too loud
It can feel like I’m stuck in the dark.
And it can feel like life’s too loud.
I made a centerpiece for our table out of evergreen boughs, a silver wreath accented with bits of mirrored glass, like gems, tall blood red candles, and a few ancient ornaments. Christmas decorations always need two things, in my opinion: light and surfaces to reflect it.
The people living in darkness have seen a great light.
On the hardest days, I feel caught in some unguarded pit, dragged against my will, which is offensive, especially at Christmas. Most days, I feel weary with what feels too hard and too much. Almost all the time, the urgency of things too complicated for me to understand feels unbearably heavy.
Before we sit down to dinner, I twist a string of firefly lights through my modern-day Bethlehem, into her make-believe sky, around and around the nativity. The lights fade and blink in random arrangements, like stars, remembering, in their tiny, sporadic way, the star that helped the shepherds find their way to Jesus. It isn’t that Christmas ignores the darkness, but rather that it shines in response.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
New friends often ask what it’s like to mother differently-abled children, what Autism, Epilepsy, and Diabetes feel like up close, and I always say the same thing. This is me, leaning in to tell you:
It’s terrifying. And also, it’s wonderful.
I turn on some Christmas music, just softly, so it tinkles in the background, like a lullaby sung in another time. These are reminders that the moment we long for hasn’t quite made it, discordant, blurry reflections in aged glass, faint processionals. But in their strident persistence, these signs of Christmas also herald the steady, unhindered coming of Christ. Time comes and He comes right into our darkness, like a building crescendo.
We sit down to eat, finally, me carrying my remembrances with me. Adam has been waiting, wearing a path back and forth from one end of the kitchen to the other, walking on the balls of his feet, his steps like drumbeats, his nose growing bigger in reflection as he leans over the simmering pot with its polished silver lid. He stops mid-stride as I reach for the plates, focusing carefully on my movements.
This is what I need to do, I’m thinking, when I feel lost in hard living. I need to watch and wait for the One in whom I trust. Adam reminds me I can do that while still forging a path with my feet.
Forks clink against plates now, as our conversation rises and falls. Kevin asks Riley about her class today. A strand of hair slides down Zoe’s cheek as she looks up, listening for Riley’s response. For a moment, I feel held and settled. For a few days, my children are all home. Our table is full.
Suddenly, Adam pushes back, pressing his grown-up hands down flat against the table on either side of his plate.
“Too loud,” Adam says, with an expression like a warning that breaks right through our easy conversation.
“Too loud?” Momentarily, I grapple, the comment, his urgency, coming as a surprise. “What’s too loud? Is it the music?”
I had forgotten the music while we talked, had “tuned it out”—what a funny phrase—in favor of our spoken words, which is an ability I often take for granted and not something many autistic people can do. Adam absorbs all the sensory information in a room at once, with no ability to adjust the volume on any of the input. I imagine that life itself seems to him always to be blaring.
You know, it wasn’t really silent when Jesus came.
“Too loud,” Adam says again, lifting his arms and trying, in vain, to find a way to wrap them around his head, to cover his ears. His face twists with panic.
That look, the desperate way he clasps his long fingers down, bending the tops of his ears, takes me back to the years when some sounds were just too much for Riley. Crashing waves made her hide. Buzzing bees, which she seemed to hear a few minutes before we could even see them, made her scream. Group singing made her cry out in pain.
I used to carry ear plugs in my purse.
We wish you a merry Christmas
We wish you a merry Christmas
We wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year
I never really understood what those sounds did to Riley, just that they hurt her.
I push up from the table in a rush, looking for my phone so that I can stop the music, still confused about exactly what has caused Adam’s distress. I only know, having watched Riley suffer through anxiety attacks in the past, that Adam is on the dangerous edge of an escalation.
‘Merry’ is maybe the wrong word, I’m thinking, my thoughts in a tangled whirl, as I hit pause on my playlist and watch Adam relax.
In my favorite painting, Christ looks battered and messy. The artist used paint and ash to smear the hard lines of suffering into his face, where also I can see the suggestion of many nations and the impression of a royal crown composed of both light and thorn. He looks terrifying. And also, wonderful. His eyes–strong, dark eyes, look right into me with unflinching determination.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
Right now, I’m thinking that painting is as much an image of Christmas as the worn old ornaments on our table that persistently reflect the candlelight.
“It’s okay, Adam, it’s okay,” Riley says softly, tenderly, touching his arm lightly with her fingers.
The people living in darkness have seen a great light.
“So, it was the music,” I say with sighing relief, a full exhale, glancing at Kevin as I sit back down at the table, phone still in hand.
Adam picks up his fork, his expression placid, as though nothing happened.
“Maybe it was just that song,” Kevin says.
The song? We Wish You a Merry Christmas?”
Kevin shrugs. “Might be worth skipping it, just to see.”
I push play on my playlist and We Wish resumes, just a phrase, before I can strike the forward button with my thumb. Adam drops the fork and moans, a terrifying inward sound, like a scream tucked up into his heart. The fork clatters against his plate as his shoulders begin to rise. Skip, skip, skip! I hit the button too many times, but as soon as I move past that song, Adam relaxes, like a deflating balloon.
The music meanders on, decorating the background.
Sometimes the only thing easy to see is that things are so broken here, we can be blind to what needs fixing and why. We have eyes, but we still can’t see.
And then Christmas comes, anticipating a new creation, another Breath breathed into us to give us life, another time when God will say, “Let there be…”
Light.
