To me, late summer means amusement parks and fairs. My passion for rides and cotton candy stretches back to my earliest childhood days, when my parents took me to Old McDonald’s Farm for my fourth birthday. Old McDonald’s was a tiny park that may have had only one or two rides, but to me it was magical.
When I became a mom, I was so excited to introduce amusement parks to my three sons, Nat, Max, and Ben. But Nat was the only one who liked them, and that took a long time to happen for him. Nat is profoundly autistic and he needs a lot of time, repetition, and familiarity to learn things—even understanding what rides are all about—so he did not really enjoy them until November of 2010, when I took him to Disneyworld for his 21st birthday. That was a huge victory for me, because he has a lot of behavioral issues but somehow I navigated them.
But the biggest triumph was that we had real fun together—not the maternal kind of fun where you feel happy because they’re happy. This was a muscular, deep-in-the-belly fun, and we were both equally ecstatic to be there.
But when Nat began his true adulthood at 22, we had to find him a good group home so that he could be as independent of us as possible. And soon after his exodus from our house, his two younger brothers also came of age, leaving for college and then that real-life land of amusement: New York City. My husband and I became empty nesters, traveling, vacationing, and biking, and I tried to put away childish things.
Until one day when a miracle happened: Nat’s group home was going to Six Flags and they invited us to come along. It took a lot of haranguing and begging, but my husband finally agreed to go, too. After all, he loves to visit the group home because the staff and Nat’s housemates are so welcoming. And so, off we went, arranging to meet them there at lunchtime.
There was terrible traffic—what did we expect, driving to the Berkshires on a Saturday in mid-August? And the line to park was just as long as the lines for the rides. But at least we found Nat and his companions and made our way over to a roller coaster—the only wooden one in the park, built in 1941. Already scary.
After our long wait, we managed to get a car that fit all six of us. Nat and I sat together—it was almost too small for both of us. But we squeezed in and after I checked our seatbelts and the protective padded metal arm five to ten times, we were ready.
Before the ride even started, Nat suddenly began shaking. I didn’t realize he would be so scared. I did what any mom would do. I said, “It’s OK, Nat,” and I asked him if he wanted to hold my hand. I grabbed his hand before he even answered because I realized that I was scared, too. Scared that this old rickety contraption would break apart—and that my 61-year-old bones would as well.
He gripped my hand, which was so unfamiliar to me because Nat almost never reaches out to others. But feeling those strong fingers wrapped around mine, my anxiety softened. And then I noticed that Nat was no longer trembling. We had calmed each other. This was a completely new experience for me, and I felt a warm surge of joy that had nothing to do with anticipating the ride.
Naturally, we got thrown around, wrenched our necks, and messed up our vertebrae. But the happiness I felt, knowing Nat and I were feeling exactly the same thing—the wild child thrill of a roller coaster—completely eclipsed our discomfort. And right beside that crazy excitement was a tender new connection with Nat that was also very, very old.
