Category: Travels with a Daughter

I am a single parent with a teenager on the autism spectrum and travel is one of my passions. Travel is a wonderful, educational experience for typical children, and my hunch that Julia would learn and grow with travel experiences was rewarded last summer in Italy. So, I am on a mission to teach Julia about the world—one trip at a time!

solstice

written 21 June 2014

Almost summer.  Or is it summer?  Solstice day or night is when the season changes.  We are preparing to go to Tulum today.  Intent on using a tour company but our local taxi driver convinced us to use another local driver who speaks English.  We are getting the same tour for a third of the official tour price.  Will we be disappointed?  From experience, it appears that having the “official” anything does not guarantee proficiency or knowledge — a real tour guide may have a graduate degree in history or may have visited the site once.  It would be great to have a fantastic guide — a naturalist who guided us around a park in Costa Rica taught us a great deal — but we’ll bring our guide book and just a few facts and ruins themselves feel sufficient.

Having Cheshire here to speak Spanish is an incredible help.

We are having a good time.  I am having a good time.  Yesterday, we were lazy.  We had our equivilent of not leaving the resort for most of the day.  We lounged around our little pool, took frequent dips — I am in love with out tiny pool! — watched a midday movie and napped, and finally made it out of our house to go downtown for dinner in two restaurants and an ice cream bar and shopping.

Julia is spending a lot of her time relatively alone.  That Is, she is with us physically.  Always.  But not always interacting.  Instead, she is drawing, playing with leaves or plants or sand, reading or asking to play with her iPad.  I need, desperately and not so much, the interaction with adults that my dears, Cheshire and Alice, provide but I also have felt incredibly guilty not constantly interacting with Julia.  And yet, Julia’s time is not ill spent.  This morning I feel a gentleness come over my feelings.  Realistically speaking, the time away from interaction is not in some dark corner but within hearing range, physically together, and available for interaction.  This is not different from how all young children are raised.  I have wanted to shovel everything that was missing from Julia’s first years into our lives together so that she could “catch up.”  At the gut level, I have wanted her to become typical.  I am still learning.  As I contemplate art lessons for her this summer — art, the last quarter in which Julia does as she wants — I am drawn to think about respecting her integrity, her spirit that expands at its own rate and in its own way.  Her not quite appropriate interactions with us and with the people that we encounter are her own becoming herself.  I am aware, acutely, that I have the power to squash her soul and suck the creativity out of her.  How, in a much, much subtler way, that was done to me.  I cannot do that to her.  If she be an artist, if she be human, she deserves more than correction and fitting into some box that I have imagined.  I am here for her, to protect and defend, to teach but also to be taught.  This is a fluid relationship — like all relationships — and I can never allow myself to forget that.

Posted on by Suzanne Buchko 0

arrival

At best, travel is for exploring yourself.  That is how it has always been for me.  Not that I’ve found nuggets of wisdom in every jaunt to the Jersey shore or expanded my inner vision with every overpriced ride from an airport, but going to and being in some unfamiliar place pulls my spirit hither and yon.  Nothing can be assumed, nothing is on automatic.  Perhaps it is the jolt into the present moment.   Perhaps that points of comfortable recognition are not available to hang on to.

This is one of the mornings that I cannot type fast enough.  I want to get so much down on this screen and I know that when I follow any thought path, I will leave others, equally important to me to die by the wayside.  Sometimes when I travel it takes me days to get into this mind set and when I don’t feel the click into this intense desire to settle into a book, journal or do some mindful exercise, I am very disappointed.  When the switch is thrown (although the mechanism is still unknown to me) quickly, I celebrate.  This morning is one of those experiences.

We — Julia, Cheshire and I — are in Puerto Morelos, a small town south of Cancun.  A bit more “real” than its  ersatz developed neighbor.  We are in a very sweet walled house, the house developed for tourists like us — little pool out back, BBQ, very nice linens, good kitchen, big screen tv — on a street where dogs back and some properties are falling into ruin while others are being built.  Mexican people walk and ride on motorcycles and in cars.  We saw another tourist couple in the convenience store but without Cheshire’s Spanish and some pesos, it would have been harder settling into our digs last night.

We arrived in late midday into the stifling heat that is both unpleasant and recognizable to me — Vietnam and China, even Costa Rica — I have traveled in this kind of heat before and my body know, even when my mind refuses to believe, that this is a place of slowing down and tending to the body in a way outside of my normal day-to-day.

Monday night back in Madison, there were fierce storms, tornado warnings and alerts.  We spent a good deal of our night on the living room couch and in our basements.  There were trees down and houses ripped up, not in our part of Madison but close by.  As I looked at the pictures online much later I was very much aware of how life changes in an instant — how different Tuesday would have looked had the storm claimed our neighborhood.

Julia and I had a place at 6 a.m. in Milwaukee which is about an hour and a half from our house.  I know, crazy time, but I never sleep well before a trip and always sleep on planes — it seems a good use of time and energy but how crazy it was!  Monday, I had very little planed outside of Julia’s activities.  We packed, cleaned out the frig, checked in with Amy (whose kids are cat sitting) and were both in bed early — she before 9, myself before 10.  The thunder and tornado alarms woke up before midnight.  Julia first climbed into my bed.  She can sleep though a moderate thunder storm now, but there was no sleeping though this one — thunder, cell phone alert squawks, town alarms, and emergency vehicle sirens.  When the storm seemed to keep coming, I checked the weather on the lap top and tried to decide what to do.  After all, we were waking up at 2 to leave before 3 to get to the airport.  I had “planned” on those four hours of sleep to get me focused enough to drive.  My initial mental gymnastics were about how I was going to get back to sleep in order to stay on course.

Ah, how the gods laugh at mortal planning!  If there are micromanaging deities, I could believe that they present us with lesson after lesson, usually on the same topic.  Almost ad nauseum, waiting for some learning to happen.

After a few minutes of wild storming and the warning to get into a safe place NOW, I had Julia put on clothes and we sent down to the first floor.  Amy, bless her heart (friendship lesson #5,009,234.671), texted me asking if I was ok.  Yes, this was serious weather.  We stayed on the couch in the living room which is not as safe as the basement but from which movement to a safer part of the house would be easy.  We snuggled together for an hour or more, neither of us sleeping, me worrying, Julia very quiet.  When the alarms stopped and the storm became merely heavy rain, we climbed the stairs and collapsed into my bed.  I would have time for a nap before hitting the road.

The alarm went off at 2 and for a moment I imagined it a dream.  I willed myself out of bed — when David was alive he would have done the willing.  Yes, I have learned.  — grateful for the shower that woke me up and the time to rouse an exhausted Julia and get us out the door on time.  And then on the road we hit more intense rain.  Optimistically, I must admit that although I hate driving through rain and hail, there was no possibility of falling asleep at the wheel.

The trip down was uneventful.  We slept on the planes — I much more than Julia and arrived in Cancun with flocks of American and British tourists lining up for immigration as if they were Noah’s cargo of feathered and furred pairs.  Julia had been cooperative on the planes; however, she denied needing to go the bathroom when I did during our second flight.  And she is still not always aware of her body.  Where that leads is predictable but always surprising to the mother who juggles too many inconsequential lists in her head.  The long walk from the plane to the immigration lines which is not lined with conveniences was too much for her and mid way there she stopped with pee streaming down her legs.

My initial anger leads me to humiliation  which would work well for most typical kids.  I am not proud of this, ever, but my first impulses with what I see as baffling behavior is not necessarily the most helpful or loving.  To my credit, I deeply see that there is no intent in these situations, there is just poor planning on her part.  We found a rest room before the immigration line, Julia changed into the clothes packed in her back pack — always a change of clothes incase of travel mishaps — and she washed her good sandals before we went into the lines.

I am struck by the Velveteen Rabbit realness of living with Julia — we can have no pretense, no false pride.  We find joy where we can and we are not humiliated by what occurs.  That did not come out as profound as it is clanging around in my brain.  Not that many wiser people have not taught the same thing but I am so much Dorothy who needs to discover how those ruby slippers work for myself.

The house, as I said, is lovely and it was heaven to spend the evening and night with Cheshire!  We can talk — we might do it non-stop for the entire week if mouths did not need sleep or food.

There is a convenience store  of the 7-eleven variety and two restaurants within walking distance of our house.  We bought cereal, milk, bananas, cookies and Julia’s longed for chips there and then retired to a very empty restaurant which served very USA food.  It was very good — Julia’s fish and chips was as close to healthy as that dish can get, my burger was perfect and the calamari, “Brooklyn style” was fresh — but not the Mexican experience that Cheshire and I travel for.  Julia was hungry!   Understandably so since we split a bagel before the first plane and had little else except for plane snacks during the day.  I was still on adrenaline from the last 24 hours, she simply needed food in a way that she rarely does. She ate her own food, had bites of my burger – rarely does she care to taste what others eat, rarely does she really care about food! — and some of my and most of Cheshire’s fries.  We then returned to our little house, exhausted but not tired, and watched one of the Star Trek movies on the largest tv screen that I’ve ever lived with.  Julia went to bed protesting a little, more a formal protest than with any passion, hit the pillow and was out cold within minutes just after 9 which under normal vacation circumstances would have been early.

Cheshire and I indulged and dozed in front of The Wolf of Wall Street which is an incredibly depressing movie.  I have little interest in dissecting my reasoning but suffice it to say that perhaps some spiritual awakening has penetrated my core.

This morning I woke up just before 7 — I am still on school year time and 7 is sleeping in on a school morning.  I came out to our walled back garden, did Japanese Crane, took a dip in the pool sans clothing, made myself some tea and have been tapping away on a lounge listening to birds that do not live in Wisconsin and the rustle of palm trees.

And now, I hear the murmurings of Julia who may have found her iPad before she decided to find me.

Posted on by Suzanne Buchko 2

all’s well . . .

All’s well . . . although I can’t be sure it will  end well.  For now, all’s well.  Small gratitudes are gratitudes all the same.

It has been a week since I heard from “downtown” — the school’s district’s office that is running the music experience in July.  I wrote an email to the woman I spoke to last week:

Dear B,

We spoke on the 13th about finding support for my daughter, J, so that she can participate in the summer music experience.  I wanted to check in with you to find out how that is coming along.  If you have difficulty finding an aide for her, I should be able to come up with a short list of people who would be interested in doing it.

Thanks for your help,

S

The response came quickly, about a half hour later:

Hi S.

Thank you for checking in on this.  I am working with our Human Resources Department to secure an SEA; they’ll use the list of applicants for summer school.  I sent an email this morning checking on the status and will let you know as soon as I can when we’ve secured an SEA for Julia.

Thanks very much, b

Later, I wrote back with the name of the person who has been her strings aide all year.  We — myself and the SEA — would love to have her spend the music experience with Julia but I don’t really expect that the PTB will take my suggestion.  Still, it is worth a try.  I am just so relieved that I didn’t have to put on battle gear.  I will send our communication notebook and ask whoever the SEA is to let me know how the class goes.  I would not be surprised if there are still some lumps along the road but the big barrier to Julia’s attendance has been removed.

Relief floods in.

Just before I picked Julia up from school, I talked to her principal.  He had called as I was headed to school and I was thankful that he initiated the calling.  On Friday, I sent him an email about the bullying and he responded during the weekend that he would explore the issues.

He talked to all the kids who were involved in some way.  Julia and her supporters told the same story, as did the fourth graders who were bully followers.  The perpetrator did not deny any of the behavior and did not come up with a good reason for it.  He is not a powerful or popular kid and Julia is not his only target.  It sounded like some of his targets are bigger than he is and the principal pointed out to this boy that it was really not in his best interest to push around bigger and stronger kids.  (One of my concerns is that Julia, for all her training to “walk away” or “report to an adult” may one day find the end of her rope and deck the bully.  She is fully capable of doing that.  We cannot forget that she used to fight for food and win.) The boy was told he did something wrong and that his parents were called.  At that point, the boy broke down and cried although I expect it was from the anticipation of parental correction and not from the realization of his wrongdoing.  The hope is that if his behavior changes the younger boys following him will back off.  I know that I wrote that I wanted to punch him out, I really don’t want to bring him down in any way.  Rather, I want  to get him to stop doing what he is doing.  He was also told that if news of continued bullying trickled down to the principal again, that being removed from the bus and suspension were apt descriptions of consequences.

I hope that this solves our bus bully problems for the semester.  I am however, stymied as to the reason this boy does what he does.  I know, I know the reasons in text-book phycology language but to see it played out is bewildering to me.  I was either raised right or raised much too timid but the urge to exert power over those with vulnerabilities never existed in me.  However, in the interest of full disclosure, I admit that I did attack one neighborhood boy when I was in fourth or fifth grade.

Tommy Sopko lived three doors down from our family and he was one of a bunch of brothers.  He was in my class at St. Thomas the Apostle elementary school and had terrorized me since my arrival there in third grade.  I don’t know if I had been told or it was instinctual but I knew that my stutter made me a prime target for what we called ‘teasing’ of any kind.  I got out of Tommy’s way, said nothing, never reported it, cried a few times at home and was told or ignore the ‘teasing.’  Tommy was a bully, to be sure.

One very rainy morning, I was walking to school with my brother who was 2 years behind me in school, when Tommy fell in behind us and started his socially acceptable banter, except this time he started making fun of my brother — over what, I don’t remember.  My brother, for any of his little brother faults, had no obvious target pinned on his back.  I distinctly remember being in a irritable mood — rain, sharing an umbrella, heavy book bag and who know what little brother complaints.  Tommy was on our heels, under the back of our umbrella, taunting, teasing, bullying, first me and then my brother.  At that moment, I had enough and I had a weapon.  I turned on him and started hitting him with the umbrella.  I remember his stunned face!  And then his running from us.  I do also remember the powerful feelings coursing through me.

One of his parents came over to our house that evening, complaining about my behavior.  I suspect that I must have left some mark with my umbrella.  I can’t imagine that he would have told his parents of being beat up by a girl otherwise.  I was asked why I beat up Tommy on the way to school and I think I stuttered out my reasons.  I have no idea what was said, but I did not apologize (timid but stubborn), I was not punished after they left and was not told to keep my umbrella to myself.

What I felt then was a self-righteous victory over an oppressor, but it was a feeling of power.  I wonder how it compares with our bully’s feeling.  Could telling Julia that she is stupid feel as good as beating up Tommy Sopko with an umbrella?

Posted on by Suzanne Buchko 1

eggs, tarantulas, travel

I begin blog entries and get dead ended after a paragraph or two.  I’ve been writing letters and trying to complete a scholarship application for the online course that I want to take next.  Also, it is tax time.  I have my way of preparing and I usually get down to it at exactly this time of year.  How predictable is that?  I always imagine that I am getting started this year much later than last year, but looking at my prep documents from previous years . . . Yes, same process, same time.

Julia and I are making eggs in the evenings a few nights a week.  Julia finished her first egg and I cleaned off the wax.  She was satisfied with the result, not astonished, not disappointed.  She had already started a second egg and while that was in dye last night, a third.  She has no interest in looking at pictures — I’ve said this before.  I am so dependent on the traditional designs.  Julia has her own ideas.  I’ll post pictures soon.  I’ve made three eggs and ready to begin challenging myself.  I am not using any guiding elastics on the eggs to begin designs this year.  It is changing what I can and want to do.  Again, I’ll put up pictures. Continue reading →

Posted on by Suzanne Buchko 0

worry

From 2 January 2014, about an hour after our flight was pushed back.

Stranded in the Baltimore Airport.  Hopefully for a few more hours, possibly for the night.  It has been cold and snow in Wisconsin but tonight the weather is acting out all over the country.  The flight that we are schedule to go on departed hours late from Houston because of a late arrival from the midwest.  Now, there is the weather here to cause concern.  It is snowing and sticking, and folks in Baltimore are cowed by snow.

We are prepared — comfortable, warm clothes, backpacks with a change of underwear just in case, and plenty of electronic toys to occupy us.  I decided that I would pay for some internet here but I cannot seem to connect to anything including the free WiFi.

The plane landed about 2 hours late and we were on it soon afterwards.  The weather in Maryland was terrible and the plane needed to be de-iced and the runway plowed.  Everyone pushed on until it was off the ground and flying.  Milwaukee was cold, but the roads were clear and dry.  We made it home a bit after 2.  Five hours later than planned but home nonetheless.

What I notice is that I worried less than I ever have about that kind of situation but even the worry that I did was useless.  I could not give it up but at least I could notice what it was good for.

Worry is a tough one for me to give up.  I do it all the time about Julia and it ruins everything!  Just a bit of hyperbole.

I can get into a vortex of maternal preoccupation when I focus on all the Julia has not learned that is essential to an independent life and a typical 12 year old.  oh, 13 in two weeks.  I want to schedule every minute, fill it all with something important — reading, writing, science preview, cello practice, math on the computer, typing program,  knitting, calendar work, before and after work.  It is hard to find any time for fun and being that 12 year old on that kind of schedule.  I have not found the balance.  I am still on the intensive therapy schedule.

There are brief flashes when I see/hear/perceive Julia’s intelligence.  A very rare glimpse of clarity — an answer to a question, an astute observation, an enthusiastic explanation.  When we were at Universal Studios, the Wizarding World section, we went to the Olivander shop to get a wand for Julia.  This is her description of what happened:

We went to Universal Studios and I got a wand.

I went to the Wazarding World of Harry Potter and to Ollivanders wand shop.  A whole group of people went into the shop at the same time.   Mr. Olivander came in and said “Welcome to Ollivanders Wand Shop.  I’ve made fine wands since 382 B.C.”  Then he asked me if I wanted to find a wand before I went to Hogwarts.

Mr. Olivander handed me a wand and said, “Perhaps try this first wand.”  He told me to say luminous to make more light in the shop.  I said “luminous” and I made lightening and thunder.  People in the shop were scared.  Mr. Olivander said that that was not the wand you should use.

Mr. Olivander gave me another wand and told me to bring the flowers from one corner of the shop to the counter.  He told me to say, ___________.  I said that and the flowers wilted.  So, that was the wrong wand too.

Then, he told me to stand in the light by his counter he asked me when I was born.  I told him, January.  He said, “Ooo, wait a second.  Perhaps you should try  . . . .”  He went up the stairs and found a good wand.  It was made of Alder wood with a phoenix feather inside and he said it had a good “swish.”  He handed it to me and my pigtails were blown up and lights came on.

He said that was the wand chose me and that he expected me to be a great and strong witch.

Two things startled me.  First, that she was able to be involved in such an encounter — answering questions, responding to directions and all in front of a group of people.  Second, that she was able to remember it and tell it back to be a few days later.

When we were in Maryland with Cheshire and friends, I watched as Julia interacted with them and I do not see much difference in her interaction from last year to this.  I want to know how to inspire her to be as attentive to her sister as she was to Mr. Ollivandar.

At home in Madison, Julia is obsessing about Harry Potter.  Harry and his life and friends are on her mind all the time.  Sometimes I ask her to stop talking about it for a little while and talk about our lives and she asks me if she can still think about it.  This obsession has a different feel to it.  It is focused on people and not on dinosaurs, and the people have been part of books and movies.  I wonder if it is a step in the right direction — interest in people, that is.  I understand her interest on my own terms because I obsessed about books and stories for years but is it the same.

I have no idea!  And guidance is sparse.  No one seems to really know.  When I ask experts they tell me of possibilities, most of which I’ve figured out for myself.  Navigating the development of typical children is not easy but navigating Julia’s tween years is like padding upstream, in the dark, with a straw for a paddle.

Absolutely, all that I can do on my best days is to be present for her and have patience with the both of us.

Posted on by Suzanne Buchko Aside 0