waiting
The waiting settles in—somewhere deep in my bones—laying a heavy hand against my eyes, clouding everything like the veil of early morning fog blanketing the horizon, obscuring the sharp lines of roof tops, cloaking the striving limbs of the trees.
Two and a half hours at the doctor’s office, and I come home to dirty dishes and towels dotted with toothpaste. I stand in the kitchen rubbing my eyes, trying to remember what to do in what order, trying to figure out how to move through time.
Waiting is a divided investment, a pause between truly living and paralysis.
It begins well:
The morning a whoosh, I gather myself and leave the rush behind for a walk, pushing my stride, testing my knee for weakness. The sweat, the movement, the purpose feels good as I press my way up hills, tracing the fog line with my eyes. Every step a whisper of prayer, I give thanks for a thousand gifts, for a wealth of grace.
And then I walk home. I open my palms and let the whirlwind catch me up again. I help Adam brush his teeth, urge Zoe to put the finishing touches on ready, wash away the sticky evidence of exercise. I have outlined the schedule with Adam, so he knows we will drop Zoe at school, go to the doctor’s office, go back to school. He seems caught in the doorway, unsure. He’d been packing a tote bag for the waiting when Zoe reminded him of his book bag. I’m not sure why, but it didn’t seem to make sense to him to have both, as though he couldn’t blend the two—the waiting and the work.
Together, we wind our way through the parking lot at school, leaving Zoe at the door, wishing her day well. Then Adam and I drive on. I remind him of the schedule as we go, knowing that anxiety will only make this more tedious. We’re ready to transition him to an insulin pump, and I think he’s ready too. Adam notices everything, and he’s been watching Zoe use her pump for months. I had not anticipated that the doctor would require a visit to approve the change; Adam’s been diabetic for so long, and this will be our second pump of the same kind. But so urgently did our doctor feel the need to see us that he squeezed us in on a busy day and called twice himself to set up and confirm the visit.
But the second time he called, he’d said, “Now, we’re squeezing you in, so there may be some delay.”
Adam finds toys he likes and passes time in the waiting room absorbing minutiae—the way different parts of the wall become visible as he moves a truck in front of it; the way the pages of a book look when he moves his thumb against them, letting them fall quickly; the way his voice modulates when he thumps his chest.
The receptionist smiles benevolently at me as I sit with my book, half-reading, half-watching, half-expecting.
A short time later, a medical assistant calls Adam’s name from the doorway that leads from the waiting room to the exam rooms. It’s a trick, this shifting of location. The assistant wears navy blue scrubs and speaks to Adam with a question mark buried in his tone. He hasn’t met very many people with autism, doesn’t know whether he should communicate with words or how Adam will react when asked to remove his shoes, stand on the scale, sit in the chair to have his blood pressure taken. I am used to this now, but it surprised me in the beginning, how little medical professionals really know about autism.
I smile comfortably, trying to reassure the man without drawing attention to his discomfort. I want to hug Adam, to laugh out loud, when my son arches his eyebrow and immediately presses his heels against the wall for a measurement, when he takes off his shoes without hesitation, when he laughs with me about the cuff squeezing his arm. I watch the medical assistant soften visibly. I notice the way he changes, speaking directly to Adam without requiring a response, the way he tells Adam exactly which room and knows now that my son can listen without looking at him.
In the exam room, we wait.
Adam sits up on the exam table with his legs crossed, reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid. I find it ironic that he loves those books. Adam has never been wimpy, not even at two when we pressed needles into his chubby baby arms. I flip the switch on my Kindle and sit back, my chair tucked behind the door, resuming the half-absorbed diversion, something to keep me from thinking about everything waiting to be done at home.
The nurse seems surprised when she walks in and finds us this way, equally glazed by our reading, Adam trilling sounds from his throat.
She takes data, reports a remarkable A1C, promises only one patient before us on the schedule.
She leaves, and again, we wait.
Adam leaves his book on the table and lays in the floor, positioning himself underneath the doctor’s circular stool so that he can spin it with his hand and watch the rotation. In seconds, he has figured out how to adjust the stool up and down. He tests the spinning sitting on top, laying on each side. He rolls the stool slowly across the floor and watches the wheels turn. I glance up from my book to check the activity, all harmless distractions from our limbo. The stool hits the edge of the exam table, and Adam glances toward me quickly. He knows me. He knows a Mom line lies firmly between spinning and banging into things. He puts his hand on the stool and pulls it gently away from the table, away from the door, toward the center of the tiny room.
Fifteen minutes of spinning, and I reintroduce the book, motioning toward the chair against the wall by the door. We read, our impatience groggy in the fog of words, another fifteen minutes. Adam puts the book down and opens the door, catching my eyes as I look up. He pushes the door slowly open, then pulls it closed again.
“What are you doing?” I ask him, a hint of laughter pulling the words across my lips.
He smiles at me, repeating the motion with the door. Slowly open, slowly closed, never fully either. Sometimes he pulls the door closed a little too forcefully, and it announces itself with a loud click as latch bumps metal plate. The sound pleases Adam, but it makes me sigh. Soon, someone will find meaning in the clicking. I smile at Adam and shake my head.
“No, leave the door. Okay?”
Adam picks up his book and puts it down. He spins the chair twice. He climbs on the exam table and belts out the chorus to It is Well With My Soul.
I look down at the book in my lap and try to read. One sentence, two, but I have lost the plot line. I glance at my watch, expecting the doctor any moment, miserable with the half-existence, this pause just shy of nothing. In fact, so preoccupied am I with the waiting, with the things coming at some time just out of our reach, I almost miss it. My fingers push against the side of the Kindle, pages turning in a story I can only half walk through, and I glance up.
And two blue eyes are trained on mine.
Adam points to the wall, a decal of Curious George carrying an ice cream cone piled a dozen scoops high and dripping. “Ice cream,” he comments. “Lick.”
Adam loves ice cream. When he speaks to me, it’s as though holy hands have gripped my shoulders, shaking me awake. All this waiting, and I’m missing the now–my son and me alone in a room, a room with Curious George decals all over the walls.
I put down my book and stand next to him, ruffling his hair with my hands. “George is eating ice cream. Yummy,” I say to him, touching ice cream George with my finger.
“Ice cream. SO Yum-MY,” Adam says, reaching for my ears.
“What kind of ice cream does George like?” I ask him, pointing at the dripping cone in George’s hands, the scoops bright blue, pink, yellow.
“Chocolate,” Adam says enthusiastically, laughter coming with the word.
This makes me laugh too. I don’t see a single brown scoop on George’s cone, but I know chocolate is Adam’s favorite.
I point at his chest. “YOU like chocolate ice cream. It’s your favorite.”
“Yea,” he says a little too loudly, laughing still more. He is beating a rhythm against his chest, so I put my hand in the way to disturb the cadence. He giggles, shrieking happily as I change the beats. A few moments of this, and we are both laughing. And for a little while, we’re not waiting at all. We’re living and loving and saying so much to each other with just a few words. And I almost missed it. I almost missed the joy of being caught up in this parentheses with my son and nothing and no one else.
And then the endocrinologist comes in to talk to us. He listens to Adam’s heart, and Adam reaches up and flicks his ears, and the doctor blushes and laughs out loud. This makes me smile. The doctor blushes every time, and it’s just Adam’s idea of an amicable hello. The examination and discussion short, punctuated by a whole lot of head bobbing—no, we don’t need training or classes or a specific formal start for this pump; yes, we feel comfortable programming the device and making changes; yes, we need all the relevant prescriptions; yes, we feel good about the decision; yes, Adam can handle the pump on his body now; no, he won’t pull it off; and the doctor leaves to draw up the necessary paperwork.
And so, we wait.
Adam seems tired of the room and the George decals. He picks up his book and lays back on the exam table, swinging a crossed leg dramatically, amusing himself with a new movement, a new rhythm. He touches a canvas on the wall—a clown painted in bright colors—and slowly moves it sideways with one finger to reveal the wall behind. I smile, understanding. “Hey Buddy, leave the picture alone,” I say, coming to stand beside him, trying to find the now again in the midst of the pause. I rub his cheek with my hand, and his bright blue eyes find mine, and slowly a new conversation begins.
And I realize, standing there with my son—he the picture of so much grace offered to me, how much of the now I’ve missed in so much waiting. And I see what God wants me to see, what He gently shows every day because I need it so badly—that there is an important difference between waiting and anticipation.
As a new mom, I waited for nearly everything, my breath caught in my throat. I waited for words, for walking, for no more spit up wiped from my shoulder, for the sour smell to waft away. I waited for my body to remember what it had been, where everything belonged, for taut and angular to replace round and soft. I waited for potty training, for quiet, for rest. I waited to find myself somewhere in the whoosh of mothering, sometimes only half-living out those weary days, the ones that felt so cluttered with need, the hours that felt unending. I spoke a lot about what would never happen and would always be, those words the signposts of a wasteland, a warning.
And I clung hard, and God fought hard, touching my eyes to help me see the blessing of now.
I held my babies and walked my fingers up their tender arms, slowly, slowly, slowly–and then quickly–stopping to tickle them under the chin, laughing over their gurgling giggles. Even then, they taught me that anticipation means “laughing at the days ahead,” while tasting the richness of right now.
And still, every day, I struggle. I struggle against the half-living, the waiting for something else, the wondering when some season will come. But waiting means never really living fully, the expectation of something other shrouding the gifts of grace poured out in this moment. It is a distraction from madness, a tapping of unsatisfied fingers against an unwelcome pause just shy of paralysis. Waiting is the cloaked half-sister of complaint and discontent, the shrouded, mocking, blinding trio of the I’d rather.
We were not created for I’d rather. And the lie is that we have a time other than this one, that any moment could be more important than the one we’re breathing through right now.
Lately, the Spirit has me on my knees, asking for Holy hands to shake me awake, begging to see the fullness of a thousand gifts poured out NOW.
Because God reveals His glory moment by moment. And I don’t want to miss any of it.
