Green Balloon (part 1)
the story of a song
One Saturday in April, I took the kids downtown to a vigil for justice for Ricardo Munoz, a Lancaster, PA resident who was shot and killed by city police in the midst of a mental health crisis, and for the members of our community who were arrested, convicted, and sentenced to prison or probation time for protesting his murder. When we arrived at the vigil we were handed green balloons, a symbol of mental health awareness.
What happened next for us — my kids and me — was that my older son Jericho had an autism meltdown about the balloons. I had tied both boys’ balloons around their wrists so they wouldn’t fly away, but Jericho still held his very tightly and gingerly, while his younger brother Westerly took full advantage of string attaching his balloon to his wrist and moved freely, letting it flail wildly in the breeze. This concerned Jericho so much that he freaked out, couldn’t relax, couldn’t let it go. I put my arms around him and locked him close to me (a meltdown tactic we call “snuggle jail”) to try to give him visceral comfort and get him out of his head, tried to both validate and reassure him, all the while trying to let go of my own self-consciousness that we were disrupting the vigil, that people around us would think I was a bad mother or my kid was just a brat.
It doesn’t matter what people think — I was telling myself that too — but also, when it comes to people behaving differently because of mental health issues or neurodivergence, sometimes it does matter what people think. It matters what your kid’s teachers think when his fears or unusual behaviors interfere with classroom norms. It matters what his classmates think when he needs friends and nobody believes he’s worth understanding. It can matter, catastrophically, what a police officer thinks is happening when he melts down.
We left the vigil early. One thing I’ve learned about autism meltdowns is that you can’t reason with them; you can offer comfort and reassurance but most of what’s required is patience and adaptability. Don’t ask the meltdown to hurry or conform to the time and space you’re in; move to somewhere safe and give it time to work itself out. As soon as I told Jericho we could leave, he started to calm down a bit. Then Ricardo’s favorite song, “Fireflies,” came on, and I could see that Jericho was feeling its resonance, letting it massage his overactive brain cells, allowing it to move inside his mind and give him some relief. He stood still, staring into the street as though hypnotized, until the end of the song. Then he put his hand in mine and we walked away.
On our way to the car, the kids asked me a lot of questions about Ricardo — about his life, his illness, his family, his death. It felt good — truthful — to meet their questions with my own, to not have answers, to say “I don’t know.” When I got home I started writing a song called Green Balloon in an attempt to get into Jericho’s head and tell the story of what I found there. Of course it’s a projection; there’s no perfect way to tell another person’s story, and any story I tell is run through the wringer of me. And Jericho’s story isn’t that far from mine — we have different neurodiversities but we share the struggle of a sometimes-tortured mind, irrational fears and anxieties, and a sense of otherness, of not quite fitting into the world as neatly as we wish we could.
Listen to Green Balloon: