Seeing Ezra by Kerry Cohen

Author:Kerry Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Seal Press
Published: 2011-08-03T04:00:00+00:00

Difficulty with Transitions

Michael and I don’t do “date nights,” those contrived stand-ins for romance that so many couples with new children have. I was never a fan of the date night. It seemed like maintenance sex, which strikes me as equally unappealing. But I start to see the allure. Maybe maintenance sex is better than no sex. Maybe date nights are better than divorce. There is a startling and disturbing statistic out there (although no one seems to know of its source) that 80 to 85 percent of couples with an autistic child wind up divorced. I don’t like this statistic, and not just for the obvious reason of its suggestion that Michael and I are doomed. I am beginning to feel enraged that autism keeps being posed as this terrible monster that will destroy children, and now marriages as well. I want so much to believe that if my son’s neurology is simply his neurology—meaning, if his brain makes him who he is, and he will always be autistic—then he can have a constructive effect on the world, on us. I know that he can, that he does. This is a mother’s basic right, to know, to not have to argue, that her son is worthwhile. But statistics like this seem pitted against the possibility of my son’s ever being accepted as a positive force.

But enough intellectualizing, enough thinking about such things. We arrange for Nadine to work a few hours one evening, and Michael and I go out to a local restaurant. All the eateries around here are fancy and overpriced, intended for rich vacationers. They give us one more reason to miss Portland. But we try not to talk about that tonight. We desperately need to enjoy ourselves. We sit at the bar and order glasses of wine and an entrée to share.

“I can’t believe we’re here by ourselves,” I say.

“It’s weird,” Michael agrees.

Without the fog of feeding and diapering and playing with and keeping the children from harm, without the silent weight of our constant fears about Ezra, we are like different people.

Michael and I talk about the Montessori school. We laugh about Griffin, when he threw a balloon up over his head and said, “Wheee!” We look warmly at each other for the first time maybe in years.

More than a year before Ezra was born, Michael and I took a vacation to Baja, Mexico. We stayed at a resort where there were only two other couples. It felt like we were there all alone. The beach went on for miles with no one in sight, so we walked a ways and skinny-dipped in the turquoise water. We made love on the sand, swam some more, and then we went back to our room for what has gone down in the history of our relationship as The Best Nap of Our Lives. Why the best? Because it was long and peaceful, lulled by the sounds and smells of the ocean, and because it was punctuated with more sex.

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