get a grip
Into the night and our deep sleep comes the blare of an alarm. History repeats. Emergency emergency wake up wake up, the alarm screams, and cartoon me jumps up and runs immediately into the wall, while the real not-yet-lucid me picks up my phone, swings my legs over the side of the bed, and pulls open a drawer in search of fast sugar for my son. It’s grace that chronic emergencies like ours teach us a series of automatic responses, that before I can think consciously about what’s happening I am already on my way down the hall, speaking in shorthand over my shoulder to Kevin. Adam’s blood sugar is 42. I have been here before, I remember; I am here now, feeling the chill of the hall beneath my feet. This will happen again, and I will be with Adam the next time, too.
At the end of the hall, Adam and I say nothing. I open the door and he is up on his elbow extending a tender hand, waiting for me to pour gummies into it. By the time I return to my room, he’s padding down the hall to the bathroom. He’ll settle himself back in and hopefully fall asleep again. Very likely, he’d heard the alarm. He’d been quietly waiting for me, trusting.
As for me, I will climb back into bed having just recovered full consciousness, suddenly feeling completely untethered. What time is it? I feel a growing sense of alarm I did not feel until I woke up enough to lean on my own understanding. These things usually happen at 2. Or 3. In futility, I try to measure the light glowing around the edges of the curtain. Starlight? Or early dawn? Because if it’s dawn, why bother going back to sleep?
It’s true that moments ago I looked at Adam’s blood sugar reading on my phone, but in those moments, I had no presence of mind to notice the hour. I extend my arms now, reaching ahead of me for obstacles, touching walls, bedding. Darkness blots out most of what I can see, but so it is with emergencies. There is no time, no planning, no sensible thinking at all when urgency takes over. It doesn’t matter, I think, curling into Kevin, but my mind has already begun to consider the day ahead and its requirements, assessing physical needs as well as emotional ones. I could lay awake for hours creating outlines and plans in my head. So I try for stillness and begin to pray, opening a tender hand, because I know that prayer reasserts the truth.
For me, prayer in the night comes down to a series of anchoring phrases: God…the one who is, who was, who is to come…help, please. I need you. In insecure places, that is the only truth, the only thing really to grip: God inhabits all of it. Whatever was, He is; whatever is, He is; whatever will be, He is. “I AM who I AM,” God told Moses. “Tell my people, I AM sent you (Exodus 3:14).” Like Adam, I wait in the dark, trusting.
In the morning, I remember this, walking into my office at the exact moment Adam comes twisting out, whirling like a wind-blown leaf, turning on his heels in the doorway. He does this. Walking, for Adam, looks more like a dance. As I wander through the doorway and discover my planner turned on the desk like a book someone has suddenly left mid-read, I develop a hypothesis:
Adam spins as he walks because it’s the only way he can move forward and still see what’s beside and behind him.
Avoidance of the unknown remains the single most obsessive concern in the lives of my Autistic two, so much so that they memorize my planner as the map to their lives, both of them checking it multiple times a day. It occurs to me suddenly, in light of last night, that while my children believe this attention keeps them secure, such intention is really only possible from places of safety. They are already safe, or they could not afford to be so methodical.
Rigidness, predictability, and routine are allies to those adrift in a miasma of uncontrollable events, because they assert, if in a delusional way, our ability to impose order upon circumstances too complicated for us to comprehend or manage independently. Human cleverness has made time management a skill, a market, a subcategory of self-help. We sometimes believe that with the right grid, highlighters, and attitude, we could rise above the stress we feel over arriving at some unpredictable moment unprepared. We’re smart; we can create some special shoes that will keep us from falling over the cliff. If we study the planner hard enough, if we keep it well enough, we won’t feel so vulnerable.
A good friend of mine grew up on a sheep farm. Recently, she shared with me some of the wisdom she gained from the experience. She said, “People think sheep are dumb animals, but sheep are actually very smart. For sheep. They habitually do smart things to protect themselves. But sometimes, when I’m trying to help them, they bruise themselves trying to get away from me because they don’t understand what I’m doing or why or when things will be different. They get confused. They’re smart. For sheep. But that doesn’t mean they can understand the things that I do or that they can understand the timeline of events or that they’re smart enough to know who I am and to decide to trust me. I’m too tall; they can’t even see me very clearly. Listen, it’s not just coincidental or cute that God used sheep as a metaphor for people, or that Jesus called himself a shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep. It’s a brilliant comparison.” She laughed then, her grin wide, twisting with her fingers the ginger braid that fell loosely over her shoulder. “I can see that because I’m smart. For a human.“
Smiling over the memory, I straighten the planner on my desk, thinking of so many occasions when my children have stared at me in shock after some sudden change of plans defied all their careful attention to time, when emergencies of every kind have left them with no way to avoid the facts about our human vulnerability. It’s grace, really, that from time to time God wakes us to the unreliability of our own understanding. “In all your ways, acknowledge me,” He says, “and I will make your paths straight (Proverbs 3:5). His story repeats, and so, I gather my children in and teach them again how to pray, how to wait in the dark with an open hand and trust.
Dear God…the one who is, who was, who is to come…help us, please. We need you.
