Walls

Fun Monday's topic today was about walls. The assignment was meant to display the physical walls in your home, but the wall that concerns me the most today is the one towering between me and my son.

My house is currently oddly silent, although we are all here. We are dancing around each other's presences, with Kira nearly desperate to maintain some normality. She is determinedly coloring and reciting lines from her play and creating things with her dolls.

Mark walks from his room to the bathroom and back. He made a ghostly appearance downstairs long enough to wordlessly consume some dinner, and then disappeared back into his bedroom.

In half an hour or less we will all be going to the school to attend a meeting for the seventh graders and their parents, where I assume we will put on faces of normality, although perhaps quieter than usual. I cannot imagine smiling and chattering and pretending that all is well, although I know that I will do all those things, and do them with skill.

We are dancing, he and I, around things that were said this morning. Around the discovery of yet another trivial and needless lie on his part, which led to an argument and punishments meted, and disrespect, and harsh words said at the bus stop that his sister overheard and reported to me after school. Words of hatred and violence that stun me from this child of mine, this treasure.

There is betrayal and disappointment and hurt. There are wounds that cannot be staunched, that remain open and bleeding. There is frustration, on both sides, I imagine, although I wonder if I can still say that I know my son's heart. There is dismay. I cannot begin to figure out how to breach this wall that seems to have sprung up, whole and enormous and bristling, between us. I am not sure if I have the strength to try.

I am not even sure if I want to.