Growing Pains

Anonymous

The room is cold. I hate cold rooms. I want to wrap my arms around myself, but then she’ll ask why. I don’t like talking to her. My mom makes me come here though, so we sit in silence. Or I do, anyway. The lady keeps asking questions. How am I feeling? What have I been up to? Do I like that picture on the wall that I keep staring at? I don’t want to talk to her. I don’t want to tell her that I’m not really looking at the picture, that’s just where my eyes fell when I chose to hide in the small room in my mind. I want her to go away. I don’t want to be here, and I don’t want to talk to her.

If I tell her that, then my mom will scream and hit me when we get home. I’m only seven, so I know the lady won’t listen to me. They never do. I won’t tell her the truth when I know she won’t help. So instead, I just answered some of her questions. Not a lot though, and not with a lot of words. Because I can’t tell her that I hate this ugly brown room with drawings of superheroes and animals that are colored outside the lines, and uncomfortable chairs at a round table with folders and pens on it. Nothing in this room is organized except the grown-up desk with the computer. I want to read my books and sleep. Instead, my mother says I have to talk to this lady. I don’t know how long I’ve been here, but it feels like forever when mom finally says we can leave. She talks to the lady and then looks at me funny. I know that look. She’s angry. Maybe if I’m quiet she won’t be so mad. She likes it when I am quiet. I follow her out the door.

We don’t go right home though. My mom says she has to make a call. She takes me to the park and tells me to go play. I stay at the bench and look around a bit. There’s a lot of kids here playing on the slides and the monkey bars, and running around. They seem to know what to do. I don’t. “Go play.” I can’t figure out what she really wants me to do. Am I supposed to go on the slides, or the swings? Should I be making friends? None of the other kids will like me, I can tell. Why don’t they ever like me? I want to stay here and sit, but my mom tells me to go play again. She’s louder now, angry. I have to go before she hits me.

I choose to go on the slide. I stand there for a minute, preparing myself for the feeling of warm metal on my thighs and that weird stomach feeling I get when I move too fast. I sit at the very top, and push myself over. For a split second I am fast, too fast, and then I am at the bottom. I stand and stall. I don’t know what to do now. Was I supposed to have fun? That doesn’t feel like fun. I look at my mom, who is still on the phone. She looks calmer now. Good. Maybe it’s time to leave? I walk around the playground for a bit to be safe, and then go to her. She tells us we can leave now.

We walk a bit, and then take a train to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. I feel happier as I take in the red brick and the chain gate covering up the alleyway that leads to the backyard. I know that through the alleyway is my grandma’s dog, Bear. I don’t live here, but this is home. Here, I am safe. Here, I know that my grandma and grandpa and Bear all love me. She gives me a big hug and kiss. It feels wet on my cheek, but I don’t wipe it off. It feels like love.

My grandparents’ house is organized in the same way that I believe my mind to be. The furniture doesn’t match, and there are random items put where they don’t belong. There are shoes in the kitchen, and a brush on the dining room table. Toys strewn on the floor and mail by the sink. The lightbulbs give the room a wired glow and there are tracks on the floor made immortal through time and some very persistent mud. There is no rhyme or reason and my mother would call it a mess. I love it here. This is home.

My siblings are here too. My sister, and my brother. They’re nice sometimes, but sometimes they act like all the kids in the park. Like they don’t like me. I wonder if they do for a second, and then decide it doesn’t matter. At grandma’s house, everything is better, even my siblings. We watch TV and eat cookies while grandma and mom go upstairs to talk. Grownups always seem to be talking around me, but I don’t mind. As long as they don’t talk to me. Me and my sister play the game on the tv. I like this show. It makes me feel smart. Even when I get questions wrong, they don’t make me feel bad like at home or at school. My mom comes down and says that she will be back later. I feel warm inside. Sometimes mom says that and then doesn’t come back for days. I like it that way, because then I get to stay here longer, with Grandma.

Grandpa is always next-door doing things that make him smell like oil and get all dirty, but I don’t mind that either. It just means that it stays just me and my grandma. We talk a lot, and she listens to me. Not like that lady mom makes me see though. Grandma knows how mean mom is, and she’s nice to me. I like Grandma, and I like this house. Grandma doesn’t treat me like there’s something wrong, even if there is. She has dark wrinkly skin that forms little balls under her arms and droops on her face. The marks on her skin are small, and can only be seen when you really pay attention. I wonder about the story behind them. We spend days talking and cleaning. I follow her everywhere not just because I want to be with her, but because I’m afraid that if I stay away too long she will learn to like it when I’m not around.

A lot of days pass, and mom is back again. I want to cry. I don’t want to leave. I don’t cry, and I leave anyway, because mom says I have too. Grandma hugs me and tells me to be good. I don’t know how to tell her that I don’t know how to be good with my mom. She doesn’t like me, just like my siblings and the kids at the playground. She doesn’t listen, just like the lady I have to talk to. But I tell her I will try anyway. I don’t want to make grandma sad. I walk out with my mom and sister and brother, and hope that I can come back again.

The next time I go to see the lady there is someone new here. She wants to talk too. I like this room better. It has colors that aren’t brown, and the drawings are colored the right way. There are lots of toys here, and they are put away nicely. The lady is talking to my mom. There are so many things in this room that I want to look at and explore, but instead I sit still. I try to be good like I told Grandma and listen.

The lady says I have autism.

I don’t know what that means.

As I get older, I have to keep talking to new people. Some of them are nice. Most of them are just okay. All of them leave. I’m told I have ADHD, and then depression. Mom gets meaner and keeps asking if I took my medicine. I learn that what she means to say is, “Can I get away with hitting you?” I don’t know what pills I take or what they are for. But she makes them sound like they change me. Like I’m only worth being around if I have them. The doctors keep asking how I feel when I take them. They never ask how she makes me feel when I don’t.

I don’t think I would need them if people just left me alone with my books. It’s better to slip away into other worlds. With books I don’t have to be here if I don’t want to. I can be someone else, doing anything else. People say I’m smart because of how much I learn from how much I read. I don’t know how to tell them the truth. Books have happy endings. I’m not sure if I ever will. My mom hates it when I read because I ignore everything around me when I do, including her. I don’t think there is a nice way to say, “This is the only way I can think to escape you.”

I raised myself with my books. Books taught me right and wrong, and what the world was about. It was through my books that I learned how to socialize better. I learned how to (for the most part) be able to tell when someone was using sarcasm and learned how to do the same. I learned what was okay to talk about, and what thoughts should stay in my head. Books taught me about places opposite to where I was and what I knew. My books taught me what to expect from other people and that there is a world where people like me exist, and where houses don’t feel like cages. But most importantly they taught me what love looked like. As a person who is still convinced her mother hated her for who she was, that meant everything.

They helped me so much, so I treated my books like old friends. In a way they are. Like friends they were there for me when I needed them, and they never left me. I have always felt less alone when reading. As one of the only consistent things in my life I never expected there to be an end to my insurmountable hunger for new books. But as time went on, my stand-in friends were replaced with real ones. I started finding real places to escape to and started creating my own adventures. I used what I’d learned in my books to approach the real world.

To be clear I was still afraid of doing this. I was different, a “problem child.” My books couldn’t change that. However, I came to realize that perhaps the rest of the world is not as harsh as my mother is. Suddenly, here I am. Twenty-years-old, picking up a book series I hadn’t read since middle school while sitting on an unmade, cluttered up bed, because my books taught me that there are some battles that you must let ADHD win. I took in the wave of nostalgia in between those first few pages and realized that I hadn’t stopped reading because I stopped loving books.

I stopped because I no longer needed to find refuge in them.