fresh cut
Rigidity is a Spectrum curve, one we’ve worn to a polish, fast slipping our way through so often that we know the feel of it by heart. After all, we’ve got not one track here, but two, and even though the trajectories spin differently, that particular curve is common to both.
Something starts fresh, like the counting of gifts, and we turn around and press our hands up flat against it, catching a sticky bit on one finger to taste. The habit is at first sweet, the flavor complex with intention and purpose.
She notices how I count one thousand gifts; how I fill pages and timelines and jars with gratitude; how I can’t stop saying thank you, and she brings me her journal one day and flattens the crease in the middle with her hand. She shows me what she has written carefully there like a rainbow, every word a different color. She grips the pens in her other hand, and it’s the first thing she’s listed:
colored pens.
“That’s true,” I say to her, smiling. “You do love colored pens.”
Come to think of it, rainbow pens are just about the only thing she ever wants to buy with her spending money. It grips me, how without knowing it, she chooses to write nearly every single thing that’s important to her as a spectrum of visible Light; that a Spectrum is something she herself represents; that these rainbows are wildly unbound, always partially unseen, and yet orderly—even in some ways predictable—beauty. They say that a rainbow is always a full circle—eternally round, like a full embrace, but we only see the upper half, the full lit drops above the horizon in our line of sight. It takes my breath, the idea that God has chosen this divine and vibrant pattern, this untouchable, uncontainable, uncaptured bending of light through water to remind Him of His own covenant with us.
Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth (Genesis 9:16).
It is the grandest gesture, the way He takes the same droplets that once cleansed the earth of evil and bends His Light right through the middle of each until it reflects against the back side. It is an illumination that changes a flood-seed into a baptism. And so, the cleansing water becomes not a curse but the promise that He will cut redemption right out of Himself. Truly, He bends Himself right clear into human flesh, and as His light shines back from the deepest parts of the soul, the result is a wildly unbound, partially unseen, and yet somewhat predictable beauty. And so my children reflect the Promise, and she, she even writes her thank you’s right under the arc of it.
“What else?” She has picked up the journal. She lifts it up, turning the page away because she wants to read to me. She is lit just like those droplets.
“Number 2,” she says dramatically, and I can tell that the numbering pleases her. Sequencing is solid, orderly. The round, black dot behind each number is something we expect, a hasty and yet meaningful blotch. “Daddy washing dishes.”
“Mmmhmm,” I say, because without it she will not continue.
“Number 3. Cauliflower,” she says, looking up, pleased, waiting to see that I approve. Her gifts feel random, as though she reaches into a mystery bag and extracts them with giggly bravado. And yet, on her face, I see nothing but absolute sincerity.
Wildly unbound, partially unseen, and yet, in some ways, predictable.
Her offering is art; an eclectic delicacy. Her list is fresh, deliciously genuine. I press my hands flat against the sides of it, breathing in the new smell. And so these things begin.
But on another day, somewhere around gift 699, I find her standing in the kitchen, copying the meal plan on the refrigerator into her journal. She turns to me, as if this is as perfectly rhythmic as breathing, and says, “Mom, I have written my thank you’s for TOday.” It is a recitation I have grown used to, and even the cadence at which she pronounces each word, the emphasis of each syllable, feels like a well-traveled groove.
“Okay,” I say, reluctant, looking over her shoulder at the calendar. I know already what she will read out and in what tone, how she will say, “number 699 (pause, beat beat beat) gingerbread muffins, number 700 (pause, beat beat beat) egg salad, number 701 (pause, beat beat beat) Mississippi Roast.” It’s the second week, this listing the meal plan, and listening to it feels a bit like chewing on regurgitated food. It only matters because it’s her, but I’ve noticed that now she just grabs the first pen she can find. It’s something she does because it’s routine, because it makes her feel like everything is under control, not because it matters anymore to give thanks. She’s lost even the care with which she selected her pens.
I have waited the weeks to address her repetition because I know that the redirection must be smooth or it will be traumatic for both of us. It’s as though without warning something once beautiful has been gated into that Rigid, meaningless curve, where the doing becomes a prison and the familiarity is a trap and the sign on the gate she’s erected has been carved from the word FEAR—fear of losing her routine, fear of everything unexpected, fear of disappointing me. Her voluntary offering has become a prison she is afraid to leave.
All children find comfort in their routines, but children with autism do so obsessively. They monitor the new and unexpected from well within the boundaries of schedules and times and predictable outcomes. I know this well. We have traveled this way through a thousand other things, all of which begin with beautiful intention. For Adam, it’s the way he’ll empty a dishwasher even if the dishes are dirty because it’s what he does and when he always does it. For Riley, it’s lately also been the weather – – mindlessly reciting the extended forecast for three cities every morning first thing. In the middle, Kevin sometimes looks at me with weary eyes and says, “Is this how God feels when our prayers, our worship, our giving, even becomes a memorized and meaningless routine?”
And just that quickly, I think, “Yes,” and the thought aches. God says, “I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me (Amos 5:21),” and He means our once vibrant patterns of remembrance that have lost their meaning and become routine and then are not even connected anymore to our hearts. He means our hearts all wrong, all stuck and fallen. He means our comfortable rigid living that isn’t living by faith or love. He says, “There are those who turn justice into bitterness and cast righteousness to the ground (Amos 5:7);” and He says, “seek me and live (Amos 5:5); and He says, “So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth (Revelation 3:16).” So yes, this bland nausea over meaningless repetition is something He knows.
Over the years, I have learned that sometimes the toughest love an autism parent offers his or her Spectrum child is forced change. Perhaps, in the same way, change is God’s tough love for us when it comes to reminding us that it’s all supposed to mean something eternal.
I had been avoiding this issue with my daughter over her gratitude because sometimes it’s hard for human, imperfect me to decide whether it’s worse to listen to the mindless droning, the mind-numbing repetition of nothing—whether it’s worse to just watch them slide back and forth comfortably in an overdone routine, or to bear the weight of their anxiety—the tears, the pleading for what they know when I force them to move on.
So this particular morning, I pull up Ann Voskamp’s Joy Dare on my computer, because this time God grants a way that will feel smooth, like a soundless breaking of the padlock, the careful opening of a gate. This will hardly register with her as a gasp. I can print the calendars Ann has offered, a different prompt for each day, carefully numbered. I know that the order of it, the list, the predictability will soothe her back onto an intentional path, back to a pattern eternally rounded with meaning. Next year, I will have to write my own, new ones to spark her thoughts. I am prepared.
I don’t know if Riley’s memory qualifies as eidetic, but she never forgets things that matter to her – – names, addresses, dates, times, birthdays, and I know that next year, she will remember this year’s three gifts round, three gifts white, three gifts broken. But for now, the Joy Dare offers her a map right out of meaningless repetition and back to a meaningful pattern, and for this I am thankful.
“Why don’t we try something new with your gifts today,” I say to her, showing her the Joy Dare, the freedom page illustrated with elegant birds, for flight.
“Huh?” She says, her tone hard, as though I have jerked her by the hand, interrupting her easy, careful treading.
“See, there’s a different one for each day. Today’s is three gifts in the afternoon,” I say pointing, my thumb on the paper bird perched beside January as we look just below to March.
She nods—an okay, I can do this nod, as she takes the paper from my hand, scanning it with her eyes. “Mmmhmm,” she murmurs, thoughtful. I can see her eyes sparking now, her grin returning. “Let’s see…three gifts in the afternoon….number 702, going to the chiropractor. Wait. I need my pens,” she says almost to herself. And just like that, she’s writing in rainbows again, offering her gratitude beneath the vibrant pattern of Light given, Light bent and reflected back.
I watch her bend over the journal and then sit back, tapping a finger on her lips, looking over the offering already written, and in the picture of her I see the truth: God has given us a smoothly printed thing to hold in our hands, a map for travel, a lens through which to see all new, a solid Sword to break the lock right open on the Fear gate. It is the sharp, fresh cut of Word that keeps the human heart free of calluses.
And now I understand why, when I’m dead stuck and feeling nothing I should, why He presses His Word right into me with His own hands and whispers all through the gentle reshaping,
“So, maybe today we try seeing all new?”
