Here I am again, half a year later, having come so far, with so far yet to go.

Dieting, running, therapy, a solid effort at 7 hours of sleep per night. A lot feels better, but nothing is solved. I am a cup with nowhere to pour, a person who doesn’t feel safe leaning the entire weight of their emotion on another. So I pour a little here, with the person who’s a good listener. And a little there, with someone who’s walked this path before. But sometimes my brain just reaches a fever pitch, the emotional overload of all the conflict, all the sadness, anger, exhaustion, and hopelessness, and there’s nowhere to pour all of that. So I come back to the page and pour it here.

I’m covered in bruises and tiny scabs, the calling card of an autistic child who needs to dig into something – into someone – when he has nowhere to pour. His fingers flex as he looks for skin to grab, twist, pinch, control. Twitching hands snake through my hair, feet and elbows fly, and his tiny voice thunders with anguish. He screams demands at times, criss-crossing needs that contradict each other until I remember, for the thousandth time, that his meltdown is an echo chamber and anything I say – whether to explain, or comfort, or acquiesce – is just one more voice screaming in his tender ears. We’re supposed to disengage – to back away, to be dispassionate, to offer no new input into the swirl of his agitation. But sometimes I can’t help myself, and I put my arms around him anyway. A mother was never meant to be stone.

Every time I think I’ve come to grips with how profoundly disabled my son is, some new detail breaks my heart. His discomfort, anxiety, or pain in a situation that should have been joyful, his panic and fear in a moment that would have been merely unpleasant for someone else. The “hangover” of overstimulation and breaks in routine, that can leave us all in tears after a wonderful day. Even his contented moments, full of wordless trilling and fits of inexplicable laughter.

It’s as if he knows we are so close to the secret of his universe, and all I can think about is how afraid I am that we won’t find the way in.

I’m reading a memoir by an autism mom. There’s this moment when her son is 8, and she figures out that drawing pictures allows them to communicate on a level they never had before. She’s able to explain things that are going to happen – and he’s able to explain his perspective of things that have happened in the past, things that were upsetting to him, that she couldn’t quite grasp without that input. It was like she had found a key that unlocked his stories, his secrets, his fear and his love and his needs. Like she reached the whole person inside, when she had been seeking him mostly on faith.

Is there a key to my son? Will we someday communicate to the point that he can tell me why he loved trains and garage doors and car washes? Will we talk about some epic meltdown he had, and will he explain what I couldn’t see or contextualize in the moment? Will all of that just be a fever dream, the dark days we’ve put behind us with an unspoken agreement not to rehash the past?

Or is the universe of now all we will ever know?