​​​Skipping Stones​​​​

About five years ago, when I was in my mid-fifties, I found I needed to grapple with some words that were not part of my everyday vocabulary. Whenever a new word arrived, I sought comfort by making associations. When a friend said, It’s all about the chemistry, for instance, thinking about the chemistry in my kitchen and how separate ingredients combined can become lemon cake or apple strudel was easier than thinking about the chemistry in my son’s brain. When the pediatrician said, The brain is like a big ball of yarn, I imagined a cat by a fireplace, a grandmother knitting in a rocking chair, a ball of yarn on her cozy lap. When the doctor described how ADHD needs to be teased from depression and anxiety in order to figure out what’s going on, I latched on to teased and thought of boys and skating rinks and movie theaters, anything more appealing than the string of letters that labeled our gentle blue-eyed boy.  

I broke words apart and then thought of other words in order to feel less pain. Schizo became split became pea became soup became warmth became snow became the time our family walked around a lake in Bled, Slovenia, and stopped at an outdoor café and our little boys had cups of hot chocolate piled with whipped cream and our older boy walked down to the lake to skip stones across its surface. Phrenia became mind became philosophy became my son reading Marcus Aurelius and Aristotle and his passion for Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor and all its sad minor notes, the soundtrack of our home during the pandemic, and remembering how I would stand still and close my eyes whenever I heard his instrument.  

Psychotic wasn’t unfamiliar because it’s a word I’d throw around. She’s fucking psychotic. Psychosis, however, is altogether different, a more serious word. I had to stare at the definition for a long time before I could understand that one, if I ever did. Maybe I finally understood psychosis when I saw it in the face of my son. Or maybe it’s clearer to say, I didn’t see my son in his face, and that’s when I understood it.   

Lithium was another word I had to look up. I leaned into images of where it’s extracted, rock and brine, and waded up to my knees in the saltwater of my mind in the northwest, sauntered over smooth boulders, alone among the driftwood and the lapping waves. And when my son received his new diagnosis, I separated bi from polar. There’s bi-sexual, and I get it. There’s polar opposite. There are two poles. There’s the North Pole and Christmas and presents and my boys figuring out one year that I was Santa and how we kept up the game long after they’d caught on. There’s game and gaming and wasting time and getting stoned and dirty dishes and takeout containers on the floor of his bedroom and alone and only and memories and someone telling me it doesn’t matter how he spends his time because he only has one job right now, only one job in the world that ​​​​matters.  

I remember watching his slender form by the water before all those words got in the way. He showed me how, when you skip stones, you have to angle your body just so; you must throw with intention, or those stones won’t fly. And I thought of how words can be like rocks in your heart, so I gathered together the weight of those words and lugged them to the lake near our home and practiced tossing them one after another until only a few words remained that I could hold, like His only job is to love himself. It’s easy to love him. Loving yourself is harder, but I can help him with that. Plus, there’s nothing I need to google in His only job is to love himself. I understand every single one of those words.  

Regina Landor is a three-time alum of The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Her essays have appeared in Salon, The Brevity Blog, The Black Fork Review, The Foreign Service Journal, The Rappahannock Review, Heimat Review, Common Ground Review, and elsewhere. Her husband was a diplomat with USAID for seventeen years, and they raised their two sons in the US, Serbia, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia. She writes the Substack This Traveling Life, and lives in Evanston, Illinois. More at reginalandor.com.      

This essay is a Short Reads original.