my advocate
We sit, Kevin and I, on metal locker room benches dotted with holes, our bodies carefully sandwiched between a woman in a kerchief–silver-gray hair slipping out at the edges, and a herd of boys climbing over their mother. Mom smiles weakly when we say hello, studying the numbered slip in her fingers while one of her boys dangles from her arm. “Harrooo,” he calls. He is Tarzan holding clumsy to a lofty branch.
“Folks, please keep your voices down,” a uniformed security guard bellows, pushing off from a lean against a cinder block wall on the far side of the room. “Listen for your number to be called.” I smile at the older woman next to me. Her eyes gleam; the kerchief bobs.
Even with a crowd in the room, the murmur of voices hardly sounds loud to me. We checked in at a kiosk, a blocky, impersonal thing, and then sat down in the queue. Everyone here looks frazzled, wearing torture about the eyes, and I find myself wondering how many, like us, have come to this blank place to advocate for someone else.
I often joke with my friends who parent exceptional children about places and situations like this one, because advocacy is our full time job. And lately, as my friends and I grow older and many of them have become caregivers for aging parents, I have found yet another group of advocates with whom to commiserate. What would it look like, we wonder aloud, to string together all the letters we write, the blanks we fill-in, the applications and forms? What could we build in the hours we spend on the phone, in meetings, in cavernous echoing rooms that look for all the world as slapped up as we feel? Advocacy is difficult, messy, time and energy-consuming work. [bctt tweet=”#Advocacy is difficult, messy, time and energy-consuming work.”]
They call us using mysterious codes. “I wonder what the letters mean?” Kevin whispers. The paper in my hand, the one from the kiosk, says U35. I keep smoothing it with my thumb, pressing it over the curve of my knee. Immediately I imagine u-words that might serve as some internal category. Were it up to me, I would choose a lettering system that made me smile every time the metallic computer voice announced one, every time the digital board blinked on overhead. Unusual. Unbelievable. Ugh? Ugh. The twangy voice slowly calls our “number,” and we groan up off the metal bench. Lady behind glass says she’ll take the paper now that she’s checked us in a second time. Next time, a voice will direct us to another window down a hallway labeled by color. I see two—the red hall and the blue, marked with foam board placards. “They’ll probably call you using Riley’s name,” the friendly lady says. I see my smile lines reflected in the glass up near her forehead. I nod, gather up my beat-up folder–marked with Riley’s name and holding every piece of paper I’ve collected for this particular resource–and turn again to the metal benches. Kevin’s hand lightly rests in the dip of my back.
We’ll spend the morning this way, making entreaties at windowed openings, watching an office meander beyond. We’ll explain truths about our daughter that we wish were not and yet value as part of the joy of her; things only we can ever really know; realities we often surrender in prayer. We’ll be two faces among so many that the faces behind the glass have gone smooth and flat with the repetition of our requests. They gather us like data, tapping fingers against keyboards. I wonder if they can see our knuckles whitening.
We wait beside that mom with the tree-strong arms and the silver-headed woman on down the row, and I think of my friend, rubbing her forehead while she tells me about looking for someone new to work with her son in the afternoons, how she interviews and they try, and then another worker leaves and they start again. She spends hours filling holes, juggling schedules, agreeing upon documented goals. As soon as one problem resolves, another springs up. She shrugs, looking tired, and we laugh over our mutual vocation.
“But you know,” she said that day, finally letting her hands drop into her lap, “I think it’s helping him. I think he’s growing, and that’s good.” She looks at me with a fierce, unrelenting gaze. “And that makes it all worth it.”
I nod at the memory, agreeing now as I did then. What can we do for them if not this?
“We have an advocate with the Father,” the apostle John wrote, “Jesus Christ, the righteous one. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins (1 John 2:1-2, emphasis mine).” [bctt tweet=”We have an #advocate with the Father, #Jesus Christ, the righteous one.”]
They call Riley’s name, and we stand to walk down the blue hall to another window, and it’s this verse that’s on my mind in answer. Parakletos, the Greek word there translated advocate, properly means summoned, as by someone crying out for help. Riley needs and we go, twice summoned. I needed and Christ came. Advocacy isn’t only for exceptional people; at some point we all need a stand-in. I tap the folder in my hands with my fingers, thinking that messy advocacy means summoning uncomfortable courage and going where I would otherwise not desire to go. It means honest vulnerability and the sacrifice of time, energy, resources, and even sometimes dignity. But how could I do any less for love? [bctt tweet=”#Advocacy isn’t only for exceptional people; at some point we all need a stand-in.”]
We sit down in blue plastic chairs down the blue hall in front of another window and a woman who nods, pushing her glasses up on her nose, acknowledging us without a change of expression. And I smile, because none of what I’ve given in the name of advocacy comes close to what my advocate has given for me. [bctt tweet=”None of what I’ve given in the name of #advocacy comes close to what #myAdvocate has given me.”]
