Weave in. Weave out. Delicate at times. Boisterous and rocking and raucous at others, this dance of mother-daughter. The same child-turned young woman who locked me in my bedroom last night in some sort of weird, unspoken developmentally delayed adolescent anti-authoritarian protest. The same girl on the cusp of 18 is now curled up beside me in my bed. On the last day of this long holiday weekend, she has come into my bedroom for a visit, all fresh-faced, renewed for her restorative blanket of last night's sleep. We rub noses. I kiss her sweet peachy-fresh forehead. She caresses my cheek with the back of her small hand, looking into my eyes with goo-goo love eyes of her own. They are old soul eyes that communicate what her autism-wired brain and tongue cannot.

About the door, well, she didn't realize that it was lockable from the inside. And, so, I could get out. I had again asked her not to lock her own bedroom door because if I needed to get in, if she got sick or couldn't remember quickly how to unlock it, I didn't have a key to help her out quickly. So, apparently, after I'd crawled beneath my own covers, she'd thought she'd show me and went through the condo closing and locking interior doors.

We are dancing a dance, mother, daughter. In difficult moments, sometimes in a day of those moments it almost borders on love-hate. Stretch and collapse. Push and pull. Me: Stop, wait. Give, take. We're still learning some of the steps to these complex rhythms of growing up with these challenges of disAbility. Some of them haven't even been created. We'll have to be our own choreographers for many of them.

Her life is much different than that of her typically developing peers. Most give her no mind. I am hoping that they, too, will mature and come back around and remember she needs their friendship just as they could use hers as well. Like them she is leaning into the boundaries. Like their mothers I must give her enough rope, enough freedom and heapings of love, acceptance and compassion. For some of us, we have to invent those steps without guidance, if we didn't get the right instruction or enough of  it in the homes of our own long-gone youth.

Step. One. Two. Step. One. Two. Dip. Twirl. Repeat.

The band of life plays on.

And on the mother-daughter dance continues.

Photos: Bill Bangham (Father of Click); Edwin Warner Park, 2003; Frist Center for the Visual Arts, 2012