Butterfly Razorblade
It is your stillness that I notice. You are looking through the glass door that leads to the garden. Arms rigid by your sides, legs tense, hands balled into fists.
“The garden is dangerous,” you announce. “There is a butterfly.”
I stand behind you and see the pale lemon insect, fluttering bright against the dark laurel tree. This is not a new thought of yours but I am surprised again by the mismatch between your perception of butterflies and the thing itself.
“It’s a beautiful colour,” I venture. “Don’t you think it looks like it is dancing?”
These were not the words I was going to say. I was going to tell you that you were wrong. They’re not scary. But you are scared and to say otherwise would deny your reality, the adrenaline spiking in your bloodstream, the thumping in your chest. So, I have invited you to pay attention instead. I have learned that anxiety is a disorder of avoidance. If you can stay here, behind the glass, perhaps your nervous system will settle and your body will learn a different story.
Last year, we spent a week learning about butterflies. I thought if I immersed you in their positive attributes, you might see them in a better light. We learned about Monarch butterflies that migrate thousands of miles to overwinter, guided only by their genes, and about their role as an important pollinator and food source. You learned about food security and biodiversity. We watched videos explaining how the caterpillar dissolves into a soup during metamorphosis, and did you know that the adult butterfly retains some caterpillar memories? You were content and interested in your learning at this acceptable distance, but your terror did not lessen in the presence of the thing itself.
I try to recall when butterflies joined your pantheon of anxieties. I remember you emerging from nursery trailing a large wrinkled sheet of folded paper decorated with vivid splodges of poster paint. A Rorschach-esque butterfly loaded, not with insights about father figures and ego development but with childish exuberance and a tenuous grasp of colour theory. We read “The Very Hungry Caterpillar'' countless times and you always seemed satisfied by the emergence of the “beautiful butterfly”. When you were this small you did not mind butterflies.
One February, at low tide, I drove us across a causeway to an island in the Blackwater Estuary where we had rented a cottage for the weekend. Midway across, I had a sense of the uncanny spectacle our little hatchback car made, clinging to the narrow path across the river bed, grey water pooling near the causeway’s edge. I hunched forward over the steering wheel, knuckles white imagining the consequences of our (very reliable) German-made car breaking down. My view through the windscreen tilted at the edges as if I were seeing it through a fisheye lens. I clutched the steering wheel more tightly and only relaxed once the stony causeway had given way to the island’s gravel road. At the accommodation, your father made a start on unpacking the car and I took you to open up the cottage. The door was painted white and on the weather bar close to the ground, a tortoiseshell butterfly rested with its burnt orange wings spread out on the wood.
“Spike, look. A butterfly!”
I remembered seeing this type of butterfly often as a child but it made an incongruous scene on this cold February afternoon, its colour lurid and alien under the low white sky. Spike reached forward and poked it.
“Oh no!” I said, my voice rising with concern. “We mustn’t touch it. They are very delicate. Let’s go inside and leave it be.”
The holiday was not the refreshing break we had hoped for. We had not mastered being away as a neurodiverse family. You were discombobulated being away from home and so cut off from the hum of human comings and goings. You needed a refuge for when you were tired of the muddy shore and the house we had rented did not offer that. You were frightened of the log burner, which was the only source of heat, and the internet did not work, so you could not lose yourself in the digital fireplace of your tablet. On our last day, we were packing up the car and you noticed the butterfly again. You observed that it had not moved from its resting place on the door.
“Perhaps it’s dead,” I said. “It’s very cold. I’m not sure they’re meant to be out this early.”
You looked aghast and I knew I had misspoken. It occurred to me that you might think you had killed it with your brutish finger. What did you learn in that moment? Something about death?
The fragile beauty of a butterfly implies an ease of breaking. Since their inclusion in our earliest stories, butterflies have carried dualities with them. The process of metamorphosis has something of the resurrection about it - the cocoon as a tomb or coffin with the resultant butterfly a symbol of life or the soul. In folklore, butterflies are inconsistent auguries, of good luck and bad, of life and death, of romance and anger. You knew none of this but on that day perhaps you felt the germ of all those stories.
Not very long ago, I asked you to draw me a butterfly. You drew a slender body in the middle and a pair of wings on either side. Each forewing tapered to a sharp point like a blade.
“Their wings are sharp,” you explained. “They can sting me.”
I think there is some cognitive reverse engineering going on here. We have talked before about the thinness of butterfly wings and I tell you, again, that they cannot hurt you. The juxtaposition of your drawing and the word thinness brings to mind the stinging pain of paper cuts and my fingertips buzz in sympathy. Perhaps I am wrong to teach you that the slightness of a butterfly is a guarantee of safety. But I suspect your reasoning is this: if butterflies frighten you, then they must be dangerous.
Butterflies trouble you less outside than they do inside where they commit the additional crime of being in the wrong place. In the warmer months, I point them out to you as a kind of mild form of exposure therapy and so they do not take you by surprise. Once, while we waited for a train, I spotted a butterfly darting around a stand of buddleia that had grown in a crack in the platform. I watched as you took a step back to maximise your distance from it. You tracked its movements vigilantly, mirroring its jerky flight with your hand, wincing as your fingers bounced in your peripheral vision. I have grown used to picking through the tangle of scripts and magical thinking that you use to articulate your thoughts. You can be an unreliable narrator of your own existence, often stating how you wish things were rather than how they are. It isn’t broken. I am not sick. But how eloquent your fingers were in that moment. I saw how your attention might snag on the erratic movements of a butterfly, like a rough fingernail on the fuzz of a sweater. We are programmed to notice animate motion and changes from stillness to movement, an ability which saved our ancestors from succumbing to stalking predators, but something in my brain smooths over the butterfly’s zig-zagging and unpredictable ascents and descents. But these movements engage you. Each pivot strikes you causing a tiny physiological recoil.
When I imagined myself as a mother, I did not anticipate the intellectual challenge of it. I am deeply engaged in detective work and problem solving. I did not, of course, imagine that a child of mine would be neurodivergent. What neurotypical mother (if that is what I am) does? I pictured a child or more particularly, my child. Not a boy or girl but a diminutive place-holder which I nevertheless felt love and affection for. I imagined this child bringing their problems to me, “Mummy, I am sad / my stomach hurts / there is a monster under my bed” and I would dispense the required prescription, cuddles, a hot water bottle, a squirt of lavender-scented ‘monster repellent’. It is not often like that for me. The love? Yes. It is abundant and overwhelming and wholly noncontingent. But I also have this drive to share in your feelings which you do not wear on your sleeve. I have to mine for your truth (which I want more than diamonds) and the digging is hard work. As Leslie Jamison writes in “The Empathy Exams”, empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination, and it is empathy that I am striving towards. Of all people, it is your shoes I want to stand in.
Sometimes, when I am alone and peace settles on the house, I feel how thinly I am spread. I breathe and the quiet allows me to draw in the parts of myself. I coalesce like mercury or beads of condensation. But as I return, I find I am uncertain and tentative in my thoughts. I think. Maybe. Perhaps. I am unfamiliar. Have I spent so much time trying to be in your head that I am unsure who I am? Motherhood is, anyway, a process in which we are unmade and then reconstructed but, somewhere, I stalled. So, I write and write and try to find myself on the page. I hope I can do this. Write, while also helping you navigate a world where things flutter and disturb your peace.
