Mark Kennedy: 'From Millstone to Milestone'

All contributors of the Serein Lark Review are interviewed for our blog.

You can read Kennedy's interview here!

In this invocative, personal piece of creative non-fiction, Mark Kennedy explores his past unapologetically and reveals a layer of introspection that is both fresh, relatable, and saturated with tangible characterisation. A quiet moment plucked out of time and memory; recollected and presented tenderly. In only a few concise sentences, I was enthralled and convinced it belonged here, and I hope that it will find a place in your heart, dear reader, as it did mine.

I stormed into the house and slammed the front door. Mom appeared in the doorway of the kitchen and, seeing my split lip, said, “What happened?”

“I got into a fight,” I said.

“Over what?” 

“Another kid was making fun of my teeth,” I said. “What happened to them,

anyway?”

Even though I was 14, it was the first time I’d had the courage to ask the question

that had been tormenting me. The millstone was just too ponderous to ignore any longer.

Without a word, she turned on her heel and led me into her bedroom. Digging

around in her closet, she came back out with a small bundle of crinkly blue tissue paper. As she unwrapped it, she told me I’d had false teeth when I was little.

I noticed for the first time that we stood eye to eye. With a flourish, she plucked

something from the center of the baby blue jumble and thrust out a small device. She said it was a plate of four front baby teeth a dentist had made for me. 

“Your teeth rotted out and the dentist made this.” 

“How old was I?” 

“Three.” 

There was a pause. 

“Your teeth rotted out and since you wouldn't wear the plate, your permanent

teeth came in crooked.” That was the longest sentence she’d ever said to me, and I couldn’t find any reply. I should have said, “Rotted out? From what? How could that even happen to a three-year-old?” But I had long followed her lead and kept my emotions locked down and my thoughts to myself.

She thrust out the miniature set of teeth held together by a tiny reproduction of

the roof of a mouth and, my knuckles swollen and fingers stiff from the recent encounter, I palmed the tiny curiosity. For a split second our hands touched. It was the first time I remember her touching me, and it felt like that time the week before when I’d been working on the car and accidentally let two wires touch. 

Peering at the impossibly small replica, I was struck by how dinky it was, yet not

comprehending how something so insignificant could be so significant. Handing the device back to her, I silently walked out of the room. 

Years later, after she was long gone, a late-in-life divorce spurred me to begin

looking for answers to my early life and I remembered that afternoon. The quest led to the crucial unasked question of that conversation: what caused my mother to be so remote and affectless?  The answer lay in the surprising diagnosis I received at the end of that post-divorce pilgrimage: I had hidden lifelong autism and ADHD, or, AuDHD. Further, I learned neurodivergence runs in families, although the terminology was not available in her lifetime. Mom was almost surely autistic herself, yet something so central and painful had eluded her for her entire life. 

With that understanding that my newly visible foe had been lurking through the

generations, I found I could finally see Mom clearly, and the cause of the shortcomings and limitations we shared became plain. I could see the tiny false plate as just the first marker on my journey to wholeness, the millstone transformed into a milestone. And having received the grace of receiving the answer to the central question of my life, an answer Mom never got, I began to view her differently, offering her the grace she had never felt.

The End.