...the summer people...

Summer is coming.

It's wafting in through the open window, mingling with the alternating damp and wind of early spring.  I can smell it in the green; those precocious little buds pushing up through the dust of last autumn's leaves.  

It's coming.

Slowly.

Hesitantly.

Not sure if it's allowed to return quite yet, or if winter still has something left to say.

Summer is coming...

...and I am waiting...

Waiting, as I do every year, since school began in earnest (not counting his special-needs preschool years) for my son...waiting for summer to bring us back to ourselves.

Because it's only ever summer when we are ourselves.  When he is not a rigid, fragile shell-casing around jangled nerves and stress.  When I am not reactive, reactionary...bouncing  from defensive to offensive and back again with every day's deluge of school-based and societal-expectation-related melodrama.  It's summer when we are free of the rules and the rule-makers.  Free of the stigmas and the standards; from the always-impossible to placate and suit and satisfy.  Free from the empty worth of what other people need and want and think.

It's summer when he relaxes his shoulders and his people-pleasing-perfection and just...is.

It's summer when his smile crinkles up all the way to the corners of his eyes; when his laugh has life.

And it is summer when his being himself, means I am able to be myself.  When the backyard is once again thick with conspiratorial whispers and riotous laughter as we soak in the sunlight.  When, for that brief handful of months, every day is an adventure to create.  When from morning to night, and sometimes long past the stars' first twinkle, everything comes easily and lightly...no longer hampered by the weight of the world.

It is summer when his ownership of self empowers my own, and we drop the burden of insecurities and doubts.  It is summer when we neither of us have to bother with the fitting-in and blending-in.

Perhaps it's simply that we, he and I, are both solar-powered.
Perhaps it's as simple as apply warm weather to activate.

Or...not.

Those summer people are, because they don't have to be.
  They don't have to be appropriate or compliant.  They don't have to watch their tone or mask over any external demonstration of internal responses.  They don't have to make eye contact or use inside voices.  They don't have to respond at all, if they don't want to.

The summer people just...are.

It's not the sun that does it.  Or the warmth.  Or the saltwater.
It's the freedom from school.
Honestly.
Freedom, from school, for both of us.

Freedom, for him, from the masking that school demands of him.  Freedom from the soul-sucking daily grind of faking neuro-typicality.
Freedom, for me, from the constant battle to retain services and force staff and students to respect his boundaries.  Freedom from having to watch my words and watch their actions.
Freedom from the conformist-churn-out that is the public school system.

And, if I dig deeper...
It's the freedom from people.
Freedom from people we wouldn't choose to let in, if there were a choice to make.
Freedom from people who can't accept what they don't understand.
Freedom from people who think that he and I should be more like them.

It's the freedom to be ourselves.
Uniquely so.
All the faults and all the feelings and all the foibles...
Uniquely ours.
Felt, wholly.  Acknowledged, completely. Acted on, entirely.

The summer people are healthier.  Their skin golden in the sunlight.  The bloom of health across their cheeks.  They smell of forest trails and saltwater.  Their clothing is stained with grass, or dirt, or drips from popsicles. Their fingertips are wildly colored with ink and paint.  There are scabs on their knees and calves, from biking spills and wave-riding.  Their pockets are full of seaglass or shells or knobby little rocks.

The summer people are healthier.  They smile, genuinely, when they are happy.  They laugh at things found silly; loudly, outrageously, with no thought to who might be listening.  They argue, loudly, with no regard for the solidarity and  "maintaining the team" that they have to rely on the rest of the year.  Sometimes they encourage one another...the "go for it", "just try", "you can do it" of challenge...sometimes they don't bother...sometimes they know not to.  They know the limits and they know their capacities. They go all the way to the edge, but don't jump off.

They are our very best selves.

I think of them, now...those summer people.  I feel them below the surface as spring begins to take root.  And I find myself growing frantic with impatience, feeling so close to a freedom that is still months away.

I know he does, too.
I see it in the sparkle that flashes in his eyes quickly on a sunny afternoon.  I feel it in the pull of his hand as we walk, briskly, in the breezes and talk of plans to come.  I hear it in the frustration and exhaustion of his plaintive whimper when the school-day has wrung him out, top to toe.

They are just as eager for us as we are for them, I think.

And the window is open...the spring breezes rushing into all the nooks and crannies and dusting off the unused bits and pieces of us.  Fresh air a promise of things to come.
The window is open, and I am impatient...hoping they'll arrive early...trying to clear room for them in the day to day of now, when we must still be the fettered-versions of functionality.
The window is open, and they visit occasionally. Taking us out for a spin. Checking to make sure all the parts are in good working order.  They took us to the trails this weekend...ran us through our paces, hiking and biking and communing with waterfalls and waves.  We began to shift...trading suitable for self-assured, and on-alert for at-ease.

But Monday came.
And school came.
And he put his armor back on, and helped me into mine.
It chafes.  It pinches. It restricts. It silences.
It kills creativity and diversity.
It makes of us automatons.

Summer is coming, though.  Spring has promised it.
The summer people will shed off school and society and supposition like so much battered armor, and come back home.

~Leanna