I have spent much of my life attempting to understand what it is to be human. In the dollhouse distasteful reductionist language of autism, it would be a special interest of mine. Informed as much by my limitations that made my peers perceive me as less than human as it is by the relentless intellectualism and embarrassingly vulnerable heart to which I’ve pursued the manner. All autistic traits, I’ve since learned, all human ones.

“When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults.” (Brian Aldiss)

Growing up is about both finding and compromising your identity. (Philip K Dick)

I have brought children into the anthropocene. Into an age where they will be unlikely to be able to earn enough to afford their own homes. I have passed on genetics that have loaded the die. Poppy has had two dental surgeries for the same undiagnosed mysterious salivary insufficiency that destroys my teeth. I love children with no genetic link to me who are nevertheless mine, as much as any child is anyone’s, with a thread just as binding and just as fragile.

I have spent years refining my understanding of myself and the world, and years dismantling those frameworks when I fell off the edge of the planet into the void. Years exploring the wilds at the edge of my solitary experience of the world, and years exploring the shared reality of the domestic day to day life. Always polarised, always missing pieces of myself. Finding so many lost souls. Losing knowledge and memory as much as picking up new precious information. Looping the same mistakes over and over while I struggle to understand. Finding my way out of each kind of darkness.

Today was international mud day. Poppy’s school celebrates it and I so wanted to be there. But Bear was sick and couldn’t be out in the cold weather. My heart broke. I thought I would parent differently. I thought I would be there for everything. I work. I have other children. Nightingale has been sick. I juggle and I work hard and I have to let things go. Today hurt to let go. In any group or family, there’s a carousel of who takes the lead, whose event is special, who is sick or hurting, whose turn is next. It’s imperfect and it’s especially hard when coming from a single parent single child background where the answer to that question was once incredibly simple: this one child of mine is the focus. Now there’s more to balance, more complexity, more networks, more regrets. I compromise. Poppy waits for next time.

I resent compromise and I fight it. I sat at a show recently and a young person berated us for leaving them such a broken world and I remembered berating my parent’s generation for that, but I still wanted to say it wasn’t me! I still wanted to take my children far away into the wilds and live off the grid and away from single use plastics and be pure and pristine and at peace in the knowledge we contributed to none of it.

And I think what that would do to my children, the friends and family they’d lose, the opportunities lost to them, the network I’m part of where we care for and contribute to our world. I remember my public health training and the despair of the researchers who found the obsession with individual consumer based environmentalism had consumed everyone with guilt and distracted us all from the giant corporations and their captive regulating bodies that were permitting vast environmental atrocities for profit. I remember that compromise can be holy. It took me so long to understand that. That we remain in the world. That we accept the blemish and the stain. That we participate imperfectly in the giving and receiving of love.

Today I drove for hours through fields and forests, through mist and rain and sun and smoke. I drove to the ocean which was foamy and wild. I played Little Bear’s favourite song with him, which is Row Row Row your boat, and discovered he likes green juice. We looked at two caravans that could function as home offices while our damaged home is being repaired and rebuilt. The world unfurled before us like a flag. People were kind. Bear stomped about in his sweet little brown leather shoes, chuckling at chickens and nesting his head in my shoulder when a dog frightened him.

It was a heartbreaking day. It was a good day. This morning I pulled the car over to cry as the pressure of all my tasks and that horrible underlying fear of letting your children down pulled me into a whirlwind of meltdown. This evening I lit a candle and lay in a hot bath by an open window watching the sky darken. I watched Wallander on my phone and cried at the beautiful music in the credits. I thought about how vibrantly the male characters were portrayed and how distant the females were, passive and beyond reach for us because they are beyond reach for Wallander, loved and pitied and mourned from behind glass. What’s wrong with me, she cries. There’s nothing wrong with you, he replies. He’s right. And yet. How then should she live? Is she still human? Does she still have a soul, or is she what her father has made her?

I thought of how lost we are as a culture about trauma and grief, how bewildered. An autistic might say we have no scripts. What is the etiquette after horror and betrayal? We are bound by conflicting instructions that cannot satisfy: we must move on as if it never happened/we must be broken forever to show it mattered and prove our pain is real. Silent/passive. I think about birth trauma and Bear and the gaping wounds I carry for how he and Poppy came into the world. How I am silent and passive, I have not told those birth stories, I have not painted that pain. Something in me was broken and remains broken. I do not care to bring my pain to the public to defend it against a medical structure founded on the certain knowledge my experience is invalid. There are no scripts. There is lying alone in a bath, weeping when Wallander is kind and hurt. There is the power of naming it, recognising this wounded black beast as my own, however uninvited and unwanted. The ghosts that came with my children.

Parenting is all about living with ghosts. “Monsters are real. Ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes they win.” (Stephen King)

This is what it is to be human. The complexity and contradictions and imperfections, the threads both found and lost. My friend who died in her sleep with her face cupped in her hand and whose story was far from over. Who fought so hard for her life and to feel alive and not be overtaken by the beige. Too soon and too young and unfinished and unready. This is our life. The violin weeping with me and the dog downstairs shrieking at a rat running along the fence. The unspeakable and the benign tangled.

I lost my art again. I’m careless, I lose it often. I’ve made no art at all in years.  I’ve been hunting for it in therapy, pointing to the unspeakable stories I cannot paint, the blocks that make me afraid of my easel.

Yesterday I moved around the furniture to allow Poppy and Bear spaces in the studio with me, and I set up desk lamps and task lights and turned off, for the first time in 2 years, the overhead fluorescent lights. A chainsaw growl in my brain went instantly away and the space that has been terrifying became warm and safe. I forgot how much the environment mattered, how, like many autistics, I can hear and feel electricity, and florescent lights burn my brain. All the complicated nuanced poetry of my creative blocks fell to one side in the simplicity of shadows and lamps inviting me home. So frustratingly simple. I did not need to speak the unspeakable, I just needed to feel safe in a place where that might one day happen, now.

I stood on the beach today with Bear asleep in the car and the wind wild around me and a gift for grief and loss hidden in my bag and poetry came to me like the sound of her voice in the wind. We are human. We break, and we endure, we tell stories and keep secrets and we are gone far too soon.