listen close
Home from a walk and still smelling like outside, that fresh blend of newborn and dying things, we walk into the living room. The Winter chill still pinks our cheeks. I know, because I see it still blooming on Kevin’s face as he shrugs off his extra layers, as I bend to plant a light kiss on Adam’s cheek. The sight of my son momentarily paused from his usual perpetual motion, sprawled long and lean in that wing-back chair, makes me stop a moment too.
“Hi, whatcha been doing?” I ask, lightly brushing Adam’s cheek, his chin, his forehead with my hand. Touching him often feels like holding a skittish butterfly in my palms, wings beating to go. The question I’ve asked is hard; Adam struggles with doing questions. He wants to give the right answer, wants to be doing the right thing. He glances at Kevin, his brow gently furrowed, then reaches up and flicks my ears with his fingers. Years ago, Adam chose ear-flicking over hugs, because he loves us but the physical pressure sometimes feels like too much. Adam squints, his gaze following Kevin’s path into the kitchen.
“Whatcha been doing?” I try again. I can guess, more than that, I know already exactly how Adam spends his time, but I want him to tell me. I want to watch his expression turn to searching; I want to hear him say the words with that deep, careful voice. Instead, Adam makes a sound, a dismissive, light noise that translates into polite refusal. I love you, Mom, but I don’t want to talk.
I gain nothing without persistence, so I lean in, finally resorting to something like verbal multiple choice. “Did you…listen to music? Did you…” but before I can finish, Adam hops out of the chair and hits the stairs, his legs pounding out machine gun taps on the risers. Within seconds, the swell of music floods the stairwell; the warm, full sound seeps through the ceiling, the walls. “…listen to music,” I said. So now, to please me, he listens to music. But I really want him listening and talking to me.
Kevin and I exchange a glance, understanding at once that Adam only really processed the one phrase, listen to music, that he heard instructions or expectations in place of my open-ended question. “Adam, I wasn’t telling you you had to go listen to music,” I call up into the stairwell, but the words trail off weakly, falling faint and unraveling at the ends because I know I’ve already lost his attention.
“Wonder how often that happens when God talks to us?” Kevin says thoughtfully, and I smile, because we all have spiritual autism. We’re still just learning the language of God; we still reach and reach for spiritual expression and connection. In the book of Romans, Paul wrote that when we don’t know how to pray, when we turn to searching and the words won’t come, “the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans (Romans 8:26).” I look up at those empty stairs and think about how I fill in the gaps for Adam too, how love moves me to speak when he can’t.
Turning away from the stairs now, I sit down in the wing-back chair, the cushion still warm with Adam. “Probably pretty often,” I muse, considering seasons of life when I have little margin for listening, times when I live as God’s rarely still child. Sometimes I pause for but a phrase before rushing off to please; trying to change me must feel like cupping holy hands around a bird. Why would God urge Sabbath rest, why tell us to be still, if not to open our ears and coax the spiritual tongue? Maybe, I’m thinking now, as I wait for my son to thunder back down those stairs, it pleases God most to hear my voice loving him, to see me sit still for divine conversation, to know I’ll give up the time it takes to listen well.
