I don’t like it
How easy it is to sink to that place where the smallest things we do for love don’t feel like love at all, to that shadowland where we believe wholeheartedly in withholding, where we forget that giving is the means to abundance.
Adam sulks over his dinner, flicking his eyes toward me, his look pit-dark. He appeals to me mostly because he knows I require fewer words; I’m an expert in his glares. I know the dip of those shoulders the way I know the change in the color of his face when he’s sick, the way I know the difference between that tone and the pallor of a low blood sugar. I know the way he holds his tongue when he has a bad taste in his mouth. I know that specific slope down at the corners of his mouth when he’s sad. I know that dancing light in his eyes when he’s happy. I know my son so well, which in recognition only makes me gasp. How well then, must God know me.
Adam can barely eat for wanting me to know what’s on his mind, and I can see: This look most certainly announces affront; those eyes, they’re angry, with the murk of something bitter taking root.
I look at Adam and lift my eyebrows in acknowledgement and also in question. Here’s what I’ve learned: Adults with autism are expert communicators; they just don’t use the same language most of us use. It makes sense, really. They’ve lived their whole lives like the immigrants we are, trying to adopt a culture entirely foreign to their way of thinking. But it’s hard to have a significant emotional conversation with someone so devoted to words. I can see why Adam might believe that I am really the one with challenges in communication.
He blinks at me, and it feels like some strange code: short dark, long long long dark, short. I smile a little, thinking this has something to do with the apple Kevin plopped on Adam’s plate right next to his mashed sweet potatoes, a joke Adam considers a crime. We are all shameless about provoking Adam; we love the sound of his voice. Adam, who dislikes most fruit on the basis of texture, had responded briefly, no, grabbing the apple and replacing it in the fruit bowl. And Kevin, unsatisfied by this cursory dismissal of his joke, had continued with verbal taunts, asserting that the apple was as much a part of Adam’s supper as the salmon Adam favors. “Not right now,” Adam had said, with somewhat more volume and disdain, but we had interpreted this to mean nothing more than another way to say, “please stop annoying me,” which is typically Adam’s polite way to put an end to such jests. I feel a tenderness for him, knowing him to be a very old man in a very young body. He sighs over our silliness; He wonders why we must poke at his preferences. He does not understand why we go to such great lengths just to hear him talk. He searches my eyes now, and I can see that he knows I’m not quite getting it.
Conspiratorially, Adam leans, only slightly toward me. “I don’t like it set the table,” he says succinctly, his voice low.
Ah, so that’s it. Just before supper, Kevin had called Adam to put out the placemats, the forks, the napkins, the drinks. This interrupted Adam’s plans; it brought him out of his comfortable reverie and put him to work, and coming from his father, Adam knew that it was not a suggestion.
“Oh, you’re upset because Dad made you set the table,” I say, sitting back in my chair.
Kevin smiles. “Oh is he now?”
And Adam sighs, dismayed that I don’t know how to keep a secret. But I am slow to add things up–the low tone, the careful lean. I thought it my job to intercede and help him back out of the hole, but Adam really only wanted me to listen and commiserate. That’s the difference, I guess, between confession and complaint.
“It’s funny the things that get to us, isn’t it?” Kevin says to me, observing how generally small-minded we humans can be, and then, chuckling, “All it took for Adam was a few placemats and some forks.”
A friend of mine once said that Adam only says what the rest of us are thinking, and I can’t help but smile now, thinking about how often I respond this way to God, how I can get to grumbling. It’s perspective-sickness; it turns things upside-down. Small things become giant; important things become futile. I am tempted to believe in a fun-house mirror view that stands in opposition to the truth. God calls me to service I believe to be insignificant, and feeling inconvenienced, I sulk. I don’t want to acknowledge that I think the task is beneath me, but that’s the honest truth of the bitterness carefully putting down its roots. I can be ridiculously affronted by the smallest of sacrifices, the need to fold the clothes or make a meal or change an empty toilet paper roll again, nevermind lingering to listen or sitting in someone’s suffering. Some work feels so daily and repetitive I don’t even remember being called to do it, even though all of my work is work God prepared in advance for me. And maybe I don’t say it with words, but my glare says, my heart says, “I don’t like it.” I don’t like it empty the trash. I don’t like it have compassion. I don’t like it take up my cross. I, I, I. It’s all just another strain of self-centeredness. Like Adam, sometimes I want God to love me and provide for me without involving me. I want to receive and I don’t want to give, but that just means I’ve underestimated and undervalued what He has given me.
“Oh Adam, turn that frown upside-down,” I say now, patting him affectionately on the arm and gesturing toward his plate. And I smile; and I let him see the glimmer in my eyes. I love you so much, and see, you have a whole feast before you.
