just wait till your father gets home
Kevin walks in the door and the afternoon rushes right in with him. It’s as though the jostling traffic, the dying sun, and dozens of fading fragments of conversation cling to his shirt sleeves, his warm cheeks. They fall off his shoulders, these things, as the strap from his leather bag falls to the floor beside his office chair, as his keys clink in the dish on his desk. I turn from the sink, wiping my wet fingers on a towel. Adam twists on one long leg, maintaining the careful tree pose he’s holding in front of his tablet, silently acknowledging Kevin’s arrival. “Well, hello there,” Riley calls gleefully, lifting her eyes from the schedule she’s perusing, tapping her pen–a thick thunk–against the notepad in front of her. Zoe wanders in to get a drink, sock-footed; water from the pitcher splashes in her glass. The garage door hums and clacks down. Dad’s home.
“Hello there,” Kevin says, smiling at Riley, pulling me into a hug. I close my eyes, feeling like I could dissolve. I always feel a sense of celebration when we’ve all finally landed at home again. We linger together recounting the day, our conversations wide open and expansive.
“Adam, tell me what you did today,” Kevin says at last, releasing me. After chores, Adam has two occupations during Spring Break: watching other people play Xbox on YouTube, and playing Xbox himself. He practices the exact rise and fall of the game announcer’s voice, says “Could we have anticipated these scores?!” with aplomb. He balances in that tree while life blooms around him; studying videos with his brow drawn as it was for learning even when he was a fat-cheeked baby.
“Ummmm,” Adam says, drawing out the ‘m‘, his voice deep and thoughtful, “not right now.” In other words—Let’s not talk right now, Dad. Sometimes, especially at the end of the day, Adam resists the work it takes to string words together. And the question itself feels like a stressful one to him. At sixteen, Adam still wants to please his father. He wants to say the right thing. Is this, I wonder suddenly, why we struggle so much with prayer?
“No ‘not right now’. I want to know what you did today,” Kevin says, turning toward our son.
Realizing that he now has his father’s full attention, Adam pushes the button on the side of his tablet, a quick motion that instantly darkens the screen and turns off the sound.
“Ummm…chores.”
Kevin looks at me, eyes twinkling. Lately Adam has decided on his own that Kevin delights only in a few activities, none of which fall into any category Adam would label fun. So, when Kevin gets home, Adam abruptly stops playing. It’s become our joke, and a bit of a mystery, as Kevin has never been overly strict about how our children spend their free time. But autism draws hard lines for survival; it creates rules to make sense of things, and sometimes the rules don’t make sense to us.
“You did your chores?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s great. What else did you do?”
“Ummm….”Adam wobbles a little on his tree. Finally, he says, “Bulletins.”
In truth, worship bulletins comprise Adam’s only diligent collection; there’s something he loves about the orderliness of them–the dates, the lists, the way they pretend life exists, however briefly, in lines and columns. Adam keeps stacks of bulletins on the shelves in his bedroom, but he rarely brings them downstairs.
“Bulletins? You looked at bulletins?”
“Yes.”
I throw Adam a rueful look and he quickly glances away. Adam and I spent the day together, and at no time did he have a bulletin in his hands. But for some reason, my son’s pretty sure his dad prizes bulletins over games and videos. Where, I wonder, does he get these ideas?
It reminds me of the thick block walls we like to build around God before we know Him, as though we could ever hem Him in to an understandable space. God likes dress clothes and careful expressions, but not messy buns or ugly cries; parchment and pews but not inked-skin and bars; prayers but not laughter that flat knocks you to the floor. There’s a billboard on the interstate that somberly warns, God is watching you, as though that means you’d better rearrange your face and put your hands in your lap quick. But this is most assuredly not the God of scripture; it’s not the Father I love.
“Mmmhmm,” Kevin says, reaching for our son, laughing, wrapping arms around Adam’s ever-widening shoulders. The question, while hardly an examination for discovery, Kevin offered merely as an avenue for sharing. What Adam doesn’t know–not yet–is that the conversation itself is his father’s delight. So now, the father smiles, holding on to the son, and says, “Why don’t you show me what you’re doing on your tablet?” so that the son will learn exactly who his father is by the experience of their relationship.
