IT WAS DURING HOLY WEEK last year when E, wearing her fake Gucci butterfly necklace, tried to light herself on fire. A garland of woodland rabbits was strung across the doorway of our kitchen. Jelly bean prayers and Mardi Gras beads were scattered across our table. And the pills—lithium, Abilify, Geodon, and the pill to give when my daughter is completely out of control, the pill to give instead of calling the police, began to resemble the colored tablets from egg-dyeing kits that fizz in vinegar water. I read that Seamus Heaney wrote only poems of lightness at the end of his life. I yearned for this lightness, and so began my search for a trapeze dress.
I talked of buying a trapeze dress for Easter, not only for myself, but also one for each of my friends. A dress that would be the net when our lives felt as though they were in free fall. A dress for the moments our children were hanging from bathing-suit straps tied into a noose, moments when they grabbed a knife, jumped out of the car, stripped off all their clothes, and ran out of school. We had all of these moments, the moments that caught you off guard, a bird’s nest in the dryer vent, a clutch of snakes in the woodpile.
We are mothers of autistic young adults with multiple disabilities and mental illness. I believed we each needed an Yves Saint Laurent trapeze dress, one designed for the house of Dior. Such a dress would help us endure the spinning, aerial flips of our lives, somehow let us flow through them more easily, avoid getting caught on what was beyond our control. With a trapeze dress, we would breeze through all the storms.
When Olivia Rodrigo’s new song came out last week, E could not wait until dawn to hear it. In her room, in her Juicy Couture tracksuit with headphones and heels, she began pacing. My thirteen-year-old son woke asking, “Why is E wearing heels at six a.m.?” Her pacing made it sound as though we lived under a bowling alley. E has probably walked the length of the entire country within the walls of her room.
My son was learning about potential energy and kinetic energy in his seventh-grade science class. The energy brought on by Olivia Rodrigo is something more difficult to calculate.
During the equinox, the sun is supposed to be balanced over both hemispheres, but it never feels balanced in my home. The moon is forever needing me. I didn’t realize the extent until the day I realized that my son had never learned the months of the year. He still believed it was January when we were carving pumpkins.
We live riding out the storms.
I now write down things my son says on scraps of paper, as if his words were trails that would lead me to know him more, in a way I have missed knowing him, while I have been behavior-intervening with his twenty-one-year-old sister. He tells me of Constantinople and preserving artifacts as he falls asleep; his fish are eating the rocks in the aquarium and spitting them out.
A lei of purple hibiscus is draped around his bedpost. Earlier, E offered to let him borrow it for the middle-school Hawaiian dance, telling him not to lose it. “The last Mother’s Day that we celebrated with Jen, we wore these,” she said. In her headband of marshmallow chicks, a fake Kate Spade purse dangling from her arm, E placed the lei over his head before his carpool of friends was at the door. For every occasion, E will bring us mementoes to wear: Mom-mom’s pearl necklace, Aunt Gerry’s pendant, Lynn’s fishbone earrings, a peacock feather, a cameo. “Here, you should wear this,” she will announce, carefully wrapping items around our necks or pinning them to our collars. She carries these things out to us from the secret places under the floorboards of her room and in her jewelry boxes. She is always embellishing us, adding accessories, wanting us to shine. My friend Jen died two years ago. E remembers everything, as if it is all stitched into her being, all the names of purple flowers, hibiscus, the Phantom of the Opera’s ring worn as a necklace, every line of Hamilton.
When my twenty-three-year-old son returned from the Florida Keys for ten days, with his first barn-swallow tattoo for sailing his first five thousand miles, he spoke of the lightness of finding buoyancy while scuba diving. He showed me his dive watch, which can tell the amount of air left in the tanks of all his divers when they are forty feet under. He is a boat captain and a dive instructor. We wish there were a way to predict how much time was left before E would have a meltdown.
We sat in the living room watching Humphrey Bogart’s Key Largo, and I asked him, “Is it stressful to be here?”
He talked of the storms that come out of nowhere in the Keys. “When I see one of my students drifting away in the tide, that’s what’s stressful. These stresses are different from living with E,” he said. We watched Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall board up the Key Largo hotel for the hurricane.
It felt like a hurricane when E was in Saint Vincent’s screaming hysterically and tearing up prayer flyers in the middle of mass, watched by the statue of Saint Vincent holding a child and the Blessed Mother statue next to him, also holding a child. This is what it means to be a mother. I search like Emily Dickinson, with lanterns, for myself, hoping that these storms will turn away, be carried out to sea. Sometimes during a gale I think of the Buddha inviting the shadow god in for tea and then sending him on his way.
I believe a trapeze dress can make tea like the Buddha and carry lanterns like Emily Dickinson. And would provide me with eyes to see the vestigia Dei—the fingerprints, footprints of God in all of this.
When E was awake all night, manic from Easter, she talked of saving the elephants. She had a dream of woolly mammoths roaming the earth again and elephants being extinct.
“If I lived in Africa, I would work for Ivory Ella, saving the elephants,” she said.
When E, in her fake Gucci butterfly necklace, tried to light herself on fire, my uncle suggested we turn on the NCAA Final Four championship game. That Sunday, we found ourselves watching the LSU women’s team, not for the basketball but for the coach’s outfit. While I called psychiatric hospitals to inquire whether there was a bed available in the neuropsych unit, my uncle spoke of the LSU coach’s eccentric clothing. My daughter watched Coach Kim Mulkey’s glitter and sequins. She had overturned the tray of seedlings in my windowsill while my uncle was searching for the channel. This would be the year tomatoes grew with zinnias and zinnias grew with peppers. With my garden seeds strewn across the living-room floor and potting soil everywhere, we were introduced to basketball, and through the flamboyant coach we were led to Angel Reese, the smack-talking forward.
We watched her John Cena wrestling move, her hand in front of her face: You can’t see me. We watched her tap her ring finger, taunting Iowa. “I don’t fit the narrative. I don’t fit the box that you all want me to be in,” she said later during a press conference.
With egg dye still staining my hands and my desire for an Easter trapeze dress still in my heart, this suddenly felt like the road to Emmaus for my daughter and me. The instability, the inability to function, the great sadness of calling for a bed in a psychiatric hospital; this is the most difficult road for us to walk. We feel deserted and isolated. Angel Reese was like the unrecognized Christ coming to us, appearing out of nowhere. And not only the unseen Christ; she was all the characters of Holy Week. She was one of the “women who have astounded us,” as the disciples called them. She was the one in Isaiah who brought us oil of gladness—who was glad tidings to us. She was the woman anointing our feet with oil, the fragrance of her words filling my house: “I don’t fit the narrative.” She was the trapeze dress.
There was a bed available in the neuropsych unit. In the weeks that followed, as her meds were being adjusted, my daughter and I continued to go back to the Louisiana coach who wore a lion tamer’s suit, and to Angel saying, “I don’t fit the narrative.” Her words somehow freed us from the shame associated with otherness, gifting us with the lightness of a trapeze dress, a lei of hibiscus.
At night sometimes, when it is finally quiet, I lie in bed with all the windows open, listening to the crickets and cicadas, how their chorus grows and radiates to a volume that catches me and carries me off with it, without my body, without my skin, without my thoughts or worries, just a large field of myself that I have never yet stepped into. This is the lightness a trapeze dress has in its very fabric.
Karla Pahel’s work has appeared in The Baltimore Sun, Delaware Today, Beach Life, and A Prairie Home Companion’s First Person series. She is founder of Free Writes and Coffee, a radically inclusive writing community in Baltimore.
Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash