Leisa A. Hammett

The Thing I'd Never Grieved, Part I

"Don't You Stuff it! Don't. You. Stuff it, Leisa!"

I had just finished a harsh yet intimate, soul-digging session with my spiritual teacher. The truth hurt. The truth shocked. We both cried. The truth that surprised me but yet I knew was spot on was that there's an aspect about my disAbility journey that I've never grieved. Instead:

I stuffed it.

It was too painful.

Ironic, huh?

"Am I a phony?" I asked.

"No" was the answer.

I had shut off my heart to my deepest hurt. It was buried in my womb. The one I forgot I had.

The continuum of life as I know it in this world of my daughter, is:

"Normalcy." Asperger's. And, the profoundly affected end of autism.

While long ago I accepted that we edged somewhere near that far end of the spectrum, I ignored and buried the grief that we had lost all sense, all hope of normalcy. Sure, I visited it, only to sigh, quickly stuff it down and be glib about it.

"Don't wallow!"

The words from my mother suddenly echoed in my memory and made their way onto my tongue.  The admonishment never to wallow in pity came from the lips of a woman with a hard-edged heart whose psyche bore the pockmarks of an impoverished depression-era, familial hard-knocks youth....

"Your mother was right about one thing," said my teacher. "Don't wallow."

His next words were so emphatic, I reached for my ink pen and spiral-bound journal and transcribed them onto the blue-lined pages:

"Grieve it. Heal it. And move on through it!"

Am I a phony? I asked again, my head fuzzy, spinning with these revelatory thoughts and emotions."I mean, I've spent the last nine years-plus writing and speaking about the disAbility grief experience. And, right now I'm ramping up the road show with another book and more speaking. And...I haven't grieved myself?!

"You have not grieved the loss of normalcy."

He dared to give voice to my quiet thoughts. The ones tucked into the dark crevices of my soul, where the door that sheds light on them is only creaked open in small increments but rarely....

If I had a "normal" daughter, in addition to Grace, then I would experience those milestones that other mothers experience, my teacher reminded....You know the ones: First dates. Proms. The college selection process. Graduating with real diplomas. Shopping for a wedding dress. A grandbaby swaddled in my arms. I'll never have those things. It's okay. It's okay. I quickly slam the door and move on in a frantic mania of creation.

The fact is: It is okay. And these losses never negate the gift of who my child is. But the trip up came in slamming the door on this element of my loss.

Mother-Daughter Look-Alike

The link to my daughter's art site, www.GraceGoad.com, popped up as I typed it into a Facebook message to someone. I stopped and looked at her fresh face and then I looked at my own staring back at me in my Facebook profile. If you're a parent, ever notice how so often we can't seem to see the "us' in "them" that others can so readily see? It sure is that way with me. It seems to happen in stores often. We'll approach a counter and a clerk will rave about how much we favor or, proclaim that we've just gotta be mother and daughter! I just smile knowing that I can't exactly see what they see....

Every now and then I get glimpses of her that elicit memories of me captured in childhood black-and-whites. (Yeah, that long ago. It was only about 1967, seven years into my life, that I recall the images being in color.) Other times, I happen to walk toward a mirror and stop, noticing a trace of my daughter's face. It's so much easier for me to see her in the face of her aunt, or her paternal grandmother. Sometimes it's even difficult to see the face of her father within her own. But, these. These pictures of us two, my personal page profile picture from Facebook and the one from "GraceArt," I totally get it. I can tell: she's mine.

What do you think?

Mother's Day has come and gone but I'm celebrating it all month long here on "The Journey with Grace" with mom-centric posts at least once weekly. Enjoy. And: Thanks to all who came out yesterday for Grace's third spring art show. It was a tremendous success. The exhibit hangs through end end of May 30.

Photo credits: Massood Taj, taken November, 2011, the debut of our book, From Heartache to Hope: Middle Tennessee Families Living with Autism. He caught me crossing the room with a stack of bags for book buyers. Grace photo by book collaborator and special needs certified photographer Rebekah Pope.

GraceArt: Green Hills Library, Conclusion of Our Spring Art Show Blitz (Whew!)

Grand tally: About 2,500 miles, nearly 40 hours driving and $700 worth of fossil fuels were logged, totaled and consumed by yours truly with a sidekick or two, sometimes including Grace, during April. How that went down: the last day of March, I hung GraceArt: Grace Walker Goad ~ The Art of Autism at Hot & Cold. The next day, April 1, I headed for an overnight in Chatty Town before delivering a show of GraceArt to the McMinn County Living Heritage Museum. The next weekend was Easter and Grace and I trekked to my Carolina homeplace for a long weekend. On Thursday, April 5, the Hot & Cold show opened with the Hillsboro Village First Thursday Art Walk. It was the night of a Nashville spring monsoon. The heavens opened up just as I left the condo. I hugged the wet shoulders of the most die-hard of my friends and art-loving and Grace & Leisa-supporting acquaintances that crossed Hot & Cold's threshold that night. The next weekend we went back to the Museum in the college town of Athens, Tenn., for a reception on April 14. We had one weekend home that month, April 20-22, and we immersed ourselves blissfully at the Nashville Film Festival. More coming on two particular films and filmmakers that captured my heart.

Concluding the month of travel, trip number four started on April 27 with another night in Chattanooga. (Love that once scruffy now artsy lil' city! Check out their waterfront redo. Tremendous!) And then on to Athens to collect GraceArt and return to Nashville. That Sunday, a friend and I took down the Hot & Cold shown delivered the eight foot mural across town to its' happy new owner. Then two days later said friend and I hung in the Green Hills Library's art gallery about 25 pieces, combining the work from the Athens show and the work that did not sell in the April Hot & Cold show.

You're invited to this free and open-to-the public show during library hours. Note they are closed on Fridays. Just head straight back from the entrance and hang left across from the children's library.  On Sunday, May 20, from 2 to 4:30 p.m., we'll be serving some lite (sic) refreshments and have some special musical entertainment. Massood Taj of Full Circle Art will be providing his lovely and uniquely delivered "world music" and Micah Elliott, a talented young man with autism will also deliver a solo dulcimer performance. The exhibit will hang through the end of May and concludes our (my) mind-blowing (interpret crazy) blitz of spring art shows. (I'm tired!)

Grace will be in a show in Seattle before year's end at the gallery representing her there--HeART of the Spectrum Art Center in Pioneer Square as well as the annual Mayor's exhibit at the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center.  I look forward to collaborating next year, too, with VKC and Debbie Hosseini whose third Art of Autism book was released last month. Grace is featured and I'll be writing more about her experience with the book and the book, itself, soon.

See you at the Green Hills library show! See unique art created with difference and passion. And, support a young person with autism. We'll also have the new GraceArt NoteCard Series II, to which I added an additional image.

That image is "Leafman," bottom left, above. The acrylic on canvas original is owned by the former CFO of Vanderbilt Children's. Grace recently sold a giclee print on canvas of the work to a local physician. The image to its' right is Mixed Media IV, canvas. Top row, left to right is "Blue Face," mixed media on paper and Untitled Yellow and Green, acrylic on canvas. This GraceArt photo collage, above, features her green and blues works, whereas she has many featuring pinks, purples and yellows. Come see for yourself! All are for sale.

The Long Haul

Admittedly, I'm tunnel visioned. I only have one child. She is not "neurotypical." Yet, I'm able to imagine that what I'm about to communicate here could apply to parents who have children without disAbilities. And that is, it's not a sprint. It's a marathon--this thing I'm doing, we're doing, so many of us--this thing called raising a child.

Photo: Centennial Park, Dumb Phone, 2010-11; copyright, LeisaHammett.com

From my perspective--not to lessen the challenges of raising any child--it looks to be a sprint to the finishing line when one has a child without disAbilities. They are born. They go to school. They graduate. "The days are long but the years are short," aptly writes Gretchen Rubin in her New York Times Best-selling book The Happiness Project. They go to college, maybe, and, they leave home--maybe. Eventually. Of course this is all myopic, again, eliminating the fact that we all have struggles. No one lives life free of some sort of challenge or hurdle, especially raising a child.

I typically resist war analogies because I believe how I perceive this journey is about the attitude I choose. My preference is to travel the path of least resistance and peace when possible. But, often, passivism must transform into activism to gain equal access for people with disAbilities. And, the reality of the journey is that most of us must fight nearly every step of the journey. Too frequently we must battle for the smallest rights about which others Americans do not think twice. We are not always welcomed in public and private classrooms, heart-breakingly in faith communities, and, in the general community. I realized this mere months into our our journey. Grace was refused admission into preschool at the Baptist church where she had attended Mother’s Day Out the previous year. She was diagnosed with autism midway into the year and was still not toilet trained. I still recall crouching down before the table face to face with the director, a line of registering parents behind me. My voice began to raise and escalate in pitch, as I questioned what I was hearing, confused, my eyes stinging and brimming with pregnant tears. Welcome to the Journey, Leisa. DisAbility Rejection, 101.

By law, public schools must serve our special needs children. I am pro-public school, but I wish I simply had the choice of private schooling. It's about having a choice--the freedom to choose. And while there are some private schools that focus on students with learning differences, there is, where I live, a strata of qualification, and it doesn't feel too great not to make the cut or to be unable, even, to converse at any length with an admissions counselor.

The lot of us special needs parents navigating the public school systems across America know that we are often told to go down the hall to a segregated classroom, or to another school that handles children "like that." And, yes, I know an elementary school principal who once said "like that." Even within the more accommodating schools, many of us must seek the teachers who are the most "disAbility friendly." Sometimes it's akin to choosing the lesser of two evils. Rise to middle school and then said parent has to pick and choose a number of teachers. Then there's the issue of finding the appropriate paraprofessional. I have become an extension of the Human Resources department, years ago learning I must recruit my own personnel for this extremely important position and not rely on whomever HR can dredge for the lowest paid position within the entire school system. Enter high school, and in our system, the challenge is finding classes where my daughter can meaningfully participate and learn alongside typically developing peers. And then, watching in disgust and protest, our system tears down and eliminates programs and classes such as culinary arts and cosmetology where she and others with more severe levels of disAbility had the greatest chances of learning alongside their typically developing peers.

After graduation my daughter will enter a period of community-based transition until she is 22, still within the school system. And then there will be some more governmental job training supports. It sounds good, and I am particularly grateful for the transition program. It's One. Thing. Our school system does well. But it's very patchy afterwards. And just when I see parents around me letting out a collective sigh of relief, I'm steeling myself for greater demands and peering over the cliff at a huge Unknown. Yes, my contemporaries are also seeing an unknown course in some ways. Who knows the future? But there's a little more of a road map for my peers. There are some bread crumbs left on the path for us from those who've engineered a way before us. I take those and sup gratefully, but I still face wandering a darkened path, needing more light, more, choices, more hope, more support.

This journey with my differently abled child was never a sprint to adulthood. No. It was, it is, a marathon.

Mother-Daughter Dance

Weave in. Weave out. Delicate at times. Boisterous and rocking and raucous at others, this dance of mother-daughter. The same child-turned young woman who locked me in my bedroom last night in some sort of weird, unspoken developmentally delayed adolescent anti-authoritarian protest. The same girl on the cusp of 18 is now curled up beside me in my bed. On the last day of this long holiday weekend, she has come into my bedroom for a visit, all fresh-faced, renewed for her restorative blanket of last night's sleep. We rub noses. I kiss her sweet peachy-fresh forehead. She caresses my cheek with the back of her small hand, looking into my eyes with goo-goo love eyes of her own. They are old soul eyes that communicate what her autism-wired brain and tongue cannot.

About the door, well, she didn't realize that it was lockable from the inside. And, so, I could get out. I had again asked her not to lock her own bedroom door because if I needed to get in, if she got sick or couldn't remember quickly how to unlock it, I didn't have a key to help her out quickly. So, apparently, after I'd crawled beneath my own covers, she'd thought she'd show me and went through the condo closing and locking interior doors.

We are dancing a dance, mother, daughter. In difficult moments, sometimes in a day of those moments it almost borders on love-hate. Stretch and collapse. Push and pull. Me: Stop, wait. Give, take. We're still learning some of the steps to these complex rhythms of growing up with these challenges of disAbility. Some of them haven't even been invented. We'll have to be our own choreographers for many of them.

Her life is much different than that of her typically developing peers. Most give her no mind. I am hoping that they, too, will mature and come back around and remember she needs their friendship just as they could use hers as well. Like them she is leaning into the boundaries. Like their mothers I must give her enough rope, enough freedom and heapings of love, acceptance and compassion. For some of us, we have to make up those steps, too, if we didn't get the right instruction or enough of  it in the homes of our own long-gone youth.

Step. One. Two. Step. One. Two. Dip. Twirl. Repeat.

The band of life plays on.

And on the mother-daughter dance continues.

Photos: Bill Bangham (Father of Click); Edwin Warner Park, 2003; Frist Center for the Visual Arts, 2012

Sisters Unite!

So, this event was Saturday and while many of my admirable, courageous sisters--whom I hold in highest esteem--were down at the capitol, I was driving back from Athens, Tenn., taking down the first of two GraceArt shows dismantled this weekend. But, the solidarity to keep Republicans from taking Women's Rights back 40 years did not and will not end with Saturday's demonstration. Gratefully, a critical mass--what looks to be a tipping point--of American women are waking up (if they had not already) to what's at stake with politicians who leave our gender out of discussions about reproductive and other vital health care rights.  Too late. The tide of public sentiment has turned. Young are uniting with Old. Just know: #WeWillNotBeSilenced!

Age is Just a Number

Today is the 74th birthday of my friend, spiritual mentor and companion, Rev. Dr. David Kenneth Wheaton, Ph.D. But, no bother. He's not big on numbers because he's "not a number." Ken, rather, is 74-years-young.

As we spend time together in public I am amazed, to put it nicely, the parallels of his public perception with that of Grace's. As Grace grows older, she seems to attract more attention. Children with autism can be easy to ignore after a bit. They are children sometimes acting weirdly. But an adult young woman acting rather strangely? Well, that's a curiosity. Being a member of the second oldest profession in the world (some argue that it's the first)--no, I'm not talking prostitution but promotion--I readily promote my daughter's art (or any cause or thing about which I'm passionate. Noticed? Ha!) So, I've been intrigued to watch people's jaws drop when they try to correlate the visual experience of my hyper-active, mostly non-verbal, often wacky-acting daughter with autism with the art she creates and is exhibiting in six shows this year. (I'm adding in the Hillsboro High School and the Mayor’s Advisory Committee for People with Disabilities exhibit at Vanderbilt Kennedy Center.)

Likewise, when people view Ken as a chronological number, I like to shock them out of their inside-the-box, categorical, stereotype-thinking and inform them that he awakens at four a.m. each morning to mediate for two hours, runs two miles thereafter and practice advanced yoga. (Like, full lotus over his head kind of advanced.) He also runs 5-K's for charity and is a former body builder and is still building body mass. (Age is just a number.)

If you wish to read more about the most fascinating man I've ever met in my life, you can visit his site, Journey with a Modern Mystic where you'll find a free PDF download of his epononmously named book and You Tube videos of each chapter. In addition to being a former prison chaplain, social justice activist, and university professor, Ken is a former yoga teacher, has lived as a Tao hermit and is shamanically trained.

Remember: Age is Just A Number. And Autism? It's not always what you think! And in the end? There is a special spirit in a human body within the each of us that is called One. When we see the beauty and amazing in one of us, we have the opportunity to really know it and embrace it within ourselves. 

Join me in breaking outside the box. It's liberating.

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photo: Kristen M. Chipman (Kristen literally came running up to Ken and I during a walk at Radnor Lake. Intimidating professional honker-of-a-camera in hand, she pleaded "Can, I please take your picture?" She wasn't talking to me. She had a photographer's eagle-eye for interesting subject matter.)

Resurrection

 

 

"Happy Resurrection from Fear to Love, from grief to joy,

from ego to Field, from separation to Unity. You are Loved

and kept in the Light."

This email from my beloved spiritual teacher greeted me this Easter morning. I wanted to share it's loveliness with you, dear readers. And these Tennessee Redbuds! Aren't they lovely, too? For me, they are one of the joys of springtime in Tennessee. They start out as small, orchid, multi-petaled flowers budding and lining the slender limbs of these small-in-stature trees that line highways and roadsides. They follow the Bradford Pears' burst into white, voluminous blooms. Then, trailing the Redbuds are the cherry tree blossoms ranging from milky to girly-girl pink. Together, they sing amid the heavenly backdrop of a spring-blue sky, creating a cacophony of soul-joyous color for about a week or so. When our uncommon "sprinter" melted into the premature warmth of summer last month, their flowers all arrived a month early. Then all of the sudden, the flowers of the Redbuds disappeared and in their place, one day, these tiny garnet leaves budded jewel-like themselves when shot with a ray of sweet, golden sun. Glory. Glory.

The Easter/Passover holiday for us has been soulfully sweet. Hope so for you too. Eh? 

Spring Break & Looking Ahead on JWG

 

No foolin,' today's the first day of April and the weather here and for almost all of March has been more like summer than spring. And then, there was winter, which failed to deliver much of a chill, giving us instead sprinter. Nontheless, I'm breaking here on The Journey with Grace for Spring. Actually, the blog will run it's summer abbreviated schedule Tuesday and Thursday. By the time this blog post publishes, one GraceArt exhibit will have been hung and another will be hung tommorrow.

April is Autism Awareness Month so Wednesday after break will continue the weekly Autism/DisAbility on Wednesdays. As of plans now, Fridays, during April, will focus on "Artism" in honor of AAM. It's also Earth month. Look for a special Mondays feature remembering Mother Nature. Plans now are to share sharing a film series with you that I recently watched yet again and about which I've been passionate for nearly 30 years.

For May, The Journey with Grace will feature a theme on Mondays and Wednesdays--as planned now--of Motherhood. And June? Well, it's my birthday month. And while I think about age every month, I'll be talking about it on the blog. Mostly positive talk about celebration and women's esteem. I will not embrace negative stereotypes of aging! And, I hope that you won't either!

If you celebrate it--Happy Easter! And if you're breaking also--have a good one. Life is Good!

Weekend spring sunset at Radnor Lake, Leisa A. Hammett, Droid-ography.

The Why of Resistance

"Why?" Two friends and I have asked on multiple occasions during separate gatherings with each other:  We know that our spirtual practices of yoga, meditation and journaling--throw in walking in nature, etc.--serve us greatly. They help keep us clear, stable, emotionally fueled. But why have we, during periods in our lives, resisted them?

My Saturday and Sunday mornings these days are dedicated to meditative reading, journaling and meditation. And recently, I had a small breakthrough revelation. I find it very easy to let the morning go by checking Facebook and emails, etc., especially when Grace is here with me versus with her father. Before I know it, the morning’s gone, I must get up and go and there went my practices, my solitude, my Me time, my spiritual-emotional refueling.

 

 

That recent morning, I knew I needed to buckle down and read a little and meditate and journal. I would start and then stop, get up and then comeback. I did this about three times. And then finally, I made myself start again. And that's when the reward came. I gained some peace about an incident four days earlier, one that had left my inner world periodically agitated. And, then, also about an evening out with a few professionals in my field that triggered something in me. And then, the same morning, during my meditation, the words came that inspired a future blog post here on "The Journey with Grace."

And then, I got it. It’s about the Ego. The Ego does not want us to change. It wants us to stay down in our pain, wallowing around in what does not serve us. I do not understand all of the reasons for this yet, but I am getting more clear on the detrimental ways of the Ego. It is the Ego that wants us, encourages us to not do these things that help us get clear and quiet and transport us to our truths. Our ego wants us to stay in the dark….

For many years I’ve wondered about this resistance. For four years, I lost connection with my meditation practice. I was confused about an important issue in my life and I could not get clear. I didn’t connect through meditation because I was so disconnected from my spiritual truth and center. As I have written in past posts, I am at peace with that now, especially knowing that that blip in my life was necessary for my spiritual evolution.

For that, I am grateFULL….Practices. They strengthen us. They keep us centered and connected to Source. And that, too, is why they are called disciplines. Reward...comes with discipline. And, in the words of my spiritual teacher:

"Easy. Goes. Nowhere."

Photo: Leisa A. Hammett, copyrighted. San Juan Islands, WA.