-care failings. Jokes at your expense, always, and the sense that you had to go along and somehow see the humor in it…or at least pretend that you did.

And the hair, more often than not, was some dreadful version of early Princess Di. I wanted long hair. “But what will you do with long hair?” my mom would ask. I never had an answer to that. So, Princess Di it was. Well, Princess Di with giant 80’s glasses.

As if the mother/daughter growing pains and introverted adolescent discomfort wasn’t enough, there were some real eyebrow-raising moments going on at that salon. There were jokes, probably intended to flatter, about our developing bodies and hypothetical boyfriends. There was the time our stylist showed up very late for a morning appointment, complaining about what could only have been a hangover and detailing how he’d finally managed to get the vomiting under control. (And then proceeded to do my hair. Ew.)

One time a teenage girl with Farah hair and a long, flowery dress showed up with her dowdy friend in tow and hovered around his chair for my whole haircut, flirting and begging him to join them on some adventure. Before they finally left, she actually kissed him on the lips. Twice. I saw it in the mirror. The stylist was clearly embarrassed, politely trying to deflect her and cut my hair at the same time. I was deadly embarrassed too – not for them, but for myself. At age ten, I felt so dwarfed by her; so ridiculously late-blooming. (What’s wrong with me? I should be dressed up and flirting with some old guy instead of stuck here with my mom. I’m so lame.) My mom, for the record, was mortified. But she blamed it entirely on the teenage girl, and we kept going back.

And then there was the stripper! Yes, there was an honest-to-Zod stripper there one time, right while I was sitting under the heat lamps letting that perm solution do its work. The other stylists had hired her for his birthday as a hilarious surprise. She was older, very heavily made-up, with hair like Gwen Verdon and a sparkly tux. She barely stripped. Just took off the jacket, hat, gloves, and boa; did a bawdy-ish dance to some poorly-recorded show tune on her boom box. Afterwards, unraveling the perm rods from my hair, the stylist told me how uncomfortable it made him, and how he found the whole stripper thing kind of sad. I couldn’t tell if it was sincere or not, but I appreciated the effort. My mom was off doing errands and missed that one. I’m pretty sure I never told her about it.

I have to say, though, the guy wasn’t so bad. He did tasteful perms (well, tasteful by 1980’s standards). He had some interesting stories to tell. He had his own version of “telephone,” making up ridiculous urban legends to his clients to see how long it would take the story to get back to his chair. He mellowed a lot over the years, eventually getting married and talking mostly about his step-kids and horses.

I changed, too. As I got older my mom stopped hovering behind the chair, relieving me of the awkward-daughter persona, freeing up a new version of self to explore. Grown-up conversations became a pleasant challenge instead of a cringe-fest. I was proud of myself as I worked to figure it out, learning how to fake interest in some totally uninteresting story, how to intuit a person’s sense of humor and make a joke that they’d like, how to sound happy and chatty when you’re actually bored assless and getting a headache from the smell of perm solution and cigarette smoke, how to playfully deflect teasing, how to act like you’re okay with it when a man stops the conversation to flirt with another woman in front of you, how to pretend you think Don Johnson’s sexy, how to guess what they want to hear and then say it…how to act like someone who enjoys getting her hair done.

For better or for worse, I came of age under those dryers and in front of those mirrors. My hair went from Princess Di, to tidy little perms, to lush huge perms, to a sleek early-90’s bob. It was my go-to salon all through college, all through grad school. I was well into my twenties before I finally cut the cord and went to a different place (although there was plenty of DIY henna and Clairol happening in various apartment bathrooms before that). And years later, for my first Christmas as a new mother myself, my mom’s gift to me was a cut and color at the old salon.

I don’t really do salons anymore, unless there’s a special occasion or a gift card to Habitude involved. But I love how they’ve evolved into these nurturing spaces with a peaceful, healthy vibe. And I’ve finally realized that you really don’t have to do the inane chatter thing with the stylist. Just let them know you’re there to relax and bliss-out, and they’ll let you.

No, there’s not much to miss about the old smoke-and-Top-40-infused salons of my youth. But somehow, sitting there in Rudy’s hearing that old Fleetwood Mac song, it made me so happy to remember those awkward hours spent in that chair. I was peering into the adult world, gradually trying it on for myself, taking it more seriously than any actual adult ever would. It all seemed so dangerous and out-of-my-league at the time. So illicit. And now, somehow, it seems downright innocent.

Where Do You Go From a Thanksgiving Layoff?

Down the hall in the break room, every inch of counter space was packed with various crock pots and pies. The smell of turkey wafted through the air. But first, our entire branch filed into the training room for an impromptu meeting.

Here we go again, I thought. The whole time I’d worked there – nearly four years at that point – there’d been rumors of downsizing, departments closing, even the entire branch closing. Nothing had ever come of it. They’d call us up to those meetings, amid a heavy mood of anxiety, just to announce personnel changes or some new policy. Surely today wouldn’t be any different. Who would announce a branch closing right before the Thanksgiving potluck?

And yet, that’s exactly what they did. “You’re all fired. Have some turkey.”

Okay, it wasn’t quite that harsh. They tried to let us down easy. They told us the office would be open through January, so there’d be plenty of time to look for new jobs. They let us know we were welcome to apply for jobs at corporate headquarters in Atlanta, or apply for retail jobs in any of the big box stores our office supported. They answered our questions as best they could. All around the room, you could hear people quietly crying.

Finally, we adjourned to the break room for one very stunned and surreal Thanksgiving feast. I think I ate about five desserts and very little else. We let each other vent. We wondered what we’d do next. We debated whether to call our husbands and wives now, or wait and tell them at home. Some of us were stoic, some were anxious, some were angry. Everyone had their own unique way of coping.

As for me, I was a little bitter, a little worried, a little ashamed, but mostly…overjoyed! So happy! I was pregnant with The Boy after nearly two years of trying and three early miscarriages. In fact, I’d just found out it was a boy that very week. I knew I’d miss my co-workers. I knew I’d miss a good job and a steady paycheck. But really, I was dying for a break. I wanted to stay home and start nesting, take walks, indulge my urge to nap at 3pm, maybe attend a weekday prenatal yoga class that wasn’t packed to the rafters like the Saturday one. Losing one's job while pregnant is an unfortunate situation. But I could barely suppress a wild, childlike sense of “YAY!!! NO SCHOOL!!!”

The bizarre thing is, that feeling lasted for nearly eight years. Every time I told the story of my layoff, it was with a “Can you believe my good fortune!” tone. I loved being a stay-at-home mom. Was it tedious? No more so than pricing water heaters for the monthly catalog. Was it mindless? No more so than chanting the corporate loyalty cheer at quarterly meetings. Was it a waste of my education? Please. I have a Masters in English literature. Anything that doesn’t involve analyzing food motifs in late 20th Century fiction is technically a waste of my education. No question about it. SAHMing rocked. And if I hadn’t been laid off, maybe I wouldn’t have had the courage to try it. No regrets.

Until recently. You see, I never intended to stay out of the game for quite this long. I did some freelance work here and there over the years, but The Boy is seven-and-a-half now and I have yet to set foot in another office. Little Girl starts kindergarten next year. It’s almost time. I’ve got to start getting ready to leave my own nest.

And as I look over my prospects and start dusting off the old resume, I can’t help but wonder…what if I hadn’t been laid off? What if I’d taken my little three months of unpaid maternity leave and gone right back to the old job? Would I still be there? Would I have developed new skills and made connections to get myself into an even better job? Would our finances be in any better shape than they are now, or would most of my money have gone to childcare?

More to the point: Would childcare have even accepted my little Aspergian toddler? When I was hoping to expand my freelance work, I tried sending him to a drop-off daycare. They kicked him out for crying too much. “This is a happy place,” the director explained as she refunded our tuition. I tried another daycare with a better reputation, but he hated that one, too. They didn’t kick him out, but they called me to come get him whenever he had a meltdown, which was often. After a while, I gave up on daycare and quit the freelance work altogether.

Again, no regrets. The Boy’s early years with undiagnosed Aspergers may have put me through the wringer, but I came out of it with all kinds of parenting superpowers and a fierce commitment to special ed students and teachers everywhere. I’ve learned so much, and I’m learning more every day – from his teachers, from his occupational therapist, from special ed activists and writers, and from the children themselves.

Lately I’ve been thinking I ought to put that to work instead of my mad corporate communications skillz. If it works out, then maybe that Thanksgiving layoff really was for the best.