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Neurodiversity and Endurance: What Profound Autism Motherhood and A Navy SEAL Share in Common · Inchstones with Sarah | Autism Advocacy & Caregiver Stories

• 0:01
  Speaker A: Hi everyone. Welcome back to an episode on the Inchtones podcast that has been on my heart to record for a while now. Who I'm about to introduce is not going to be probably at all on your bingo card of potential guests that a profound autism mom like myself would naturally invite to speak to. And yet in my network leading me to people, his work, it makes more sense to me than almost any other path of a profession and lived experience. Sam Alaimo is here today. He is a fellow substack author of what Then? And his reflections and existential discovery of his life and what he has endured, experienced and chosen through his time as a Navy SEAL and life after has been profoundly impactful on my own reality in reading what his life experience has been. And I think that there is wonderful awareness that profound autism mothers and caregivers can take from learning about Sam's experience as a Navy seal. Sam, thank you so much for being here today.
• 1:18
  Speaker B: Thank you for having me.
• 1:18
  Speaker A: I said to you before we pressed record, I believe that you chose one of the hardest paths on earth and I was drafted into one and then drafted again. Compounded nature that I never in a million years would have chosen. You know, there's no, as I've been told, there's no, there's no bell that I'm ringing at the end. Right. There's. And there's no graduation from my version of hell week. I don't have the ability to deploy and come home to San Diego is incessant. And yet at the same time being that there is the intensity of life and the truth that emerges from such profoundly difficult experiences. I think there's a lot of synergy in what your experience as a SEAL is and was and what I encounter on a day to day basis.
• 2:08
  Speaker B: Yeah, I'm here for it. I think it's gonna be good.
• 2:10
  Speaker A: How, why don't you give a little back background on your time as a SEAL and how that has led to right now, I guess your writing and sharing of that experience and how it has become enfolded into your life after, after your service.
• 2:26
  Speaker B: Sure. I joined in 2007. I went straight to the SEAL team to did a couple tours to Afghanistan. I was there 20, 10, 11, 12 and 13 at a couple different roles while I was there. Each time got a little bit more intense. That was kind of at the peak of the war in Afghanistan and in 2013 I had checked almost every box you could check when it came down to combat experience. And I, I needed a, I wanted a shift in life. I didn't I didn't necessarily know what I joined when I was 19, so I didn't really know what I was missing out on. And it hit me really quickly when I got out the radical shift in just day to day lifting, living. It was, it was, it went from a traditional kind of American upbringing into the military. And that, that fit well for me. I really, really dug it, particularly the SEAL culture. Going from the SEAL combat culture back to everyday American life, that almost broke me. And that was where a lot of my learnings began. That lies at the root of what I write about, at what then. And that's the ongoing problem I'm still writing to find solutions for. It's the theme I love to riff on. How do you get back?
• 3:43
  Speaker A: Same.
• 3:44
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's. It's wild. And that, that ties a lot of fields together, which is exactly what you're doing. It ties together psychology, it ties together philosophy, it ties together theories of, of the body, optimal being. You know, the, the goal is to find. The goal for me was to find how do I attain the sort of cognitive, psychological, emotional aliveness I had in that environment. When I'm in an environment that doesn't demand it of me, that is basically asking me to slow down and take it easy and shut off and shut down and glide and drift. And that is like the thing I love, that's the thing I love digging into and exploring. So I'll, I'll stop there and let you take that one.
• 4:26
  Speaker A: Well, I, you know, you've written about this and you know, what I've learned through, you know, being with a Marine is that your experience at BUDS was engineered to break you down and reveal sort of who remains. When I experience motherhood that I never anticipated nor had an even an inkling of an idea about, even conceptually. It, it did break me down and it did break me to a point of a place where I know it has and continues to reveal who I really am. And that suffering, I think, is actually an illumination point for a lot of people on a similar path. You know, I always say I'm unique in that my world and who's around me day to day in my community. There is not another mother living a parallel life to me with two children, boy and a girl, profoundly autistic and a typical developing daughter. And at the same time, I know that what I'm experiencing is universal and it's allowing me to conceptually understand and actually find such deep impact in the writings that you have of your experience because it resonates in a Sense from a. The death of identity. The death of, you know, knowing that my mission doesn't end. I have to. I have to carve out very consciously my ability to endure. And I'm sure that you probably felt similarly or at least have a parallel, you know, thought structure on that.
• 5:56
  Speaker B: Yeah, I'm learning there's different kinds of fights, and it took me a couple years to figure that one out. And I found the. The more difficult one. I. I'll. I'll elaborate a bit different. Differently. When you're, let's say, in a combat environment, your enemy is very clear. There's people who want to kill you. You're out there hunting them. It's black and white, and it's incredibly satisfying. It's what I would call ancestral. That's how our ancestors in the hunter gatherer days would live. They had to hunt. Every day was a reminder. It's a gift to be alive. That's actually easier than it is to thrive in an environment that is not confronting you with that every day and to construct it for yourself. So the identity when I got out was, who the hell is Sam Limo? What does that even mean? Who am I Without the teams? In the seals, you call it the teams or team guys. There's no individual. You are part of a team. And once you get off that freight train, all of a sudden in the world that you step into, everybody just seems to be doing their own thing. And you are all of a sudden, who. What is this all about? What is the point? That's actually harder. It's harder to construct that. It is a different fight. It's a harder fight. And I think, if I understand what you're saying, you know, you said I had the hardest job in the world. That's not. That's not true, because I chose to do it. And the more difficult ones are the challenges, like the ones you're faced with where you didn't train for that, you didn't actively seek that out, you didn't devote your life to it and feel, thank God I finally got this. And in that way, it is harder, and I would push back on. One thing you said, though, is I think you mentioned something about choice. The remarkable thing about it is you do have a choice.
• 7:37
  Speaker A: Absolutely.
• 7:38
  Speaker B: Every second of every day is a choice. And you are choosing to endure it, and you're choosing to own it. And in that, you create your own new identity, maybe even one that would be better if you weren't immersed in challenge.
• 7:50
  Speaker A: Without a doubt. I mean, I. I come into the the edge of and the friction that I hit in how I live because it's so ingrained for a mother. Looks like me, smells like me, talks like me, lives like I like I live to not ever hit that edge because that edge is so deeply uncomfortable. And that edge requires my, the activation. I'm sure that you've done that. You know that my, my, my autonomic NER nervous system are constantly in competition with each other. So there's a lot of strength that comes from listening to that that a lot of typical mothers think they're hitting the edge on. But as someone who was a typical mother for a few years of her life, you believe what you tell yourself and pushing that I know there's a choice. Everything is a choice. And I get, I'm sure you hear this too. I hear so often. Well, it's not really, I mean, I can't do X. Yes, you can. Absolutely. And I'm telling you right now, I get laughter when I share in talks that if someone right now Sam said all right, all expense paid trip for you and your kids in Hong Kong for three months, but you got to get there in 12 hours, I'd be like, done like, well, how do you. It doesn't, it doesn't. No, I can do it. And I don't say that from a place of like superiority or like anger towards typical or other mothers. It's that nothing feels like a hurdle anymore because I know I have a choice. I don't think a lot of people, and it sounds like what you're saying is that when you emerge yourself back into civilian life, you realize that that is prolific or pervasive. I guess amongst typical civilian society, people think that they don't have a choice.
• 9:46
  Speaker B: Yeah, like the ultimate. To go back to, you mentioned existentialism, the ultimate choice is the choice that to exist or not. And that's the most fundamental choice anybody could ever make. Like if you remind yourself, a lot of philosophical schools are grounded on that belief. If you remind yourself you choose to be here every moment, everything else by necessity becomes a choice. And when you compare it to the ultimate, everything else is just a little bit easier than that. And what you're talking about is even, even better because you, you've incrementally grown stronger and because you've dealt with this big challenge. What are all these little challenges? They're just little obstacles that you're going to knock over and control and control. They're not going to break you down. You're going to break them. That is A great comparative philosophy. And that's the result of being in a perpetual hardship environment, which is what you're talking about. The deployment that never ends. You're in the zone. And that is like a really invaluable and I would say ancient perspective.
• 10:40
  Speaker A: Well, there's again it. Whether it's accepted a truth that's accepted that when I am with my children, I necessary of me to be hyper fixated on their safety and health. And most women and mothers, that phase of motherhood dissipates over time because your children develop to become more and more independent. When your children don't develop typically that what that puts on the system of my body as a mother is constantly making me rewire to hyper vigilance which actually ends up in turn when I'm not around my children having the ability to stay present, stay in the. Now I've. I flexed a muscle that I would never have flexed in the capacity that it is being flexed when I'm not with them. Right. And it, it's like I. A lesson I never wanted to learn. Wiping fecal matter off of a wall at 4 in the morning, that's not what I wanted to learn, you know, but because that 4am decision of yep, never again can put her into pajamas that zip up the front. I mean it's, it's such a specific example of it, but it's, it's allowed me to stay so focused on the next right decision to make. I wanted to take that, what you said though, back from whenever you were in active combat with your team. Because that is something that if you were to ask me right now, what do I need? What. What can I actually control? I would like to have more of a team that allows me to be the best mother, to aid Millie and Mac into becoming the best versions of who they are meant to be and to. And to stay alive and healthy. What I'm realizing in the caregiving world is that I have to create that team and I also have to build that trust from a sense that institutions used to build that my children would 50 years ago be institutionalized. So there were teams there that taken care of them. Now that team is back at home is unchosen. How would you advise someone like me to create that team? Because the fatigue and burnout was what I'm hearing from so many mothers in my. The population I serve is becoming so profound and they need to set up their team.
• 12:54
  Speaker B: Yeah, that is. I'm not even sure how to approach that one. It is, it is a. Your challenge is so foreign to me. I don't even know how to approach the concept of a team. You're in combat. If you're alone, the odds are like, like buds SEAL training from day one. If you're caught alone, you'll have the shit beat out of you. Like that is a no, no. And then if you do that again, you'll be kicked out of training. You don't belong. You have a swim buddy with you everywhere you go. You're not allowed to go to the bathroom if you're not, if you're alone, not allowed to sleep if you're alone. You don't have to do anything. And the whole point is, because you have a mission and to make sure the mission gets accomplished, there have to be multiple people there in case you happen to go down. If you're injured or killed, yours is different. And I'm trying to like define if.
• 13:40
  Speaker A: My mission is for Millie and Mac to have their neurological wiring and health, the system of their body grow and develop in a way that allows them to achieve the maximum amount of independence once they hit adulthood. The requirement of me when I'm in there, when they're in my care 247 requires. Mark always jokes with me. I mean, I need an xo. Like I need. I don't have one. I don't have one. So I am that person. And then I'm. And I'm also doing the executing. I need the logistics of. It is a lot, for lack of a better word. And I know that it is in the power and capabilities of every mother in my position to do so. How do you, how would you, based on your training, verbalize that to women who look to me and say, well, I can't do what you do.
• 14:35
  Speaker B: I, I like that. Okay, the phrasing is good. Basically what we would do is work backwards from a mission. If the mission is a capture mission located in some remote valley in Afghanistan, what do you need to successfully accomplish that mission? You're going to need your team, a certain number, certain qualifications on the team. You're going to need your error assets to infill and exfill. You're going to need your overhead air assets. There's a whole measure of support that goes into that same thing for you. If that is your long term goal, what can you yourself accomplish? And then when and how is it necessary to outsource the particular intricacies that get you there that you're not going to be able to do? And it's not that you, you can't do it. It's that that one human being is only capable of so much to raise two people and get them to a long term goal a couple decades from now. And I would just start to whittle away at that one, which is what you've already done, and identify who are the. Who are the specialists who are the best to help out with this particular function of education or this particular function of play or this one for socializing. I think that's probably the best parallel I can come to when it comes down to a combat environment compared to what you're doing.
• 15:39
  Speaker A: Well, what you're saying too, again from an evolutionary biology, I really. If I could suspend time right now, I want to go back and get my PhD in evolutionary biology. I find it fascinating because as you were saying, that's what primally has made. Who we are now is based on humans thousands of years ago who were tribal and had teams and they were looking to survive every day. And I say this with like no bit of sarcasm. I have to keep my children alive every day. That is just the truth. If I leave the home and there are doors unlocked, someone will be in the middle of 22 on Highway 22. I don't mean that in a bad way. That's just the reality. They will find water and they are going to find freedom in their roaming and whatever that gives them. My daughter will probably find Moss and I will find her in the Watchong reservation studying Moss. Right. My son will be at the bottom of a lake. It's just the truth. And it's not to say that that reality is wrong. It's that what that requires to build the team is in order to actually make them functioning and growing in that individual independence is a specific set. Specific only to me and to Millie and Mac and a specific only to that other mom. I guess when I, my, my final question, that is the intuition of. From a primal sense that you have had to have with your team when you were deployed feels really similar to the intuition that I have about keeping my children alive and healthy.
• 17:10
  Speaker B: Yeah. What you're saying is almost motivating in a way because it is a. You're you. You have to be in the zone, you have to be in a low state. Which means this is kind of the comparative stuff I like to do is that compared to someone not in your situation, someone not in combat, someone with let's like, let's say a, a normal life, whatever that means, one that's not completely engaged in this day to day struggle, they're actually going to Be dealing with quite a bit of rumination, anxiety, listlessness, meaninglessness. What do I do? What's the point of this moment? I have nothing I have to do right now. Whereas what you're talking about is you're thinking long term, but acting in the immediate present to attain that long term goal. To me that's the ultimate, the ultimate combination. You know what you're working for long term. But because life is uncertain, you can't just bank for some future goal. You also have to live for the instant in this perfect second right now.
• 18:03
  Speaker A: Correct.
• 18:04
  Speaker B: And that is, that is on. That is vibrantly alive. That's all pistons in the brain firing at the same time.
• 18:08
  Speaker A: It's, it's so damn cool to live like that. Like I know Sarah, at 42 years old would not be the best Sarah have had I not had like my body built these children. These are not children that I adopted. These are not like they are of me, they are from me. My body kept them alive like with my own processes of my body for the first two years of their life. That's true. And because of that, because that didn't end, it rewired me to a flow state, to at least less anxious state, to an ability to harness my sympathetic nervous system to do things, to rewire myself. Because I. Because it already did. It did so. By a choice that I didn't make. So it makes you take pause and go, I didn't choose that. Now I can choose this. I can choose to do the hard thing in a different capacity, in a different part of my life, in a completely removed situation. Guess what? It's not that freaking hard. That scares a lot of people. That scares a lot of mothers and caregivers because they think their capacity is X when it's actually X. To the X. Nth degree.
• 19:24
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's part of the, I would say enculturation. It's hard to just step into that at full speed. There's gotta be an incremental process. Especially if you're starting from a life where that, that's just not normal, which most of us did. That's where I started before I, I joined and, and went to buds where it was like a freight train and you hang on. But yeah, there's a lot we're missing. If you go back to the, the primal analogy where that was normal from day one, you're there, there's countless pictures and stories of 12 year old girls taking care of multiple children. Yes, that was just. It was normal. It wasn't traumatic. It Wasn't too much responsibility. That was your day to day, second, second existence. And because of that, what you didn't see then was this profound anxiety of what am I doing? I. Who am I to handle this? This isn't, this isn't supposed to be what life is about.
• 20:13
  Speaker A: Correct.
• 20:13
  Speaker B: Life just was. And it was a natural cycle and you were ingrained in the tribe and you were constantly useful. And in a lot of ways it's good. The freedom is, it's a paradox. The freedom we have right now is exceptional. Freedom is always exceptional. But until that freedom is used in a way that makes a life better as opposed to arguably worse for a lot of people it becomes like a form of limbo. Like it's almost a curse.
• 20:37
  Speaker A: Yes, I've. I'm sure that you've thought about this. Growing up painfully American, right? Painfully typically American, born in 1983, I was conditioned from the culture I grew up in to my parents choices in life. And whether I believe it or not, it wasn't until I found more eastern philosophy, well before I became a mother did I start to dapple with. I don't, I mean I believe my body and mind are one. Right? Like I don't believe that the mind controls the body. I believe that we are in complete unison together. And that separates viscerally when a shock to your system occurs when it comes to your offspring. And I think the community of the primal villages and the primal womanhood, primal feminine, primal masculine, what we did innately, I would love to study and go back to it on the lens of my actual reality now because mother's intuition of what their children need to develop and stay on whatever path they, that that unique individual is on. The data of my role can never be replicated. There is no other mother that I can go to and say what do you think I should do next for Mac? I don't believe that her data in being a mother would ever trump my data as his actual mother. And that for me has been one of my like charges recently, is to remind mothers in situations like mine that you, you know, that is actually one of the oldest sciences is the mother is a maternal intuition. It needs to be treated as data for that development. And that your team that you set up around that needs to respect that as 51% of the leading reason why the mission is going to be completed for your child. We've lost that in society, we've lost that in motherhood. We've allowed for the mental portion of it to be diluted because emotional Swirl is too much. Or, you know, they, they credit anxiety or depression or whatever life's handed to them. They have an answer for why they are like how they are. They don't retain the ability of that mental state and to harness that for the science of knowing. The science of knowing your child, that's primal. You know, I, I would love to talk to your mom. I. She's never going to tell me anything that that would translate to my son, but she would tell you things about you that no other woman probably could in your life.
• 23:20
  Speaker B: Yeah. I wonder how you would approach that. You talk about like the, the intuition. We would call it tribal knowledge in the military and something that is written in no code book, no training manual. It doesn't exist on a piece of paper. It's tribal knowledge. It's not quantified, it's not in an academic journal. How would you go about approaching that and, and trying to codify, put into words, this ancient thing you're talking about, which everybody knows exists and very few people can actually articulate?
• 23:48
  Speaker A: Here's a question that just rose up for me. Who or what kind of person do you trust since Sam Alaimo's identity and I guess your reentering to civilian society, who, what are the kinds of people that you trust now? Not being an active duty seal in society, in civilian life, but it depends.
• 24:11
  Speaker B: On like what kind of trust you're talking about and to what extent. I trust, yeah, family, always. But it's like each individual human has experiences nobody else is going to understand. When it comes down to the experiences I had in the military, I trust the guys I served with, who got it around in the time I did, who I stay very close with and, you know, compare what it was like then, what it's like, how we all happen to go be going through the exact same problems psychologically and physically and match it up and then begin to put words to it. It's through a conversation, through dialogue, an iterative process. And it's actually fascinating to watch how it changes over time. Three months out versus two years out versus ten years out. And how what at first was extremely difficult, something almost of a curse, has become a blessing. Because if it weren't for that suck and that suffering, I wouldn't have the perspective and the wisdom and the knowledge I do now, which is going to continue to grow because the more you lean into that, as opposed to leaning away from it and really dig into it and make something of it instead of just stifling it, silencing it and putting it away and just not wanting to look at it because it's uncomfortable. That becomes a major thing in life that's just fun and meaningful to chew on and think on. And then through the right conversation, maybe.
• 25:31
  Speaker A: You'Ve helped other people with it, but there is. What's rising in the community of women caregivers like myself is we've tended to be culturally invisible in the whole scheme of autism as it's grown into more of a larger spectrum. And, you know, I speak a lot to not wanting to have this erasure button because I do believe that there's low support needs, autism, there's neur. I love the competitive edge of neurodiverse minds and how people can think and how because of the situations that they grew up in where their parents honored who they were becoming, they're able to be working in an environment for corporate America and beyond that is different because they think and are wired differently. And I love that. And the children that I'm raising, being profoundly disabled and needing 247 care, have become a little bit culturally invisible because our reality is too much to accept as a whole, as a culture. Do you feel that your experience as a. As a SEAL is accepted culturally? Do you feel like your. How you speak about, you know, how differently yourself changed in the face of that chaotic event and in coming back and sort of wrestling with who you are now? Is that more accepted? Because people love, like, oh, man, you are a seal. Like, you're a seal. Tell me about that. People love that story, but maybe don't love the reality of my child might eat drywall if I'm not looking. I mean, that's just. I have to. But that story's a little bit harder to accept because I live within the community of the typical. Your experience was outside the typical.
• 27:13
  Speaker B: There is an exact parallel.
• 27:15
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 27:16
  Speaker B: And it's been written of. A lot of World War II authors would write about this one. And the writings themselves aren't popular because of what I'm about to tell you. And the majority of people don't go to war. The majority of people don't have autistic children. What they like is the idea that you're going through this challenge, and there's something noble and beautiful about going through a challenge, and they want to hear about the highlights of it. They do not want to hear about the bad parts. So do I think that people understand or are curious about what seals have gone through, what anybody in combat has gone through? Without a doubt. There's movies made about it. There's Books written about it, there's people on podcasts. But the moment someone on a podcast starts talking about the worst parts, everything shuts down. No one's going to want to listen to that. It makes, it makes you uncomfortable. It's. It's just purely uncomfortable. It. It is, it is. There's two. There's the main.
• 28:09
  Speaker A: Uncomfortable doesn't equal unsafe, though. That's why I always say uncomfortable is not equivalent to unsafe, but not in.
• 28:17
  Speaker B: The everyday, quote unquote normal of people who do not have to engage in that sort of environment. The primal.
• 28:22
  Speaker A: How is it unsafe to accept the statement of your reality? How is that unsafe?
• 28:28
  Speaker B: That's a psychological thing. I can't answer. But I do know if you're not encultured to it, it is out of this world. It's uncomfortable. I don't want it because in my world right here with my coffee and my house and my job, it doesn't fit. And I want it to interrupt my day to day. I. I can't. I can't. I can't figure out why. And I was probably that way too before. Before I went in the military.
• 28:48
  Speaker A: The Sarah that had her first daughter on 72nd in Columbus, next to Central Park. I want to like whack a mole her and go get the fuck out of here. Like, I'm so sorry that it was difficult to get your daughter on the train. Like, and I don't shame myself for that past version. I wish I could instill the desire to want to know the realities of people like mine.
• 29:13
  Speaker B: It's. It's hard, it's almost impossible without having gone through it even again. Like, watching a movie about it simply isn't the same. That, that's cathartic. Like two hours in a movie is just like, oh, that was interesting. I kind of felt a little bit. It's not the same as the reality of it. The actual human suffering, that is a totally different perspective. And once you get it, you don't forget it. It might atrophy over time, but forever is perspective shifted. And forever is, like you said before, in the moments where, like, you're not immersed in the worst parts, everything's just bright and easy. Like, life is just a joy, you.
• 29:45
  Speaker A: Know, it's like, again, I. I am so thankful that I get to live the life that I do. And I'm not. There's no, like, there's no smoke being blown there. It's really, really, really fucking hard. And I am so thankful that, like, a crisp bunch of blueberries that my son tastes for the first time. And he's never tasted a blueberry because God forbid, the texture is different because every blueberry is different. Every Nutri grain bar is the same, but every blueberry is different. I, it teach teaches me so much presence and so much actionable agency over this wild and precious life that we get to live that I would never in a million years not want to share the realities of the really wild underbelly that most people don't think even exists. What is something now that you can, you know, even the credit to that, like what, what do you study now to make you have more grand realizations about what you've experienced? Is it, you know, like I say, existentialism? Is it stoicism? Is it storytelling? I think as a female, I believe in the power of stories and our stories and the shared lived experience from a cultural standpoint. What is that for you?
• 31:02
  Speaker B: I think at this point, everything I try to try to build it into like the worldview. There's the physical. I just like the like hardcore physical challenge of you're running so hard. All that literally exists at this point in the world is just breath. There's nothing else. Whatever's on your mind, whatever stress, whatever worry, anxiety, it can't function because your body just wants to stay alive by getting one more ounce of oxygen in your bloodstream. Hot and cold, sonic, cold plunge. That is just illuminating. But then when it comes down to like studies, everything, philosophy, the right literature, history's epic. It's. There's dry history, but then there's a good history. I like, I like memoir. I like the individual's experience of history. Not just, you know, this happened on this date in 1944. And in doing that you're, you get to experience the existential posture of somebody who went through extraordinary difficulty. And then you begin to make sense of your own perspective as well. They might look at it in a different way and that can shape your day to day. That's. You take a storytelling that's ancient mechanism and like think about how much the Iliad and the Odyssey guided millions of people every single day. It still does 2,800 years later. There's a reason for that. We are meaning making creatures. We need to find meaning. And it is, there's no reason to make up our own meaning at any given moment when we have three or four thousand years of written history to pull from. And before that, for hundreds of thousands of years, we had an oral history to take those things and then begin to relate to them. Well, what if Achilles, actually, you know, what? If Achilles didn't mourn Patroclus, how would things have gone differently? And because he did mourn and rage, what does that say about him and me when I mourn and rage? And is it going to end up in the same outcome? Am I going to kill Hector? Like, there's a million ways to spin this and play with it and think about it, which is fun in itself, but then it begins to save your life.
• 32:52
  Speaker A: Yeah, I. I think another theme that's emerged, I just heard you say about mourning. Grief is like a true timeline or a true nonlinear timeline. Right. And it. And it pops up in different ways. Have you experienced grief at all for. For your experiences?
• 33:10
  Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
• 33:13
  Speaker A: That.
• 33:14
  Speaker B: That was really what shaped my entire experience, was my first acquaintance with, like, violent death. That was a. That was stunning. That shaped everything. After that, it shaped my whole life right now. You know, after that, every. When you see someone who's just absolutely vibrantly engaged and dynamic and alive, just getting after it like a good seal, and then a fraction of a second later, life takes on a different meaning. It's not just this thing we just have. It's the thing that can disappear in a fraction of a second for no good reason whatsoever. And it is a gift. And then you begin to live not just like, well, how do I make the most of my life? You begin to realize, well, you have the thing that was taken from them, and now it's almost an obligation to do something worthwhile with it.
• 34:06
  Speaker A: Yeah. The obligation that grief reveals is so powerful. It is absolutely so powerful. I think that there, I believe that grief is the receipt we wave in the air that says, we love. We. We love. Whether that's purpose, a child, a relationship, a career, a place, a family unit, I never want to take away from the fact that human life is a loss much more than anything else. Loss exists in the loss of what you've been conditioned to believe to be true or expected as well. And it completely rewrote how I've lived in a way that has brought me back to the most fundamental. Sarah. The most fundamental thing of what? I could talk about this stuff all day long. I love it. I love thinking about why I even am thinking about this. And it is because my children are not conditioned by anything that the world expects. And I think to myself all the time, to bear witness and to have created individual humans like that is honestly one of the most powerful, unchosen lessons I've ever learned that I get to do this. And they are not shaped by anything that you and I were shaped at, you know, in growing up. And it's still grief over the loss of the life that I thought I would live as a mother. And that'll probably always be there. It'll probably always, you know, the realization that I landed in a place that I never would have chosen. And yet here I am, more of myself than I probably ever would have been in the place that I had desired to land in.
• 35:40
  Speaker B: That's the adventure of life.
• 35:41
  Speaker A: It's amazing. It's absolutely amazing. You know, before we end, I would love to talk one more time about that tribal brotherhood because I in the audience, in the, I guess the tribe I'm looking to create and continue to grow of the Caregiver Mother, the 247 profoundly profound autism mom, what do you think happens if that tribe isn't found? Or what would you think? Why in waging war alone, as you said, you get kicked out. How can I encourage that mindset within others? Because it takes a lot for women and mothers in my position to even desire to find their team because they think that they're not worthy of it, or they see it as weakness, or they see it as what can I even offer to someone that's already, that's already in the trenches themselves. You know, what is that? What, what can we do with that tribe? And why would, why should anyone in my situation use the minimal energy they have left at all to do anything? Why should they want to find a tribe?
• 36:49
  Speaker B: I don't know the answer, so I'll just try to riff on that one a little bit. I think that I'm hardcore individualist. I'm, I'm, I'm western to my core. I always will be. It was the environment I grew up in. I love it. I love Theodore Roosevelt kind of philosophy. However, once I experienced the antithesis of that in the military, the tribal life which was what the west eradicated for the Enlightenment, the individual enlightenment, individual autonomy, hands down exceptional. I think we've forgotten that in the pre state era. Think, think more. Hunter gatherers. That they were a tight knit band. They viewed themselves as the people. They called themselves, all of them unanimously by different names, called themselves the people. Everybody else was something other you belonged to. But it was a crucial factor in their lives that you were able, willing and able to leave at any point you want. You were always free. So they, they struck this and, and the, the reason that was built in there was to prevent tyranny. This, this great. One of my favorite anthropologist, Pierre Claustre, he wrote about this a lot. He was almost like you call him like a political anarchic ethnographer. And his ideas certainly aren't mainstream, but they make sense. And his belief was that the reason why you had this fail safe mechanism where everybody was allowed to le was to prevent the consolidation of power. So what you had was this awesome combination of an extraordinarily tight knit bond, not even necessarily by blood, but by togetherness, by mutual desire to live a good life and survive, but also this radical independence. And I think what we did at present is we focused too much on the independence and think that any sort of community, any sort of tribe, is an assault on our individual being, when in fact it's the exact opposite. And to find that balance, when I found it, it was one of the most satisfying things I ever found in my life. When I lost it, that was what almost broke me because I was me individual. What does that mean? Why does that even matter in the end if it's just me alone on the earth? I would say just from that perspective alone to know what it's like to share every moment, to be mutually, I don't want to say dependent, but mutually so involved that it, it becomes a matter of life and death. But it's done by choice. With people that you love and have chosen and have chosen to love you because you've, you've contributed to the band, you offer something unique in yourself. I don't, I don't see much of a point in life without it.
• 39:15
  Speaker A: That's, again, that's, I think what any mother in a parallel universe or parallel life of mine would say is that when you find another mom who just simply believes you or the like deep belief that what you're sharing about your reality or what you're doing in tandem to her is believed and it's not scary and it's not too much and it's not, it's not exacerbated and thrown into a flowery language of, you know, glossing over like, oh, it's not that bad or it's not that hard when you find that someone says, I believe you, I believe that that is a tribe tribal messaging of the mothers of who I serve. Because if you believe people and you believe someone is experiencing at the same time in real time what you are, there is nothing like that from, from my unique experience. There's nothing else like that. I can have every mother in the world tell me, gosh, I don't know how I could do what you do. You are, you are such an inspiration to mothers. I do not care what those mothers think. The one I do need is the mom who I text at 4:00am that's that. And who says, I just got so and so back to bed. Or I've actually been up for 24 hours. And you know, this is the fourth time this week. The mother who and then is still trying to find answers to make their child's life more independent and more full of agency as they age in a community and society that's not meant for them. It's a really cool tribe to be a part of and I never would have chosen it.
• 40:53
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, beautiful.
• 40:55
  Speaker A: Never would have. But here we are. And it's. I'm really thankful for how you share and how you share how your identity grows, shifts and is revealed as you age in your time after your active duty service. And listen, there's no posturing here. You and I can't perform. We're just two people who've probably been to war in different capacities saying stay in the fight and keep doing it without applause.
• 41:20
  Speaker B: 100%.
• 41:22
  Speaker A: Sam Alaimo, thank you very much. I will be listing where you can find Sam's work on Substack in the summary of the episode. And if anyone is looking to figure out more about Sam's business and his life's work, it will all be found on the episode afterwards. Thank you so much, Sam. And until next time on the Inchtons podcast.