will they ever
I remember sitting at a too short Formica table, overflowing a child-sized chair, in the play area where a couple of bright, shiny women evaluated my then two-year-old Riley. Riley, distractedly pushing platinum corkscrew curls away from her eyes, lined chunky animals along a busy, primary carpet in a long, snaking line. It looked like the parade ready to board the ark, only Riley’s animals went one-by-one instead of two-by-two. I could feel the flood coming. I clasped my hands together to still them. Riley squatted over her project, absorbed. Tiny lights in her tennis shoes flashed every time she stood up to move a little further down the line or to dig more animals out of the primary-colored bins sitting against the walls. Riley seemed not to notice the shiny ladies clicking their pens, gathering long necklaces in their palms, fidgeting with the baubles.
My fingers smelled faintly of chicken nuggets, and my hair kept slipping out its ponytail. I wondered if this room ever felt full or if it was only ever just a solitary child and a mom like me, deficiencies falling from our bag with the snacks, delays awkwardly slipping from our pockets.
“Do you have any questions for us?” One of the ladies said vibrantly, as though she’d just announced today’s specials instead of a developmental diagnosis, as though they hadn’t just unloaded a truck full of dynamite in my lap. She blinked at me expectantly. I imagined her at a chalkboard, carefully writing the alphabet on those Kindergarten lines, dropping the tail of the “q” in just the right place.
I stared at her silently a beat too long, trying to understand. And then I said, “Well, what does this mean?” I paused and the shiny ladies glanced at each other and smiled indulgently. Their silence felt like a cliff, and certain I would soon fall over it, I continued. “I mean, for her future. Will she go to college? Will she get married? Will she have a job? Will she ever be able to be independent?”
The shiny ladies blinked some more while I picked at the dead skin around my fingernails. They looked at each other again, like I’d just touched on a whole secret dialogue they weren’t ready to share with me. Finally, one of them smiled and leaned toward me a little. “That’s up to her,” she said, gesturing toward Riley and her industrious queue of zoo life.
I knew what the woman meant. She intended this as an open-ended, hopeful prognosis. Having applied the label, she now rubbed at all the edges; she tried to make Autism a shadowy idea with no clear boundaries. However lamely, I recognized that for my sake this woman tried to wield a power she did not have, that is, the power to obliterate probability and to offer me possibility without limits. No, I thought, considering this. It’s up to God. God alone excels in the impossible. I thought this, but self-absorption rendered me silent. I was pushing sizzling bombs out of my lap; I was not yet ready to be a witness.
I remember all of this, every last quake of my young mama hands, as we sit at the dinner table, and Riley–a young woman now in some ways and in some ways still not–leans toward my broad-shouldered Adam with a conspiratorial grin and asks, “Adam, who am I gonna marry?” She asks with sparkling eyes, licking a drip of ice cream off of her upper lip.
“Not right now,” Adam says flatly, deeply, immune to the sweet fizz behind the question, and unwilling to play.
“Come on, Adam, answer. Who’s Riley gonna marry, huh?”
I hide a grin behind my hand, knowing that Riley has one answer in mind, and she wants her brother to say it. Those two play at this all the time; hearing a response they expect makes them happy. They love to soothe anxiety with a good game of predictable repetition. And somehow, if Adam answers Riley without needing to be told, it will make her big-girl little-girl dreams more solid. But tonight, Adam is not in the mood.
“No thank you,” he says succinctly, returning to his own ice cream, dipping the spoon with serious concentration.
Undeterred, Riley volleys back, “Come on, Adam, you can do it. Who’m I gonna marry?”
“Dad Jones,” Adam says, the tiniest curl at the edge of his lips as the ice cream melts on his tongue. He’s joking now, still refusing her what she wants.
Will she ever marry? Seventeen years since I first asked those questions and we still live by faith. It’s up to God. We still don’t really know what it all means; we don’t know the when or the if or the how. We live by careful steps, always doing what parents do, raising our kids toward independence without really knowing the borders of that word. Autism rubs them away, until independence, like everything else, begins to look like something else.
When our kids were small, every comparison with neurotypical kids our kids’ ages stung, reminding us how far we trudged behind, how much harder we had to work to get there. We had to choose joy or let the facts of our life swallow us. And now, reaching another bend, we’re trying to help our differently-abled kids find the future. Whatever their adulthood looks like, it lags behind the growth of their bodies.
Riley laughs, a wild, room-filling cackle, over Adam’s joke. “No, I’m not gonna marry Dad Jones,” she says incredulously. “He’s already married.”
I read something recently, something ultimately about you and me, that also made me think of my children and how I now feel about the future: “I want them to understand that I am here to go through this journey with them, and that they will always need to do life with someone; we don’t graduate from relationships,” Jim Putman wrote of his spiritual children. “I share with them that I need their help too and that we will do this together (Discipleshift, 91).” Maybe independence doesn’t have solid borders for anyone, really, because our most abundant lives will always be relational ones. We can have our own homes and live at our own speeds, and still truly none of us ever graduate from needing to share life with someone else. As a young Autism mom, I thought the worst thing might be that my children live at home through adulthood, but now I see that, as in so many other things, that just means they get to live an honesty we can all see.
“Adam, who is Riley going to marry?” Riley asks again, grinning wide, alive with her vision for the future.
“Z-Swizzle,” Adam says, this time spilling over with laughter.
“He’s not gonna say it,” Zoe says flatly, sliding back her chair.
And Kevin and I just look at each other and smile, sharing whole sentences we’re not quite ready to say out loud.
