I know
“No Band-Aid. Not right now. I don’t like it,” Adam says, the ‘don’t’ coming across pointedly, as though Riley might otherwise misunderstand the rising volume, the sharp tone, in which he speaks. She kneels in front of him, her knees pressing into the floor, brassy hair swinging against bright cheeks, gently tugging at the heel of his right shoe, completely unafraid to confront his vulnerability, completely unafraid to lay her own right down.
I remember this later, mulling it over while I look at my physical therapist’s shoes, the laces bobbing, her feet shifting while she talks and works above me.
“Tell me when this gets unbearable,” she says, pressing her fingers into a knot she has found in the muscles of my back, and I, with my eyes and cheeks pulled tight against that hole in the vinyl padded table, think about tending, how it hurts well before it heals, how I can struggle even to believe in tenderness when I’m still in pain. Funny thing, that stripped back, the Latin root tendere means to stretch or to tense.
“I know, Adam,” Riley had said this morning, her tone light and unoffended but certain, condensing a thousand things she might say to him down to the most crucial. I know.
Here and now, I realize what she didn’t say, that she didn’t minimize his difficulty with her words, that she never even thought about making the situation about herself, even though he had growled at her and tried his level best to sound threatening. It’s sacrificial, serving someone who doesn’t understand they need saving and doesn’t want any help from you.
How many times, I wonder, wincing a little bit as the physical therapist deepens her massage, getting at things I can’t see or get at myself, have I groaned my way through God’s tending of my soul, so focused in the moment on my pain? How many times have I met His transformative work with my complaints? And yet, God is kind to the ungrateful. He is patient with me. He remembers that I am dust, and He knows what it’s like to be a creature of flesh and bone.
He presses his knees right into the floor and keeps right on washing my feet.
The writer of Hebrews wrote that the work of Christ continues even now, that He is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, because He always lives to make intercession for them, and what is that intercession if not, as part of his continual tending to our wounds, the repeated compassionate declaration of the very words Riley chose for Adam? I know.
He knows.
My eyes flood with tears, and I can’t decide if it’s the tending now or the tending then that wells up, but I am, in my heart, in that kitchen still, watching Riley cradle Adam’s foot in her open hands.
She continues her administrations undeterred, carefully peeling back Adam’s sock to expose the wound we’ve been tending all week, the wound Adam hardly acknowledges, before picking up the bandage she has waiting on the floor beside her. Like just about all of us, Adam prefers hiding his injuries to addressing them, and he looks distinctly displeased by his sister’s attention. He flattens one hand and presses it toward her.
“No, no, no, NO,” he says, shaking his head for emphasis, watching intently as she tears open the paper around the Band-Aid.
“I know,” she says again, her voice kind and easy, and I’m sure she does, always has, in fact, known, having intimately experienced what it’s like to feel the burden of overstimulation Adam feels. She has walked in Adam’s shoes for a lifetime, and Jesus has walked in mine, and sometimes I’ve been given compassion so that I can extend it to someone else. God wants to use my sisterly hands to do His tending too. He comforts me so that my hands can be His hands, comforting someone else.
Adam’s need to regulate his own central nervous system has made him a nomad in our home, which is something that, oddly, I understand, because of the disparate way we live as heavenly people in a foreign land, at home, but always on the move. Adam walks for miles, constantly pacing the floors, and always on the balls of his feet, theoretically to limit the overwhelming amount of sensory input that would bombard his brain if he walked like the rest of us.
Feet, as it turns out, happen to be among the most sensitive of body parts, due to hundreds of thousands of sensory receptors and thousands of nerve endings packed into the bottoms of each foot. Apparently, the brain uses more of the sensory cortex processing information gathered by the feet than by the entire torso. I researched this years ago, trying to understand, and it brought clarity to my Autism mama mind. It could be that Adam’s feet always feel overworked and sore, and not just because of the physical demand on them. The mind has been known to refer pain to catch a break.
And what, I used to wonder, could be the reason Adam always resists wearing Band-Aids? Only, my research told me, the same tactile oversensitivity that makes him pull out of hugs and shun jackets. Adam doesn’t have the ability to ignore the aggressive presence of adhesive tugging at his skin or that little square of absorbent material with its defined borders feeling weighty and loud in his mind. On top of that, he has very few words besides the ones he’s using now—no, not right now, I don’t like it, you can’t—to express his frustration over his difficulties.
I know these things in my mind, but Riley knows them by heart, and I think maybe that’s why Adam stays, why he lets her tend him anyway, even as he protests.
“We just need to protect your foot,” she explains to him now, carefully tracing the edges of that bandage with her thumbs, securing it in place over the wound, because she loves him.
There are pervasive miles of traveling words allegorizing spiritual life in scripture, the paths, the Way, the walk, the race, the feet steadied, the steps secured, walking with God and walking in step, the dangers of slipping and wandering away. We are described as sojourners and runners, pilgrims, and sheep with a Shepherd. In his own way, this is something Adam understands.
I read somewhere that good shepherds rigorously defend the feet of their flock against injury, trimming hooves and digging out rocks, though the sheep don’t even know they need it, and I’m convinced I don’t even know all the tending I need and could not imagine the wealth of tenderness I’ve received while preoccupied with my own wounds or even, while ignoring them. These days, I’m asking God to help me feel how carefully He holds me, to help me trust His tending, even when all I can imagine is how hard it will be to get well.
“It’s going to be okay,” Riley says to Adam and smiles, looking up into his still worried face, laying her hand flat against the top of his foot, Band-aid and all, before finally tugging his sock back into place.
