First Person: Love’s Labor Won

The author’s daughters, Shannon and Flannery, on their many explorations throughout Rhode Island. Photography courtesy of Mike Freeman

Ten years ago, I walked our daughters into the North Kingstown Dave’s Marketplace. They were six and four. Flannery, our youngest, got out ahead. She loved the pizza and strode hard for it. Shannon, our oldest, was where she always was: on my shoulders. Nonverbal, she can walk but never gets far, so to keep her moving I’d always carried her. We’d just had a long summer swim at the North Kingstown Town Beach, and the world was fine.

Between the potato and onion displays, though, Shan nearly flipped off my shoulders, as upset as she gets. There wasn’t time to wonder why.

Photography courtesy of Mike Freeman

“Come on, Flan. Let’s go.”

Used to it, Flan trotted behind as I cinched her screaming sister to my chest and jogged out. Every customer stood still. It was like moving through a photograph.

The next day, with Shan in home therapy, I took Flan back for her pizza. It was her turn on my shoulders, and we watched the employee box up her slice.

“Dada?” she said.

“What is it, Flan?”

“Why did God give Shannon autism and not me?”

The man handed the box across the counter. I took it, nodded, then turned and stopped. 

“I don’t know, Flan. There are so many things we’ll never know. Those are the most interesting ones to think about, though.”

By way of the 2008 financial crisis, my wife Karen and I are accidental Rhode Islanders. By way of autism, I’m a primary caregiver. Shan is like a shark: If she stops moving, she dies, and in a happy twist, this wed my joys of walking, labor and the new one, parenting.

I’d been living in Alaska when Karen and I met, she in Queens, New York. Her career was higher earning, so when Shan came, I stayed home. In 2009, Karen took a job in Newport, and by 2011, with her set to deliver Flannery, it was clear Shan was on an atypical path, if there was a path at all.

Photography courtesy of Mike Freeman

We’re unsure why she needs to move, only knowing that she does. Driving works, but for all her sixteen years, I’ve been the primary vehicle. She needs round-the-clock, arm’s-length care, much of which means keeping her in motion. While I push her in a wheelchair now, for twelve years I carried her — nine of them on my shoulders, miles at a time, then miles more. It’s been four years since she’s been up there, but like the way amputees rub the missing limb, I miss her weight and feel it still.

I’ve always taken to labor. At thirteen, growing up in woodsy Connecticut, I took my dad’s ax and seemingly without free will walked up to a thick aspen and started whacking. The handle sliding through my palms, halting at the hit, the chips flying. I loved it. Such work, too, frees the mind for my other cherished labor, the same I’d tell my youngest daughter about decades later — pondering, trying to crack the world’s uncrackable codes.

I installed Invisible Fences for a few years, then for ten humped endless gear for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, working nets, running boats, chain-sawing, all while wrestling the many angels of existence. I adored it, and lugging Shannon around like her horse was a seamless segue, and as fine a way as any to learn about our new home.

From Newport’s narrow streets to Providence’s neighborhoods to most waterfronts and forested trails, Shan and I have trod Rhode Island. Flan often trailed behind, incessantly querying, doddering after butterflies, petting every dog. The warp and woof of Shan’s silence and Flan’s tireless inquisitiveness wove into my own cosmology. Flan dives deep, wanting to know who, if anyone, made the world and why. And always, always, if a good God exists then how can there be such suffering?

Photography courtesy of Mike Freeman

For her part, Shan can’t speak to her interior life, but I’ve felt it. Emily Dickinson said a good poem “scalps your naked soul.” Shannon’s way of being is a collected poetry works and watching her absorb the world I’ve been peeled many times.

During the COVID summer — a broiler and her last from her perch — she clambered off by Zeke’s Creek Bait & Tackle in Jamestown to dip in the salt marsh. She’s a capable swimmer, and as we swirled around the wide eddy the bridge makes of onrushing tides, four oystercatchers — wild-looking birds with golden eyes and carrot-like beaks — flew overhead in tight formation. Their motion generated audible wind, and one sounded the species’ clownish, ghostly whistle. Suspended in brine, Shan watched them bank for the flats.

“Gaaaaah. Gaaaaah,” eeked out of her, the sign she’s been hit with the wonder of the world. Spend enough time with Shan, and you feel you’re with what humans were like maybe ten generations before language. Everything is there, the profundity, the curiosity, the ponderance. Everything but the words.

For a few years now, I’ve worked a couple of South County farms, including tree-felling. This spring Flan said, “Dad, you mostly just daydream about chopping down trees, don’t you?” I thought I was a harder read, but she called it.

Returning to work only reinforced my understanding that in muscle and mind domestic labor is every bit as taxing as other jobs. It also, in its way, pays better. From Flan’s query in Dave’s to numberless incidents like Shan’s with the oystercatchers, I’ve delighted in watching one kid in silence and the other in words try to make compatible the light and dark of the world, braiding them, the highest labor.

Recent political shifts, though, have dyed that delight with fret. Flan’s future may be as limited as her great-grandmothers’, mostly to that of a broodmare’s, while Shan’s very existence is being dangerously mulled. How they’ll fare we can’t know, but however things shake out, we hope memory sustains them, when from Misquamicut to Providence to Weetamoo Woods we took in the world together, love’s labor won. 

Photography courtesy of Mike Freeman