The PTSD pirate fairy queen’s quest for magic

Someone recently low-key implied it’s a privilege to be a vagabond and get to pick a destination and just get up and go, and that I should consider myself lucky my home blew up and I almost died, and I get to cosplay a whimsical pirate fairy queen.

I’m guessing they don’t have a four-year-old on the autism spectrum who spends every evening asking when he can go back to his castle.

His castle is what he calls home.

No, it’s not a castle, of course. Just our little Ottoman apartment in the Old City. But to him it was a kingdom of routines and familiar corners. The same bed. The same blanket. The same route to the bathroom in the dark. The same sounds drifting through the window.

For most people, living out of a suitcase sounds romantic. A grand adventure. A chance to be “spontaneous.” Hell, I get it. Back in the day, I may have thought the same.

For an autistic child, routine is not a luxury. Instead, it is a lifeline.

And every night while singing twinkle twinkle little star for the 17,563 time, my son asks when we’re going home.

The honest answer is that I don’t know.

What I do know is there is rubble and blood everywhere, and the smell of rotting things, and the roots of our building are no longer safe.

And I ALSO know that children borrow their courage from the adults around them.

So I’m trying.

I’m trying to turn unfamiliar streets into treasure hunts. Makolet donut breakfasts into feasts fit for kings. New parks into undiscovered kingdoms. Every temporary place into a chapter rather than an ending.

Some days I hold it together.

Some days I sob in the shower and then emerge with my best pirate fairy queen voice and say that we are setting sail for another adventure.

The wandering Jew is one of the oldest stories we have. Maybe that’s why so many of us know how to keep going even when the map disappears beneath our feet.

I don’t want my son to remember this as the summer we lost our home.

I want him to remember that when everything fell apart, we packed our bags, held each other’s hands, and went looking for magic anyway.