A Holy, Dim Light: A Journey Through Diagnosis and Discovery

This personal essay is about motherhood, identity, and late-in-life diagnosis, tracing my journey from early parenthood through years of misunderstanding my son's struggles. When my son is diagnosed at eighteen with ADHD and Autism Spectrum Level 1, I receive the same diagnoses, forcing me to reexamine decades of self-blame and internalized failure. The essay ends in uncertainty, with hope for resolution. - Jes Scoville

I was watching “Arrested Development” and eating a Jimmy John’s #12 when I went into labor with my first child. The contractions pulled at me like something from deep in the earth, something outside my body. I sang as I labored. No recognizable tune, just the same three sliding notes over and over. I walked the two blocks to the hospital, under a full moon, leaning on the bridge over the railroad tracks to breathe.

I gave birth to my son in a bathtub, in a holy, dim light surrounded by people speaking in whispers. His body surprised me. It was small and strange, red. The midwife urged me to scoop him from the water. Holding him in my arms, looking at his scrunched-up face, all I could think was, I’m so tired. I’m so tired and why do they want me to hold this? Why can’t someone else hold this?

Later, back in our cramped student apartment, I bounced this baby boy endlessly while he cried and his dad went to dental school. The crying was eternal — stretched out across the day, holding me alert. Nothing could console him for more than a few minutes at a time. I would pace our balcony, holding my little swaddled package, and look out into the blue Ohio sky. I had turned down a full fellowship to a creative writing MFA program for this. For him. For this endless pacing.

He grew, got little teeth. Spoke a gibberish all his own. Got a sister he wasn’t too keen on. Nursed a rage without constraint. Threw chairs at me with his five-year-old arms. Screamed. Cried.

I took him to someone, hoping for help. You know how your heart cracks. I had tried everything, but still, he cried. Interacted with the world in a sharp, staccato way. But the therapist just labeled me a failure. When my son’s dad left, I hadn’t been enough.

I believed him.

Still, I held my son while he cried, while he raged, while his hurt consumed me and him and his sister.

It would be lying to say it was all tears. We also laughed, we made pumpkin pie, we went to see dog parades. He taught himself calculus. Then Japanese. Learned to trick rollerblade. Became obsessed with calligraphy. Sang opera. Let me read him Where the Red Fern Grows and rub his back. The three of us (me, him, and his sister) became a tight little package holding desperately to each other.

When he was eighteen, I decided to try again. A new therapist, new doctor. A process I had repeated every few years his whole life. But this time, something different happened: My concerns weren’t dismissed as failure. Instead, there were long conversations, tests, more conversations. And then, a diagnosis: ADHD, Autism Spectrum Level 1.

My son cried then. Sobbed. His whole body shaking. Eighteen years of believing everything he did was wrong.

I cried too, later. At home in the shower, everything wet with tears.

I had been holding a name tag to my chest for a couple of decades. One that read, “Single mom. Failure.” So, who would I be if I let the label drop to the floor? I wasn’t sure. Unsettled in a new way.

I looked at my naked body in the mirror, wet and bedraggled. Not young, not old. Somewhere in the middle. That strange space where your body pulls downward: breasts sag, knees bag, ankles fold. It’s a strong body, even so. One that held two children, almost ceaselessly.

A few months after my son’s diagnosis, I ended up with a few of my own: ADHD, Autism Spectrum Level 1. I could feel my past explanations unspooling — the failed relationships, the hiding in the closet, the panic attacks in the rain along the highway. The floor in front of me felt littered with things I had called myself. Farce. Failure. Fractured.

I’m not sure how to reckon with all those names. Especially when I look behind me and see that young mom holding a crying baby, wanting to cry too, but knowing that any tears at all would have become tears that couldn’t stop. Or when I see myself, kneeling on the ground and holding the hand of a five-year-old girl and a seven-year-old boy, trying to explain to them that I didn’t know where their dad was or if he was coming back. Or nearly every night when I would close the door to my bedroom, draw the sheets to my chin, and shake from the impossibility of it all. How could I take care of anyone if I couldn’t take care of myself?

I still don’t really know. I watch women in their 40s, like me, receiving diagnoses only after their children do. I read the internet chatter that says the late diagnoses are a fad, none of it real. Everyone has ADHD. Everyone is a little autistic. Part of me would rather believe those quips instead of knowing that we’ve just found a new way to convince women that their experiences aren’t real — that they don’t exist.

I was the kid who couldn’t stop crying, who rocked herself on the stairs, who studied exactly what to say. The kid who ran to a corner of the playground to make bird’s nests out of grass, humming. The one who wrote myself into fairytales, imagining purple eyes and owl wings sprouting underneath my shoulder blades.

And what has changed with these diagnoses? I’m not sure. I still talk about Anne of Green Gables with my daughter. I still hold my adult son while he cries. I still take my dog for walks. We loop around the neighborhood, he sniffs the honeysuckle, pees on an electrical box, barks at a flagpole. I climb the first rise of the mountain behind my house, and the sky spreads out in front of me. Everything fuzzes in the dim light. Except one cirrus cloud, peach and pink, hanging above the mountain.

Jes P. Scoville holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Brigham Young University, where she also earned an MA in English. A senior producer for BYUradio's Constant Wonder, her poetry is forthcoming in Literature and Belief and her poetry and essays have appeared in Segullah, Literary Mama, and Inscape. She lives in Utah with her two children.