punch today in the face {the best thing God's taught this mom about surviving}

Source: trendingfitnessblog.com via Elysa on Pinterest

She doesn’t know me, so I say it without hesitation, handing her a tissue:

Just…punch today in the face.

Maybe it seems like an odd thing to say in an elevator, after she’s pushed the down and turned to me, tears still marking up her cheeks, after she’s crumbled a little right there in front of me.

“Could I maybe talk to you?” She asks, wearing an expression I recognize from my first days as an autism mom—the weary red eyes, swollen with grief.

She cried all through the meeting, rifling in her purse, jotting things down on a piece of paper in front of her.  I kept throwing her looks from where I sat on the panel, smiling, hoping she heard me saying, “I understand.  I remember.”

I am invited to this forum because I have not one child with autism but two, and between the two, I have experienced quite a few of the options for transitioning a special needs child from preschool to elementary.  I sit on a panel with a lot of other parents who have been there before, answering questions for preschool parents wondering what in the world to do about the next step.  Every year, I look around the room and see myself in a dozen other faces.  Some of these parents look confused, some militant, some tender.  All of them look tired and overwhelmed and not sure anything will ever be different.

I try to tell them about my children during the introductions, because I remember how desperately I collected hope in the first days, how I needed to hear that a little girl who once lined up her toys obsessively and had no words could become a preteen who laughed and loved and had friends; how I wanted to believe, needed so much to believe, that a little boy who still learns a completely different way could excel at math and find his way free of so much fear.  I needed to know joy and laughing and congratulations still lived and breathed beyond the too much, and the I don’t know how, and the what if they never of those first grieving, lonely years.  So I am honest about the way I felt at first while I’m telling them about things now.

The whole meeting, I just wanted to get up and give this mom a hug.  I wanted to pull her out in the hall and ask her to tell me her story.  But she doesn’t know me, and I knew she’d feel embarrassed by my attention, and after things finished up there were other parents with questions and parents I knew on the panel.  The group wandered out and on in murmuring knots, and I didn’t see her until just before we stepped on the elevator together.

So, she throws an abused Kleenex into her purse and starts searching helplessly for another.  And looking up, apologizing with her hand, she mentions a teacher we love, someone who ushered us through in the beginning, asking me if I remember her.  I nod.  “Oh yes.  We love her,” I say, thinking back to conversations, to the way this teacher’s belief in my children empowered my own.  “She’s wonderful.”

“Did she email you yet?  She thought maybe you’d be someone…Could I maybe talk to you?”  Her voice drops at the end, shattering.  I reach for the tissues in my purse.

I can see that asking me this comes hard.  She doesn’t like to reveal her vulnerability anymore than I do.  I remember how much I hated to cry back then, how I felt like everyone could see that I was falling apart, but I just couldn’t keep the emotion packed away all folded and neat.

“Yes, I’d love to talk to you,” I tell her, smiling, thanking God that this is how He is, that He let’s me share what He’s given me so freely over so many years.  It’s this verse He whispers deep, standing with us in that elevator, and this is the praise I offer then, the thanks I offer now: Praise be…to the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts me in my troubles so that I can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort I myself receive from God (2 Corinthians 1: 3,4).  He brings me through, that I might share with others the things He’s gently sculpted in me.

“I don’t know what to do,” she says.  “It’s all just…too much.  The IEP is, I don’t know, like twenty pages thick.  It’s been a year, but I feel like we just started.  And I don’t feel like he’s made any progress.  He just seems…stuck.  My son, he’s really severe…He won’t look at me.  He doesn’t even like us to touch him.  He gets angry—I mean, tantrum angry…about everything.”  She pauses, just long enough to check my face for surprise, for shock.  Finding none, she plunges on, looking down at the tissue in her hand.  “Is there something I should read?  What did you read in the beginning?”

I reach for the notepad in the bottom of my bag, the one a friend gave me just because, the one always buried somewhere below all of my emergency supplies for low blood sugars and the emergency seizure medication we hope we never have to use. I write down my name, my email address, my phone number, the names of a few books that helped.

I don’t have a lot of advice, but I think maybe I can listen and understand, maybe share her frustration, maybe offer her some hope for her collection.  I know that she will look back on this conversation and find it hard to contact me.  She will remember her naked vulnerability and somehow feel embarrassed about being real with someone she barely knows.  She will forget that I understand, that I have told her how I grieved too, how I felt overwhelmed.  So, I hand her the piece of paper and another tissue and offer her the best thing God has taught me for surviving all the I don’t know how:

Just punch today in the face.

I say it emphasizing the word today.  It’s a clever mantra I found on the internet, nothing original with me.  It’s an odd thing to say, I know, but it makes me laugh and it seems to put brackets around some hard truth, truth God planted our very first day with autism,truth that has since taken root and helped me press through.

I sat holding Kevin’s hand that day, in a blue plastic chair with metal legs, looking at watercolors of school busses on a far wall, the word autism hanging in the air, awkward.  I looked at two ladies smiling gently, trying to wrap cotton around my fear, and I said, “What will this mean for her future?  Will she marry?  Will she be able to live on her own?” She, just three years old and far away from me, lost and alone while right beside us.

And the ladies looked at each other and pressed their smiling lips together, and one of them finally said, “We can’t say.  We just don’t know.”  She looked at Riley, gesturing with her eyes.  “It’s all up to her.”

But in my heart, this resonated, something planted already, and I thought, “No.  It isn’t up to her.  It’s up to God.  And this is faith, the walking on when I don’t know where I’m going.”

This autism mom, the one in the elevator, the one reminding me of me, she laughs, a little shakily, as I press my information into her hand.

“It doesn’t do to worry about tomorrow,” I tell her.  “And not the twenty pages of the IEP.  Not the potty training or the what if he or the how will I ever.  Just punch today in the face.  Take it one step at a time, one goal at a time, one new thing.  Make a schedule today.  Do today.  Do your best, your hardest work today.  And tomorrow, you’ll get up, and you’ll do it again.”

I have given up on living life like it’s a chess game.  I am not three moves ahead. Not anymore.

God said it this way, the therefore heavy with all that He wrote before it, “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.  Each day has enough trouble of its own (Matthew 6:34).” And since that first day, He has been hard at work, carving the knowing into my heart—that only He knows, that today is all I have, that today suffers the moment I start worrying over tomorrow.  He gave His people enough manna for the day (Exodus 16:4), and then showed us to pray for this daily bread (Luke 11:3), and the whole point has always been not that we need the bread but that we need Him and what He provides and that our need for Him is renewed every day (Deuteronomy 8:3).

And so seeking Him is how I punch this day in the face, it’s how I remain present right here, it’s how I do today.  And He gives me enough for today.

I laughed out loud the day He embossed this right over my marathon training, weaving it still further into the folds of all my living.  Somewhere in the last third of a tempo run, coming down from my fastest sprint, I felt the tired clenched tight and burning in my thighs, and an old habit resurrected.  I tried to catch my breath and found myself thinking about tomorrow’s miles.  An ache throbbing in my ankles and toes mocked the thought of another significant effort.  Just how do you think you’ll do that, exactly?

And right then, I saw that mom and me in the elevator, on our way down from a meeting, and this is what He whispered:

Today’s workout today.  Tomorrow’s workout tomorrow.

And I laughed out loud, because it’s seems I need the teaching in every layer.  I’m still learning to speak the wisdom and trust it, to growl it out between clenched teeth, if necessary.

Tomorrow never comes.  It’s always just today.

So, just punch today in the face.