Vicente Returned From Outer Space to Celebrate His Birthday

My son turned 24 today, and for the first time in a long time, I did not celebrate his birthday without him.

I need you to understand what a strange sentence that is for me to type. There was a time when Vicente came to his own birthday parties. SpongeBob cake, a piñata, a kid who hadn't yet been handed the keys to his own life and didn't know he could refuse. Vicente showed up because showing up was still someone else's decision. He didn't know he had a choice. Then he got older, and after COVID, Vicente made a conscious decision to stop showing up, not only to his own birthday parties, but to life itself. He stopped going out. He stopped participating. He stopped trying. COVID didn't invent the distance between me and my son, but it finished the job on whatever bridge was already cracking.

So for the last several years, I have hosted birthday parties for a boy who stayed in his room while I stood in a rented party pool place making small talk with people who kept asking where he was. I have blown out candles on his behalf. I have opened his presents and thanked people for gifts he never saw. I often talk about him in my podcast and my editorials. I have written books about him. Vicente became, in those years, a subject. Today he is the main character.

Last week I told you about the alien from Project Hail Mary, the one shaped like a rock, terrified of being left behind in the dark between stars. That's Vicente to me most days. A rock in orbit, close enough to see, too far to reach. I've called it physics. It's easier to blame physics than to sit with the fact that autism is what put the distance there, and autism is what keeps it in orbit.

But today, on his birthday, Vicente left his galaxy and drifted to ours. Today, he is on autopilot.

July is a busy birthday month in my family. We have back to back birthday celebrations. Yesterday was my brother's birthday, today is Vicente's, and I am right behind. July is the reason why in my family we love carne asada and worship chlorine. It's only natural that I am confused when Vicente took off his Ed Hardy hoodie, and got in the pool with us. He refused, on principle, to wear shorts, because Vicente has exactly one non-negotiable law of physics and it is that his legs stay covered, so he got into the pool in his golf pants and a t-shirt like a man fully dressed for a business meeting that happens to be underwater. I have never in my life been so proud of a soggy pair of pants.

He swam on a pool noodle for three hours with me, and his sister, Victoria, and with my brother, Octavio, who is blind and whose clouded white eyes have always scared Vicente. This year, for whatever reason, Vicente okayed the discomfort. Maybe it's him maturing into tolerating the realities of others having a disability like him, or maybe twenty-four is just the year he got tired of being alone on his birthday.

What actually astounded me came before the pool. Vicente woke up at five thirty-one in the morning, and asked me to take him to Dutch Bros, his favorite coffee place. Nothing ordinary, he got a hot chocolate like he always does. His next request was a chocolate cake from Walmart. Then, with almost no expectation of a yes, I asked if he wanted to be in the daily vlog I film for FRONTeras. He said, "I'm not gonna talk." Of course not, I assured him. He gave me one minute to sing him happy birthday on camera, and blow out his candles. Not a second more. He allowed a kiss and a hug. Then he quickly set clear boundaries again.

Vicente will still be Vicente tomorrow, with all the walls that come with him. But he opened a door a crack, and he let us stand in the doorway for three hours, and I have learned to take an inch as if it were a mile, because for me, it basically is.

I will always be thankful for the inch. A mother will take it.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

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