Falling Back

Jenny Shank

8 a.m.

It's the morning after we've moved the clocks forward for daylight saving time during the year my son Sam is ten. At eight a.m., which feels like seven, I wake Sam to go to see Dedee, the reading tutor he's worked with for three years. He's grouchy at me. He doesn't want to go to Dedee's and he doesn’t want to go to Sunday school either, but I insist. He's bringing the snack. He yells, "You're a big, running-around ass with tiny legs." It's hard not to laugh but I hold it in, because he's taken care to choose the precise combination of words that show the ferocity of his anger. He has sensory processing disorder and dyspraxia, and he needs me to give him leeway, because transitions are hard.

We go to Dedee's condo. She's in her seventies and has seen all the literacy fads come and go—phonics, whole language, sight words. She knows what works. At her round dining room table, surrounded by books, reading highlighters, and whiteboards, she's built Sam up to reading at grade level and kept him there.

Then we go to Sunday school, even though Sam is now an avowed atheist. He'll finish all the kid sacraments this spring, so next year I'll let him quit. When I asked him about his day-long

confirmation retreat he said, "All we did was pray the Rosemary. It was all these Hail Marys and it was boring as hell."

I'm doing Pascal's wager from Pensées, basically, with my son—nobody knows if God exists but it makes sense to bet on it, given the potential reward. We get to Sunday school a few minutes late and the kids cheer when they see him arrive with the snack. At the very least we can fulfill our promises to others.

1 p.m.

In the afternoon, we drive to Target to look for sandals for Sam. We're going to visit the Great Sand Dunes during spring break. Before the first time Sam visited this national park when he was six, he asked, "Does it have big piles of sand that you can't even resist?" He wanted to love it as much as he thought he would, but the wind threw sand in his face, and hot sand scratched his feet so much, he couldn't enjoy himself. So we're trying again, more prepared this time. At Target, we run into a boy he knows from school and Scouts. "Are you getting ready to go to Noah's party?" he asks, holding up the large orange Nerf gun he selected for Noah.

His mom looks pained he's asked this, although it's perfectly sweet and innocent for him to assume Sam would have been invited. I like this mom, a tall, outdoorsy obstetrician with one crooked tooth, so I change the subject to spare everyone, and talk about the Sand Dunes.

I plan to leave the subject dropped, but after we walk away, Sam talks to me about how Noah didn't invite him to his party. In November, Sam had a big birthday celebration at a parkour gym called Apex—he invited twelve kids, including Noah—a chance to spark friendships, I'd hoped. Since then, Sam hasn't been invited to a single party. Sam claims Noah is copying him, having his party at Apex. Earlier this year, Aiden, another kid Sam invited to Apex, told him his dad wouldn't let him invite Sam to his own party because he was "too weird." Sam

hasn't been invited to a single friend's house this entire year. I used to email and call and chat and try to arrange things. But then I got tired of extending invitations parents would reject or ignore. They don't like my son. Even if they have valid reasons for their distaste, I don't care. I don't like them. I cut them out of my heart.

I rarely make friends among the mothers of his classmates. Screw the normals, I think. Most of the friends I've made since I was twenty are writers, confessed broken losers. Everyone is broken, but I don't like people who can't perceive or admit this. I don't like people who project a fear of deviation, who don't allow unusual kids near for fear this rogue asteroid will upset their child's orbit. Parents like this haven't learned, yet, how little is under their control. Sam spends most of his free time in his room or riding his bike around the neighborhood. Many kids with dyspraxia never learn to balance on a bike, so I'm thankful that Sam is a skilled cyclist, zipping anywhere he wants to go.

At Target, after we learn about Noah's birthday snub, I just want to buy Sam things. It's probably not the best idea, but it's what I can do. I buy him pairs of flipflops and water shoes, two pairs of pants—he only wears synthetic sports pants with elastic waists, fulfilling the fourth-grade dream of tracksuit life. I ask him if he wants anything else. He asks for gum and I say yes. Then he ups the ante and asks for the most expensive gum, the cube-shaped kind that comes in a little bottle. I say yes and tell him to get one for his older sister, too, to try to be even.

6 p.m.

That evening, Sam and I work on piano together for 20 minutes. We read. I get him to make an attempt at a poem for the Longmont Dairy cow poetry contest. He never wins, but we get a free bottle of chocolate milk for entering. His sister won second place one year and got

twenty bucks and her poem in the newsletter. She's good at so many things—school, sports, music, friends. I'm still trying to find something Sam can be good at.

With vinegar and a toothbrush, I clean the humidifier he uses every night. He likes the air in his room moist, like a jungle, even in the chill of winter.

I can't provide him with a single friend, but I can eliminate the pink slime that accumulates in the humidifier's basin. Perhaps we must live in sadness, but we don't have to live in filth and disorder. I can make his lunch. I can set out his clothes. I can tidy up his room. I've thrown out possessions he doesn't use. Each time the reality of his conditions hit me, it somehow makes it easier to part with things he used to wear or love. These objects bear the weight of discarded dreams, and with all we have to do every day, it helps to travel light.

Sam's SPD makes it almost impossible for him to clean his room—clutter bombards him with too much sensory information to process and jams his brain so he can't plan how to organize. So I eliminate stuff until it's hard to make it messy, and we can both pretend that he's cleaning his room when he picks up one gum wrapper and puts it in the trash. Nina thinks Sam doesn't deserve more help cleaning his room than she does, and I like to quote the line Clint Eastwood said to Gene Hackman in Unforgiven: "Deserve's got nothing to do with it."

Sam has filled his bedroom with sensory inputs: the humidifier, a lava lamp, various play putties that always become stuck in his rug and clothes, fidget spinners, an hourglass-shaped plastic trinket you can turn upside down to watch blue and magenta bubbles drop, gather, and mingle. His desk drawer is filled with gum wrappers because whenever he gets a new pack he chain chews through the whole thing, never thinking to trash the evidence. When he was younger, he stapled a string of paper loops together and hung them from the ceiling, dangling a paper monkey and a solar light from them. When I bought a memory foam pillow for myself, he

immediately stole it, and he uses it every night, enjoying its doughy density. In some ways, he knows what he needs.

9 p.m.

Sam turns on his nightlight that projects an image of angel fish in a coral reef onto the ceiling, and the mini LED track light with a setting that rotates between glowing red, magenta, purple, blue, green, and yellow every few seconds. We read together under the shifting colors before he goes to bed. With picture books, the effect is magical. Animals appear and disappear, go dark and bright, and flip their hues, depending on the color of light washing over them.

At some point today, he said I don't love him, and I told him I did, so much. He said when he's grown up, he'll never visit me. I told him then I would be sad. But really, that would be a triumph if he becomes so independent that he never has need of me again. When one of the only people who loves you in the world—who dependably cares about you—is your mother, a person whom you might argue had to love you, it's too much of a burden. He needs to push away. A mother can become monstrous if she's the only force in the universe. I don't want to lead him. I don't want to boss him. I don't want to loom over him.

I just want to smooth the way, unseen, like the elves who complete the shoemaker's work in the night, then disappear. I want him to be only aware of me when he leans back, when he stumbles, when he hurts, when he falls. I'm there, I'm there, I'm always there.

Jenny Shank grew up in Denver, Colorado, and earned degrees from the University of Notre Dame and the University of Colorado. Her short story collection Mixed Company won the George Garrett Fiction Prize and will be published by Texas Review Press in November 2021. Her novel The Ringer (The Permanent Press, 2011) won the High Plains Book Award in fiction, was a finalist for the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association's Reading the West Book Awards, was a Tattered Cover Book Store Summer Reading 2011 selection, and was a finalist for the Book Pip eline competition.

Her stories, essays, satire, and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Onion, Poets & Writers Magazine, Bust Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Santa Monica Review, Cincinnati Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Toast, Offline, Image, Printer's Row, Barrelhouse, Rocky Mountain News, Dallas Morning News, High Country News, PBS MediaShift, The Rumpus, 5280, The Huffington Post, The McSweeney's Book of Politics and Musicals (Vintage, 2012) and Dear McSweeney's: Twenty-Two Years of Letters from McSweeney's Quarterly Concern (McSweeney's, 2021). One of her stories was listed among the "Notable Essays of the Year" in the Best American Essays, three of her stories were nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and one received Special Mention in the 2018 Pushcart Prize anthology. She's won writing awards from the Center of the American West, the Montana Committee for the Humanities, the Society for Professional Journalists, SouthWest Writers, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.

Jenny Shank was the Denver/Boulder Editor of The Onion A.V. Club for six years, and for four years she was the Books & Writers Editor of New West, which was named "Best Literary Blog" in the Westword Best of Denver issue. She was a Mullin Scholar in writing at the University of Southern California. She has taught creative writing at the University of Colorado, the Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and the Boulder Writing Studio, and she is on the faculty of the Mile High MFA at Regis University in Denver. She lives in Boulder, Colorado with her husband, daughter, and son.