What About Marcus

My fifteen year old son, JT, ran cross-country last year as a freshman. He fared well for his first year. He wasn't the fastest runner but he medaled in each race. His last race was his best in which he came in tenth out of 150. He was always proud of his medals. He was proud because he learned early in the season that no medal came easy. It took training, sweat, a lot of pain and most of all heart before that medal, even if it wasn't first place, was won.

JT's lesson definitely has its application in our life with my autistic son, Marcus. You see, since January of this year, Marcus has lived in a small family home. In so many ways, Jt's medals symbolize this change in our home . My other three children get the attention from me they need. Everyone in our home is safe. And most importantly, Marcus is safe. So yes, his move has been good for the family and for him but we all have gone through lots of training, pain, and sweat. And most of all, the strength of our hearts has been tested.

I have started a blog on Marcus so many times over the last several months. Invariably, each ends up as a draft in the margins of the page. It has been a grieving process to go against my belief system and my heart and deliver my son over to strangers so that they can care for and save him when I cannot. But several months have gone by and it is time to share and tell more about Marcus and me because this is the promise I have made.

One Saturday afternoon in June when Marcus was ten, he had his first violent fit. We didn't see it coming. My fiance was over, my other three kids were milling around the house. Marcus was doing his usual pacing, and flipping of a sock, (his favorite "stim"). I sat on the couch in my small living room watching him pace. It happened just like that, without warning. He started screaming at the top of his lungs like someone had stabbed him. His scream was loud and desperate. He began jumping with both feet hard on the floor. I jumped up and yelled "Marcus stop!" He didn't and couldn't. He screamed and this time, he ran across the room and crashed into the wall. My fiance was in the room by this time, and he yelled for him to stop. Marcus was about 75 lbs. at this time and about 57 inches tall. But he seemed to have mythical strength for a kid his age. For me, his aggression was more than frightening. He screamed again and this time began banging the sides of his head with his balled fists with all his might. This is when my fiance and I grabbed him and forced him to the floor on his back to protect him from serious injury. He screamed again. I remember looking into his eyes and seeing the helpless, vacant glare he had. I kept asking, "What's wrong sweetie, what's wrong!" I wanted to fix that stare and stop his screams that were so desperate, and his movements, so unabated in their force.

This scene would repeat itself many times over the next three years. As Marcus grew, his strength increased. The fits became increasingly more difficult to control. It also marked the genesis of a heart wrenching ride into prescription medications. Risperdal and clonidine were Marcus' only medications up to that point. But they seemed to have lost their effectiveness, especially with the onset of Marcus' fits. Many doctor appointments where trial and error was the medical code of conduct never seemed to balance Marcus' behavior for any significant amount of time. Worst of all was the unforseen side-effects of the wrong medication or dose.

911 calls. Hospital visits. All night stays in emergency rooms is the short list of what ensued before our family got enough attention from the medical profession and our local agency to get permanent help for my son and for our family.

We see Marcus each weekend now. We are working up to overnight visits. Right now he is quite content, after a few hours with the family, to go back to his small family home. So we are taking it slow. There is no conclusion to this blog because Marcus' story is ongoing but I will say that for now we feel like we 've won a medal, maybe not first place, (what's that? - to be healed of Autism?) but certainly a medal that sees Marcus and the rest of our family safe and healthy.

Why I Write

One escape that brought healing and developed me as a writer came from the weekly routine of going to church – without my parents. I would wake up at eight in the morning, and be dressed and ready for church by nine. I would walk down the hallway, counting eleven steps to the end of the plastic runner. I would turn right, and walk four more steps down the short hallway to my parent’s bedroom door. I’d knock three times. At the door, I always obeyed the demand of the air force sergeant who was my father that I must ask for a ride to church every Sunday or I wouldn’t be able to go. My request every Sunday was, “Daddy, may I have a ride to church?”

Of course I was unable to know the impact of Sunday school in those days except that it gave me a feeling of independence from my parents for the short time I was within its walls. Now, as an adult, I know my love for the poetry and music of words was honed from reading the King James Bible. The questions of why we exist and how do we exist kept me searching and questioning for the best way to live. The metaphors, paradoxes, parables that explained these questions formed my analytical skills. The Bible’s story about the origin of sin, its symbolism of darkness and light, its insistence that there was a God that both loved me and would kill me if I misbehaved provided the foundations of the narrative I strive to complete now. Although I was at once terrified, confused and intrigued by this famous book, I gleaned from those early Sunday school classes that life has a larger meaning than what I could see in my immediate, often painful existence. It gave me hope. I began to breathe in a philosophy that life was to be lived out as truthfully and as honestly as possible. I concluded that truth comes through seeking, reflecting, and chasing it.

With that said, my personal search brings me to the realization that my narratives must explore the journey to truth. Whether it be the truth about the African-American woman’s fight to selfhood. Whether it be the truth about breaking generational curses. Perhaps it is the truth that man limits and destroys God’s plan that this earth’s bounty should benefit all mankind, and our common spiritual inheritance is that we were all created to have dominion over the earth, including the African American. I want to write how we all are part of a larger narrative where one decade – or fifty decades – cannot crush the human capacity to live fully and truthfully. Of course, as I explore these positions and possibilities through writing, I expand my own boundaries and lift the psychological limitations that were placed upon me. This journey, this narrative, is my experiment to prove that Jeremiah 1:1 is gospel. God told Jeremiah, who doubted his own purpose and authority over Judah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” The beauty and irony of this is, of course, I control the narrative.