every time I think of you...

We've had this crazy wind that picked up around 3 am and my eyes are tearing up.  There's all this silty grit in the air.  

I'm righting fallen umbrellas, shoving uprooted cornstalks back into disinterested, dried out soil, salvaging the wind-torn garden.  Next I'll dive in the pool and drag out the mess of palm prongs floating like dead men over the now placid, blue surface.

We get these Santa Ana winds blowing from our deserts every now and again.

I wipe my teary eyes and she walks away from me.

Why do I feel so emotional about my daughter?  

Why is she the ticket to my insides?

What did I do to deserve her and all the hardships, guilt-trips, sleepless nights of worry and hours of blessed wonder, why me with all these gifts hidden beneath tiny disasters which she's brought into my life?

I remember when she was four years old and her pre-school teacher told me that something was wrong with her.

Every ounce of me wished that woman ill.  

Denial is a lovely and powerful thing.

Then later when others proved there was something wrong with her, I took it upon myself to prove there was something right with everything about her.

I won.

All I have to do is look at her and my eyes feel as though the Santa Ana winds are kicking up.

Everything she does, she does well or not at all.

And there are plenty of "not at alls".  

She's no joiner, my daughter.

The idea of changing out of clothes and into a swimsuit was enough to make her nearly skip taking the place she earned on the high school swim team.

But she worked beyond nudity and the rest of it.

Now she walks from her solitary space on the bleachers at swim meets to the platform she jumps from with relative ease, or so one would think, but I know better or maybe only I know her period.

There is no relative ease about her life.

"Who is that kid?", one coach asks the other.   "I don't know, but she's killing it".

'She's my little girl', I want to say, but like her, I find myself quiet...

Every sentence she speaks in public is an effort.

Every fragile friendship she makes will eventually evaporate, like the blue water in our dead man pool, after a Santa Ana windstorm.

I remember the first moment I was certain I mattered to her.  

I'd gone away over night, semi reluctantly and she'd stayed with my mother.

In the morning, I walked into my mother's pine paneled living room to find my daughter, in purple corduroy overalls, watching out the window instead of watching Elmo on TV.   She turned to look at me and came to hug me, repeatedly.  I held her in my arms and she'd bury her face in my neck then pull back to look at me, bury her face, pull back.  Not long after she said, "the mommy person came back..."

I was delightedly offended, moved and appalled.  

Even when she was inside of me, she felt like a separate entity and I can rarely get close enough.

Yet, I get so emotional - over her... 

She goes to Saturday school to raise her steady A to an A plus.

She doesn't need a "talking to" ever.

She needs someone to talk to, but they don't exist.  

I do though.

And I won.

She talks to me and I listen as hard as I can.

And I'd listen forever, because whatever I don't have or can't find is nothing compared to what I was given.

It's a long road, raising a daughter on your own is, but raising a daughter with Asperger's is a different road.  It's a trip...

It's a long and lonely and exhausting avenue, which leads to an open road, if you stay on it long enough.

Recently we moved.

I have 93 pairs of various footwear.

I counted.

93 pair of shoes.  

I'm sorry.

I'm greedy.

She has 6 pair of shoes and three of them are converse.  Two high tops.

She only can handle six pair of shoes.

Seven makes zero sense to her.

Everything she does is beautiful, to me.

Everything I take in, moves me to tears, when it involves her.

I get so emotional.

When I was in labor with her, I was expecting a boy, a big boy

but when she finally appeared, the doctor said,

"you have a little girl, I mean a really little girl."

5 lbs 13 oz

I get so emotional.

Thank heaven for little, little girls.