wait
Adam hates waiting.
When he was in first grade, he often got to be the line leader for his class when they left the classroom. But Adam didn’t like to wait, so when the teacher said, “Line up at the door,” he’d just open the door and leave. Every reminder, “Adam,wait,” he met with frustration. “Please, wait!!” He’d exclaim, tears dripping off of his cheeks. Finally, his teacher made a big red stop sign for the floor in front of the door that said, “Adam WAIT.” So, they’d line up at the door, and Adam would plant both of his feet solidly on top of that horrible, paralyzing word until his teachers gave him permission to walk out the door.
Even on vacation at the beach, I write a schedule (or actually, the girls press me for turns doing the printing of it) and post it on my door on a dry erase board Mom kindly provides for that purpose. Poor Adam always waits to do something, and the day goes a lot more smoothly if he knows exactly how long the wait will be. He breaks his day up into “first, then” statements, always looking past the obligatory item on the agenda toward the thing he really wants to be doing.
Sometimes he even protests about eating breakfast. “No breakfast, today,” he grumbles, which is funny coming from the lips of a person with diabetes (Now that I think about it, it’s actually not a lot different from the way I sometimes say “no rest, today,” knowing that I will go nuts without enough sleep.). When I respond, “Yes, Adam, you have to eat breakfast today,” he says, “First eat breakfast, then play music!”
and always, it’s “First bath! Then math!”
and something like “First brush teeth, then sleep sleep sleep, then play.” Last night he even pressed us for a specific wake up time. Once we’d established that at that point all playing would happen after sleeping, he drilled his brilliant blue eyes into mine first, and then my mom’s, and said, “Six o’clock?”
The funny thing is, I understand his impatience. It’s only been in the last few years of my life that I’ve begun the hard work of training myself to be present in the present moment, finally recognizing that living for the next eight tasks on the to do list is no way to live at all. There are things I’ve learned to do, reminders I’ve put in strategic locations, to help me focus on this day, this moment, this experience. In his insightful book A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle recommends taking a few moments each day just to focus on taking breaths, pointing out that nothing grounds you in the present like actually thinking about breathing. I love yoga, and my favorite moment in one of the workouts comes when the instructor stops the class in the middle of a series of crazy balance postures and directs all in audience to return to mountain pose and clear the mind of chaos. So my active pursuit of uncluttered spaces now extends to my mind as often as possible. Teach me Lord to Wait has become my passionate anthem.
For years I was terrible at this. I nearly drove myself to insanity living life in much the way that Adam does, mentally chanting “I just have to _______________, and then I can finally_________________,” all day long. The problem for me was that more and more commas kept inserting themselves before “and then I can” until it became obvious that, well, I just can’t. Life lived in the future is just one long wait. As Eckhart Tolle points out, the future never really comes. It’s always today—just right now.
I did not realize, when they placed my first child in my arms, that for the next twenty-five years I would be taking the exhaustive course on self-sacrifice and waiting. Waiting for when I would no longer smell like spit up. Waiting to feel like myself and not this woman I’d become, this person I didn’t recognize. Waiting for words, for acknowledgement, for the tiniest milestones. Waiting to let my free-spirit out of it’s cage. Waiting to write. Waiting to feel rested again (Once I even asked my mom, “Will I ever feel rested again, or is that pretty much over??”).
I hate waiting. And that’s why I’ve had to learn to stop waiting and live right now.
So, I understand my son completely.
I also know that there’s another reason we have to get this waiting thing under control, another reason I have to figure out how to teach my son this thing I’m learning. When we can’t wait, we take matters into our own hands. In permanent marker that has to be scrubbed off the dry erase board with Comet. No matter how hard we scrub, it will still leave a stain behind.
Aside from being on the shore with his body in the surf, Adam’s favorite thing to do when he has free time is to play Angry Birds. Lately he’s even figured out a way (that only he understands completely) to play the game on the computer, do math, and play the piano all at once. He knocks over some birds, calculates something, and then tries to mimic the sounds of the game on the keys of the keyboard. His face while he does this is all intensity and depth.
Adam becomes so deeply absorbed in certain things he loves that we’ve learned to give him time limits for certain activities. He understands the rules and doesn’t complain too often about these time constraints, but every time a turn ends, it’s certainly true that he waits with varying degrees of patience for his next fix. I spend a significant amount of time reassuring him about when and in what order he will get to do the things he most wants to do. For Adam, “wait” is about the closest thing he knows to a curse.
Tuesday turned out to be a particularly difficult waiting day for Adam. After he read the day’s schedule, he became argumentative about one particular item: rest time. Rest time appeared to be the ugliest thing through which he must wait before freedom and angry.birds. He found me in the living room and immediately began his campaign. “No rest time, today. First lunch, then Angry Birds.”
“No, Adam. We will have rest time. Rest time first, then Angry Birds.”
Adam struggled to find the words he wanted, something to convince me. I could see the intention in his eyes. He felt determined, unwilling to concede the point. I’d never seen him quite so irritated about this particular line item on the schedule.
He left the room. Moments later, he sat down next to me on the couch, still frustrated. “No rest time today,” he muttered futilely. I noticed the black permanent marker in his hand, but I didn’t put two and two together right away. And then I had to go get something in my room.
I laughed out loud. No one can say my son doesn’t know that if you want to get someone’s attention, you should put it in writing.
Bad waiting always leads to one horrible decision that cannot be undone: taking matters into our own hands. Inevitably, it leaves a stain, a black blotch that screams things at us like “foolish,” and “impatient.”
In scripture, Sarah shows herself to be one of the worst ever at waiting when she convinces Abraham to sleep with her maidservant Hagar so that she can finally have the son and heir God had promised to give her. Never mind that she had laughed in God’s face for making the suggestion in the first place. God had said that Sarah herself would give birth to a son (Genesis 17: 16), but Sarah was very old (well past child bearing), and she had managed to wait a number of years before she finally figured she’d waited long enough. Flipping through the pages, I can almost hear her thinking, “Well, maybe I was supposed to DO something. Maybe He didn’t actually mean I would give birth to the child myself.” How many times, in the middle of waiting have I thought, “Wait (oh, delicious irony). Maybe I was supposed to DO something.” So, Sarah insists that Abraham sleep with Hagar, who does become pregnant and gives birth to Ishmael (Genesis 16). This taking matters into her own hands births not just a son but disruption and disunity in a relationship, a household, a marriage, and a nation. It’s ultimately the birth of one of the world’s most longstanding conflicts, a conflict that spans not just territory but religion. Wars have been fought, and it all began when Sarah got fed up with waiting.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t blame her. I’ve botched things pretty badly that looked a lot less impossible, and after a much shorter wait. I can’t tell you the number of cakes I’ve ruined because I just can’t seem to wait long enough for the filling to thicken. And most of the time, it’s not just food that suffers when I can’t seem to wait, it’s relationships that matter to me. There have been times, praying over conflict, knowing God has taped a big giant stop sign on the path in front of me, when I have ignored the “Elysa, WAIT” and plunged right out the door, or rather, right over to the computer. When I am hurt, my fingers can fly over these keys. And once I’ve pressed send, and my words have rattled through cyber-space like machine gun fire, I can’t take them back. Even after I apologize, they leave a nasty blotch right on top of “it’s going to be a great day.” So, painfully, I have learned to struggle with waiting. And I say struggle because I still do. All the time. Hence, so many reminders placed carefully where I can see them.
So this week I’ve been wondering, “How do I teach my sweet son the wisdom in learning to wait well?” Autism takes obsessions and compulsions to a whole new level. In the AU world, obsessing is an extreme sport. Trust me, if you think you’re having trouble getting something you’re waiting for out of center-focus, you should spend a day with my son. It’s enough to drive both of us insane.
I think that’s why God has been working so hard these last years to teach me to wait upon Him. Every other effort just leads to madness. But my God is trustworthy. His timing IS perfect. He loves me. He doesn’t want me to live my life in “first, then’s,” and I don’t want that misery to be my son’s life either.
I look at Adam sometimes, and I’m on the edge of explosion, weary with his constant frustration over the present moment and whatever is keeping him from what he really wants to do. And then I see that familiar misery written plainly on his face, and somehow, God defuses my emotions instantly, melting my weariness into compassion. Softly, holding his face in my hands, I say, “Adam. It’s okay. Trust me. We need to do these things, but then we’ll do the other.” In my heart, I’m imploring Him to trust me, because I know that some things—like breakfast, a bath, and sleeping, for example—just must come first. I know what he doesn’t—that those things can be wonderful too and will make the things he really wants to do so much better; that there are important benefits—things he needs—to be had in the first things, in the waiting.
And I realize, that all this time, that’s exactly the way that God has been teaching me. He cups my face in His palms, turning my eyes to look at Him fully. Relenting on all His frustration, He says gently, “Please, daughter. Trust me. Some things just must come first. It’s better my way. You don’t know it yet, but the waiting will be worth it.”
…but they that wait for Jehovah shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint (Isaiah 40:31).
