we’d better get on with it
Saturday morning, Adam walks downstairs wearing his football jersey, which is blue like the crisp Fall sky, blue like his eyes. I say walk, but his steps have a certain bounce that matches his wide smile.
Maybe autism steals away my son’s words, but Adam’s body has always found its own ways to convey what he feels: flapping for inexpressible joy, tears for worship, pacing and pacing and pacing for anxiety. In the early days, we even went through a season when, in anger, our son tried to smash his head against any wall he could find, when he slapped his forehead with his hands until they left harsh red marks. That same year, before our then 5 year-old daughter Riley found her words, she woke up every night at 3 am and screamed, face crumpled with frustration and rage, and I learned my first two lessons in our long, still-evolving journey with communication challenges. I learned that the word communication encompasses and describes so much more than mere words. And I learned that there is a weariness that soaks into our bones and seeps from our finger tips, an exhaustion that can flat out blind us. But in fact, long before I came to describe our family with words like special and exceptional; long before these words took on definitions I had not known nor imagined I would ever know; long before I learned bone tired for myself, I saw that weariness lingering about the eyes of other mamas, saw it messing up their hair and leaving them short of breath; and I was afraid of it.
“Are you ready for football?” I ask Adam, reaching up to slide my hand through his hair in that thin, downy spot at the back of his neck.
“Yes,” he says easily, looking down, as he does these days, to look into my eyes. He has something he wants to tell me, something important. Adam doesn’t waste eye contact. “I…”he starts, searching his mind for the words, reaching carefully, as though the ones he wants sit somewhere on a high shelf in his mind, just a little too far away. He begins to hum, just a low, gentle sound, which for Adam is like a extending his strength to give that mental shelf a shake. The sound will make the words tumble a little more easily out of his mind, onto his tongue, over his lips. “I…want a helmet,” he finishes, and again the wide grin, the bright eyes. He lifts his hands, and they beat the air about his shoulders.
“You want a helmet?” Adam plays flag football on a team for differently-abled kids. It’s no contact. They don’t really need helmets, though the pint-sized players who take the field after his team wear them, as well as a full set of pads. The players on Adam’s Xbox game also have helmets, so it stands to reason that my son would believe it’s not really football without one.
“Yes,” he says again, and his grin could stretch across the world. His enthusiasm is contagious, and with all of my being I wish I could conjure up a helmet as blue as his jersey, as blue as the sky. It’s not only that he has just managed to share a tiny part of himself with me–the tiniest flicker of a now teen-aged boy’s dream; it’s also that I still remember our therapy-clogged days of long ago, before Adam enjoyed or understood how to play anything at all. I still remember the obsessive way he held toy trucks in the air, turning their wheels with one finger, the odd way he slid books out from behind a door so that he could watch each letter suddenly appear. My son had neither imagination nor social skills, and this documented fact meant that he needed play therapy along with the speech and the in-home one-on-one tutoring provided by our local autism center. I still remember buckling Adam into the car seat beside his baby sister, the way his sweet round knees felt beneath my fingers, that smooth, new skin. I hoisted Zoe on my hip and led Adam by his chubby little hand into a colorful room where he would presumably learn to play, hopefully with the other challenged children who attended the group. The children sat in chunky plastic chairs in a rough circle, while their vibrant, wispy therapist sat cross-legged in the center. Some of them cried when their mothers left, desperate tears, while Adam silently swung his feet, and the therapist animatedly pretended they had all just arrived at the fair.
“Hey, we get to play today,” she said, putting a tactile ball into the nearest child’s hands, nodding and winking a careful you can go now to all of us parents.
“Soon it will be Adam’s turn to hold the ball,” I heard her say, as I resettled Zoe on my hip and turned to go.
During that hour, Zoe and I walked in a nearby park.
As a child, I thought pilgrims were turkey-loving people who wore silver buckles on their tall black hats and white pinafores over their dresses. But on my therapy day walks so many years ago I learned that pilgrims are really only people changed by their travels, people who learn how to let go of what bogs down and take up the things they need. Anyone who has participated in or cheered on a long-distance race knows that perseverance requires a determination abiding no distraction. The course will be littered with weighty things–extra clothing, sunglasses, water bottles, packs now discarded like trash so that racers can get on with progress. The Bible says, “We’d better get on with it…strip off every weight that slows us down (Hebrews 12:1 MSG, NLT).” And so it was that on these walks of mine I began to throw off my doubt and fear. I slung that weariness right off the tips of my fingers. I left behind ugly, terrible, frustrating moments–screaming and futility and anger, and I picked up beauty, the with-ness and truth of God. I prayed. I stopped so that Zoe could touch flowers with her tiny fingers.
Why is it that we gather in solidarity to walk or run or ride for significant causes? Because we are pilgrims; we have somewhere important to go together; we have things to achieve, and to do so, we have to throw off the things that slow us down and take up what will aid our progress. I must have walked that park for miles, traversing the same spaces countless times. A witness would never have known that the mama who left was not the same mama who arrived. While Adam learned to play, I learned not to be afraid to be tired or overwhelmed or undone. I learned to how to get on, how to keep getting on. I learned that our hard days do not last forever and don’t have to slow us down.
Soon it will be Adam’s turn to hold the ball, she said.
And now here he stands, long and lean, taller than me by six inches, tossing and spinning his football in the air in front of him, ready to meet his friends and play. And he wants a helmet.
I know, because he told me so.
