getting answers
“So Adam, what did you do at school today?”
The question, admittedly, feels familiar and worn, like a knob on an oft-opened and oft-slammed door, one we open today like every other day, honestly anticipating nothing save blank space. And for how long, I wonder, sitting here wearing my end-of-the-day weariness like grave clothes, can these conversation starters feel like the door going nowhere before we stop trying to start a conversation?
The Spirit speaks quick: All these years, God keeps starting conversations with you.
He’s right; by comparison, our time at it has been short. Eighteen years, and we still don’t give up, even though our far-from-perfect parenting means sighs sometimes flutter beneath the words and off and on we lose hope, because even though we wouldn’t describe it that way, in certain seasons we stop praying for progress. We balance a fine line, a tightrope stretched between two cliffs, between the acceptance of Adam’s challenges and our dreams for impossible things. I suppose that’s how it goes with Autism; it’s the diagnosis that pegs that rope.
“So Adam, what did you do at school today?” Kevin asks, putting down his dinner fork. Lately God has drawn us back to the truth of His unlimited possibility, to the fact that He provides good, to the reliance on Him that sustains real life. We have been praying for words again, asking for sentences.
I glance up at our son, smiling over the way his hair curves like a comma over his forehead, the snarls his restless hands have left in the back. I want to reach up and smooth the strands against his head; I want to draw my thumb tenderly along the sharp edge of his nubby cheek, but I stop myself, hardly wanting to be a source of distraction. Even so, I don’t expect Adam to be able to answer. He tries, but something immovable has walled up the way. So I am one of Peter’s praying ones, crowded in a house expecting no release, expecting that Adam will only look at us with those hooded eyes, will only murmur no–as in, No, I don’t want to talk–as he usually does, or that if he says anything at all it will not make any sense as an answer to the question. Sometimes he spits out the name of a class, and then Riley interjects that this was not a class they went to today. Or, when pressed for details, Adam makes up something, reaching, speaking in jagged phrases about an activity which, in response to our raised eyes, Riley immediately denies. Tonight, the disappointment of our many failures feels too heavy for me; I wish Kevin had not bothered to ask.
Adam returns my gaze, those startling blue eyes so sharp and smart, and I hope he can’t see my reluctance.
“On PE we did running,” Adam says, still looking at me, flicking his gaze over to his father and back.
I glance at Kevin, because briefly I wonder if I have imagined the words, the full sentence, the deep, deliberate sound of Adam’s voice actually answering. I wonder if I have missed the usual dyspraxic pause, the desperate mental reach for words, Adam’s immediate refusal to try. That’s the trouble with grave clothes, they wrap the ears; they fall, rotten, over my eyes. I sit up, pushing my skepticism away, remembering God. My faith fails, but God’s love is relentless. This time, Adam speaks so smoothly it feels planned, as though he has considered the question already.
“You ran in PE today?” Kevin asks, leaning forward. In our life, this famine of hearing Adam’s words, the tiniest morsel reawakens hunger.
“Yes.”
We glance toward Riley and she nods, carefully chewing, her fork tinking against the plate. She smooths wild, errant curls away from her cheeks, as though this will make it easier to speak at the end of the bite. “Yes,” she says finally. “They put the directions from a map on the gym floor.” She stabs the air with a flat hand, her fingers jutting toward the table. “North, south, east, west. They told us to run in one of the directions, and the last person to get there was ‘out’ and had to stay there and swim.”
“Swim?”
She extends her arms and breaststrokes through the air in front of her. “Swimming is another way to move your body,” she says flatly, dropping her gaze back down to her plate and her dinner.
I smile, remember something a favorite teacher once said about how our loved ones with Autism believe we have the communication challenges (and don’t we, though?), and over this clever game, those teachers who work so hard, and even more, because the new connection with Adam sizzles. I imagine Adam’s teachers, whom we count as a gift, people through whom God extends the reach of His love, intentionally pushing Adam to talk in class, seeing beyond Adam’s obvious challenges to his potential, expecting the sentences for which we’ve prayed, relentlessly teaching him to form them. If it’s so, is it God or those teachers whom we should thank for this progress? And I say both, because everything good comes from God and because God administers grace through people who give themselves away for the good of others.
Even though I will not expect the same evidence of progress in Adam’s responses the next night or the one after that or even the one after that, for the next week Adam will come to our table with a complete sentence to describe his day. It will seem that every day he has prepared for the question. The following week, his sentence structure will improve. He’ll say, “In math today, I did a living room,” and even though Riley will still have to fill-in-the-blanks (dream houses, likely drawn with attention to dimension), I will notice that Adam has taken a step further still, that the walled off way has begun to tumble. Finally, I’ll ask his teachers: Have you been working with him on this? And one will say yes, that knowing Adam has more to say, she has recently refused to let him get by with one or two word answers, that she has worked with him deliberately, relentlessly, hope-fully. And I will smile, telling her gratefully how much this effort, this giving, means to us, and then, I’ll thank God for answering our prayers–just yes–and for never giving up on us.
