The Wind is Whistling Today

My phone vibrates. A picture of an owl sitting on a ladder fills my phone screen.

I sit, staring at my phone. The text above it reads.

-it’s minus 40 here, plus the wind chill

The image and the words completely disconnected.

-cute owl

I text back. I watch the three little dots bouncing, indicating that there is another text coming in.

-yup

I send her another video of the wind whistling in the trees.

These texts are emblematic of the way I’ve learned to communicate with my mother. When I was younger, I’d talk with her and tell her stories about my day and I could tell that she wasn’t listening. I’d watch her eye glaze over, and she’d nod her head, and it was as if I was talking to myself. Sometimes I’d ask her where she was. Oblivion, I’m staring into oblivion, she’d say.

As a child, I’d take it personally. I would stop talking to her for days. I stopped hugging her when I was six years old. I would instead read books about loving families who went on adventures together. The families would ride horses, examine the world together, and I didn’t understand. That’s not what families did. They sat in silence. They ignored one another.

I remember being 3 years old, sitting in the corner holding my pencil awkwardly, teaching myself to scrawl letters while my mother breastfed my brother. They seemed peaceful together.

I was filled with latent rage. I fought with the boys at school, getting reprimanded daily for not being “lady-like”. My parents didn’t care. My mother focused on my brother and treated me like a poltergeist as I destroyed my room over and over, broke plates, threw things, tried everything to get her attention. But I was just an angry ghost.

When we moved when I was 7, I continued to get into fights every day. I came home bruised, and proud that I had learned to engage with people. My mother wouldn’t react. I was invisible.

The other children called me alien. They made fun of the way I held my pen. They didn’t like that I brought my dinosaur toys to school each day. They seemed afraid of how much I knew about palaeontology. My mother got fired from the school she worked at. The school I went to. For having a meltdown in class. I was always in the principal’s office for swearing loudly at the children who would approach me to hurt me with their fists.

I made a few friends. I was adopted by loners and outsiders. They loved how much I knew about dinosaurs. Sometimes I would ask them to draw me pictures of stegosauruses and ankylosaurs. I put them up on my wall. My mother would say nice things about the pictures the other children drew. I couldn’t draw. I felt hurt that her compliments were never for me.

While on vacation I met a boy my age who drew pictures so beautiful I knew that I wanted to marry him. We were 11. We would write letters back and forth. He would send me his drawings and always apologize for taking so long to write. Sometimes there would be two weeks between letters. Time seemed infinite then, and this heartfelt communication, was a gift. We were like two brains, talking to each other from different planets. He eventually broke up with me to move on to dating “real girls”.

I starting working early. I sat at the convenience store on a stool behind the counter and learned to socialize from my customers. I learned to laugh at their jokes. I learned to make eye contact. Between books and the folks who frequented the store, I began to warm up, and realized that people liked my stories. I continued to tell them. I made people laugh.

I watched movies. Romantic comedies. Family dramas. I was like an extra-terrestrial gathering knowledge. I especially liked to watch movies where people hugged each other.

I made enough money to get out of town. I went to university. The campus radio station was looking for volunteers. I was longing for a community. I became a radio DJ, I talked into the void, and didn’t care if no one was listening. I learned to make my voice warm, so that when I heard it in my headphones it was comforting, even to me.

My listeners would call me, tell me how my voice in their heads made a difference. They would write me to tell me that my warmth made them feel less lonely.

I fell in love again. Sort of. I was good at attracting people, but terrible at the follow through. What was I supposed to do when someone told me they found me fascinating. I felt like a robot, an imposter of a human. I was mimicking the way the people around me acted. I kissed, but felt nothing. I shied away from other physical contact, not knowing what the protocols were.

My life felt gently disquieting, like I was living an unsolved puzzle.

At 33 I got my first smart phone.

My mother got hers at the same time.

I sent her my phone number.

I stared daily at the screen. My friends would text. I would respond with words. So many words. My friends would laugh at my need to punctuate, and would tell me that phones were not for “walls of text”. I missed writing letters.

One day she sent me a text.

It was a video of the wind whistling in the trees.

I sent a video back. A leaf falling to the ground.

The next day she sent me a video of the river flowing.

I responded with a red-winged black bird singing.

After three weeks of purely visual communication, I sent my mother a text.

-“I love you” written on a piece of paper

I received a response , two days later, of a rock with a heart on it.

I cried.

Years later, both my mother and I were diagnosed as autistic humans.

We learned to hug that year at Christmas.

We still send each other pictures, and videos. Sometimes I send her flowery words knowing they don’t mean anything to her.

Sometimes she sends me disconnected thoughts, or thinks I’m google and wants me to tell her how to boil noodles. I respond with the answer.

I love my mom. She loves me. It just doesn’t look like it does in the movies. It looks like rocks with hearts, and the wind whistling in the trees.