To Say Thank You

Today’s challenge was simply to say thank you.  To thank someone who has played a part in our journey.   One person that has been instrumental in our lives.

And so to mine:

Thank you.

Thank you for loving me when I least deserve it.  For constantly pouring yourself into me even when it seems like the effort is falling on barren ground.  Thank you for encouraging me.  For supporting my every whim and fancy.  There have been many and you’ve never said no, that I can’t or that I shouldn’t.  You’ve only said yes.  And only ever meant it.

Thank you for making me a mom, the one dream I had that has never changed.  For the way you love those boys.  Ways I’ve only ever been able to imagine.  For the way you chase and toss and tease and laugh with them.  They are becoming who you are because of what they see.

For the way you show them what it means to be a man who is honest and respected.  For the business decisions you make that whisper your character in a world that only recognizes those that are shouting.

Thank you for teaching them and learning from them and always lavishing your love upon them.  For showing them that men say “I love you” and “I’m sorry” and they cry at sappy movies and stand taller than they ever thought possible when the ones they love are attacked.

I know you had dreams, too.  For the way your life would be.  Their soccer coach and their side line supporter and biggest fan.  You couldn’t have ever planned for this. Neither of us could have but you carry us through this.  I mean it.  You pick us up and you carry us forward when it would be all too easy to stay where we are.

The statistics are 80%. That’s the number of marriages that end in divorce when they have a child with autism.  You know that number, not because you’ve read the reports or have feared the reality, but because you fight against that number every day.  With everything you do, you fight to be the 20% and when I don’t feel like trying anymore, you fight even harder.

This life we live is lonely.  It’s hard to maintain friendships and build relationships amongst the chaos.  We’ve seen it.  You felt it even more.  You’ve watched friendships fade and be replaced and you’ve grieved for them but you’ve never once placed blame.

You are unapologetic about the way you love me, the way you love them.  About the lengths we go to try to make this life more manageable, to make them comfortable, to make them happy. It means we stay home most weekends, it means we retreat to the place that is safest.  It means going weeks and months without spending time with other adults and I tell you how sorry I am about that and you remind me that this is the place you want to be.

For being quiet in our often way too loud world.  For being constant when it seems our whole lives hinge on the cycle.  For dancing with me in the kitchen.  For making them laugh with the way you kiss me.  For spending your weekends gladly hearing about Pokemon cards and video games.  For taking walks when you’d rather sit.  For saying yes when it would be so much easier to say no.  For all the times you’ve said no to others so you could say yes to us.  For praying in front of them.  For praying for them.

For all of the things you do and for all of the things that you are.

Thank you.

 

To All The Servers: A Letter About Lettuce

On behalf of all us parents, we have something to tell you.

To tell to those of you that work in restaurants.

Something you really need to hear.

 

When we come to your restaurant it’s no big deal to you.

We are just another customer.

Another table to serve.

 

But it’s a big deal to us.

We’ve prepared for this.

We’ve planned for this.

We picked the week and the day and the time.

 

We’ve worked ahead to do everything we can to make this experience enjoyable for not just us, but the other guests in your restaurant.

When we order, it’s not like we have taken 10 minutes to leisurely look over the menu and choose something that sounds pleasing to the pallet.

We know what we are going to order before we get there.  We know what takes a while to prepare and what can be served quickly.

 

We have already thought about how the food will smell.  How it will sound when we are eating it.

Will our boy be able to handle those smells and sounds.

When we order things prepared a certain way it might sound different to you, but that is the way that it has to be.

No exceptions.  We didn’t plan for anything other than our usual.

 

When you bring our food to the table and our boy’s plate isn’t the way that we ordered it, you have to understand that it is a bigger deal than what you think.

To you it’s just lettuce atop a hamburger.

Nothing to get all worked up about.  Just take it off.

It’s just lettuce.

But to him, it’s a lot more than that.

 

What are you afraid of?

Is it spiders?  Does the thought of them make you shiver?

Maybe it’s snakes?  Does the sight of a snake cause you to scream?  Is your first reaction to run the other way?

Well, it’s just lettuce to you, but to him it’s a spider.  It’s a snake.  It’s the thing that causes the most fear.

It’s not like he has a lettuce phobia but he is terrified of things that are new.  Unplanned.  Unexpected.

 

To you it’s just lettuce.

To him it’s more than he can handle.

To us it’s just another defeat.

 

We will be back…eventually.

We will prepare and plan and try again sometime.

When we do show up please try to remember this.

To us it’s about a lot more than lettuce.

Its about our life.

Paint By Numbers

Today I was asked to write down my biggest fears.  Yeah.

I can’t think of anything more frightening than giving a voice to the things that frighten me most.

I wish I could answer spiders or storms or Michael Buble, but I wouldn’t be telling the truth.  Not all of it.

What’s my biggest fear?  Do you really wanna know?

It’s getting to the end of this life and realizing that I never fully accepted our boy’s autism.  That I never got over it.  That I never moved past grieving and into living.  That I never loved him enough.

That.

This week I have been reading through some things that I have written in the past.  This one is nearly 3 years old and my deepest of desires is that these would cease being just words and start being the true reflection of my soul. 

That the story of our crazy, beautiful life would really be the masterpiece that I know God has intended it to be.

 

Paint By Numbers

Even as a little girl, I loved to create.
Paper, crayons, paint.
Anything that could be transformed.
Anything that could be made into something else.
Some of my favorite things to do were paint by numbers.

There was something magical about that white paper canvas.
Segmented into tiny shapes.
Individual boxes.
Each waiting to be filled. Waiting to be changed.
Waiting to be turned into something beautiful.

As an adult, my life mirrors that paper canvas.

Unrefined.
Blank.
Unfinished.
Numbered.
Segmented.

[3] The age Isaak was diagnosed with Autism
[180] The number of pills he takes each month
[80] Estimated divorce rate among parents with Autistic child
[18] The age kids go off to college…most kids…probably not ours

Numbers. Boxes

Segmented.
Individual.
Stand alone.
Isolated.
Sterile.

Until you begin to add color.

Each box begins to fill.
Each color merges into the one next to it.
Shapes turn into objects.
It begins to be something else.
It begins to be something different.

Cohesive.
Connected.
Interdependent.
Consecutive.
Coherent.

Transformed by the hand of someone.
One with a plan.
One who knew the color scheme.
One who took the time to color within the lines.
One that changes things.

Meticulous.
Aesthetic.
Imaginative.
Intact.
Whole.

A painting.
Not just a painting. A masterpiece.
Brush strokes that on their own are not beautiful.
In fact, some are ugly.
A piece of art created for the purpose of being shown.

Not created by someone. Created by the Creator.

Perspective {revisited}

Recently I’ve been rereading some of the things I’ve written over the past few years. Some of the have made me laugh, some have made me cringe and others are a strange reminder of how life revolves in patterns and seasons. This is especially true of this piece.

As a freshman at Purdue studying Fine Arts, I spent an entire semester drawing the same structure. Three days a week. Every week. Four months. The same thing.

There is this place right in the middle of campus where a number of walkways, corridors and buildings converge into an open space. Architecturally and from a space planning sense, it is really quite stunning.

Right in the middle of the open space are these fountains, that seem to be oddly misplaced in the context of what surrounds them. To one side are the buildings that house the schools of engineering. On another side there is the pharmacy school and to yet another side are administrative buildings that house the dean of students and other official types.

But there are these fountains. They seem to spring up from nothing. Whimsical and playful and completely unexpected.

The assignment for the entire semester was to build a portfolio that showed this spot on the map from every possible perspective. To be honest, I liked the idea of spending warm afternoons out on the grass drawing rather than in the studio being lectured. I liked that part far more than I did the idea of drawing it repetitively.

It didn’t take me very long to figure out that there were places that I could plant myself that made drawing the space pretty easy. Finding a spot where I could look at the fountains straight on made rendering it in perspective a breeze. Everything looked right. There was no need to measure angles and figure horizon lines and vanishing points. The view from that spot was aesthetically pleasing.

It was the perspective that mattered.

It took me just about as much time to figure out that there were places that I could plant myself that made drawing that space a nightmare. A spot where lines and angles and forms converge and twist and becomes nearly impossible to replicate. The view from that spot was gritty and tangled.

It was all about the perspective.

It could be where one sidewalk would crash into another, both coming from opposite angles. Or where the slope of the walls of the fountain would intersect visually with the overhang from the roof of a building in the background. Or looking down on them from the corner of a roof top of Schleman Hall where, when you stare for too long, your eyes begin to play tricks on you, like you have been staring at an optical illusion and soon you don’t know which lines are real and which ones are imagined.

I learned so much about composition and technique and scale and art in general that semester.

I learned perspective.

Little did I know at 20 years old that the lessons that I learned sitting in the grass with some paper and a a pencil would not only encourage me later, but at times sustain me.

I learned perspective.

Perspective isn’t this static thing. It’s not a feeling. It’s not an emotional state. It’s not the way you view things.

It’s the way you see them.

Objects don’t change.

A building is a cube. That doesn’t change. No matter where you plant yourself, that building will always have the same walls and roof and windows and doors. The angles and the slope and the pitch of things will always be the same.

If you can’t make sense of what you see, closing your eyes and opening them again is not going to help. If you try it enough times, eventually your eyes may begin to play trick on you. They may begin to see things that aren’t really there. Just like an optical illusion, you can think you see it a different way. But you don’t. It didn’t change.

There is only one way to make what you see in front of you different. You have to get up. Up from where you planted yourself. You have to stand up and move to another spot.

It doesn’t change things.

The building is still a cube. The walls and roof and the windows and the doors. They didn’t change. But the way you see it has.

My life is just like that spot. All around me are things that are black and white. They are schools of thinking that have only one answer. They are diagnosis and diseases and relationships that have no room for interpretation. They are what they are. That will never change.

But there are these fountains. They seem to spring up from nothing. Whimsical and playful and completely unexpected.

If you plant yourself at many spots around them, they don’t make sense. You have to squint your eyes just to even begin to see where one form starts and the other stops. It’s gritty and tangled and nearly impossible to reproduce in any way that would be recognizable, let alone pleasing.

But then there is this other spot. This one place where if you stand and look at just the right time and in just the right way, what you can see takes your breath away. These two concrete forms begin to take on life and they don’t just exist in the same scape, they begin to interact with each other, almost as if they have this dialog that doesn’t need words. The juxtaposition of the two forms as they swirl and dance around and among each other is beautiful.

You can capture that image on paper, it is visually stunning and it makes people stop to stare into it. An image that, had you not moved, would have been lost forever.

The Ones Who Dare To Dream

For the dreamers
The stargazers
The castle builders
The thinkers

For those who dare to believe that fantasies were made for us chasers.

For those who hatch
And crave
Long
And thirst

For those who pursue
Relentless
Seek
And search

For those that inherit
Cultivate
Harvest
And glean

For us, the romantics
The mystics
The ones who dare to dream

What Fear Fears

5 am comes early and in the first hours of the day, fear is quiet. It’s dormant. It’s waiting.

Awesome is tangible when the things that you fear the most are still sleeping.

5 am comes with breaths of gratitude. Of thanks. Of thanksgiving.

At 5 am, anything seems possible.

Starting seems easy.

And then the real day begins with demands and pressures and the reality of a life like ours.

Tempers flare and buttons are pushed and the feeling of success felt just hours before is gone.

It’s summer. The sun beats down. It burns and it stings.

The weather outside is unbearable but the climate inside is just a volatile.

Words burn. Cries sting. And how is that love and pride and anger and heartbreak can fill the same space?

It’s barely past the noon hour and limits are reached and it’s autism for the win.

Autism.

And fear.

Fear has spent the morning practicing it’s speech. It’s prepared. It’s ready for the attack.

And it’s vicious.

And it should win. It always wins.

It hasn’t know defeat in me before.

But it doesn’t know that I’m not fighting fair this time.

I’m not fighting it alone.

If it really is true that fear fears community the fear should be terrified.

It may have won the battle but this isn’t over.

It’s who wins the war.

Beauty From Ashes

Sometimes I’m not sure why God picked us. And to be honest, sometimes I’m not sure if He even did. Sometimes I think it just happened. The luck of the draw. Fate.

That we would long for a baby for 5 years. That we would dream and scheme and prepare for that child. And then wait. Sometimes I think it it’s almost worse that way. The waiting only makes the dreams more real.

And then one day, when we had all but given up we would receive the blessing and in his face we would see the love of the Father.

And we would begin to check off the dream list, one milestone as a time . Until one day it became clear that the plan we had wasn’t going to work out.

And not like it needed to be tweaked. It had to be scrapped. Thrown out. Shredded and burned and forgotten.

Except it’s easier to throw something away than it is to forget it.

Because after all, how can that much hurt come from God? How can He give and take away at the same time?

When you have more questions than you have answers, you aren’t quick to move on.

But after days and weeks and months it becomes a little easier to craft another plan.

The new becomes your own kind of normal and you begin to allow yourself to dream again and in his face you are once again are reminded of the love of the Father. You trust again. You believe again.

And just like you once believed to be true so long ago, hurts are redeemed and tears are exchanged for laughs and beauty really does come from ashes.

And then one day in the middle of the summer you read these words. The words of your second son who was born into the midst of what is often times chaos and you begin to wonder again.

“Having a brother with Autism is hard. It’s hard to play with him. Even when he is bad to me I just kinda have to deal with it because I know it’s just Autism. I just have to live with it when he does those bad things in the house and try to remind him to do better and to keep trying.”

~ Luke, 8 years old

And all those once quieted fears come racing back. The doubts and the questions come with new words.

Words like burden. Like normal. Like fair.

Words that you begin to measure his life against and you wonder all over again if it’s God who gives the blessings and us who earns the hurts.

And how do you reconcile this hurt that you must have earned with the pain that it brings to the ones you love most?

And then one night you listen to that same little boy pray. And he prays from a place that you once kneeled. A place where he trusts not because he has tested fate and God prevailed. But a place where he knows nothing different than to trust that the God that made the universe, made him and loves him and has set him apart for amazing things.

He prays for his brother that night, not questioning if God could, but knowing that He does.

And once again, the fears and the doubts and the questions fade away and in the eyes of a sweet, brown hair, blue eyed little boy, your are reminded once again of the love of the Father.

Perspective

As a freshman at Purdue studying Fine Arts, I spent an entire semester drawing the same structure. Three days a week. Every week. Four months. The same thing.

There is this place right in the middle of campus where a number of walkways, corridors and buildings converge into an open space. Architecturally and from a space planning sense, it is really quite stunning.

Right in the middle of the open space are these fountains, that seem to be oddly misplaced in the context of what surrounds them. To one side are the buildings that house the schools of engineering. On another side there is the pharmacy school and to yet another side are administrative buildings that house the dean of students and other official types.

But there are these fountains. They seem to spring up from nothing. Whimsical and playful and completely unexpected.

The assignment for the entire semester was to build a portfolio that showed this spot on the map from every possible perspective. To be honest, I liked the idea of spending warm afternoons out on the grass drawing rather than in the studio being lectured. I liked that part far more than I did the idea of drawing it repetitively.

It didn’t take me very long to figure out that there were places that I could plant myself that made drawing the space pretty easy. Finding a spot where I could look at the fountains straight on made rendering it in perspective a breeze. Everything looked right. There was no need to measure angles and figure horizon lines and vanishing points. The view from that spot was aesthetically pleasing.

It was the perspective that mattered.

It took me just about as much time to figure out that there were places that I could plant myself that made drawing that space a nightmare. A spot where lines and angles and forms converge and twist and becomes nearly impossible to replicate. The view from that spot was gritty and tangled.

It was all about the perspective.

It could be where one sidewalk would crash into another, both coming from opposite angles. Or where the slope of the walls of the fountain would intersect visually with the overhang from the roof of a building in the background. Or looking down on them from the corner of a roof top of Schleman Hall where, when you stare for too long, your eyes begin to play tricks on you, like you have been staring at an optical illusion and soon you don’t know which lines are real and which ones are imagined.

I learned so much about composition and technique and scale and art in general that semester.

I learned perspective.

Little did I know at 20 years old that the lessons that I learned sitting in the grass with some paper and a a pencil would not only encourage me later, but at times sustain me.

I learned perspective.

Perspective isn’t this static thing. It’s not a feeling. It’s not an emotional state. It’s not the way you view things.

It’s the way you see them.

Objects don’t change.

A building is a cube. That doesn’t change. No matter where you plant yourself, that building will always have the same walls and roof and windows and doors. The angles and the slope and the pitch of things will always be the same.

If you can’t make sense of what you see, closing your eyes and opening them again is not going to help. If you try it enough times, eventually your eyes may begin to play trick on you. They may begin to see things that aren’t really there. Just like an optical illusion, you can think you see it a different way. But you don’t. It didn’t change.

There is only one way to make what you see in front of you different. You have to get up. Up from where you planted yourself. You have to stand up and move to another spot.

It doesn’t change things.

The building is still a cube. The walls and roof and the windows and the doors. They didn’t change. But the way you see it has.

My life is just like that spot. All around me are things that are black and white. They are schools of thinking that have only one answer. They are diagnosis and diseases and relationships that have no room for interpretation. They are what they are. That will never change.

But there are these fountains. They seem to spring up from nothing. Whimsical and playful and completely unexpected.

If you plant yourself at many spots around them, they don’t make sense. You have to squint your eyes just to even begin to see where one form starts and the other stops. It’s gritty and tangled and nearly impossible to reproduce in any way that would be recognizable, let alone pleasing.

But then there is this other spot. This one place where if you stand and look at just the right time and in just the right way, what you can see takes your breath away. These two concrete forms begin to take on life and they don’t just exist in the same scape, they begin to interact with each other, almost as if they have this dialog that doesn’t need words. The juxtaposition of the two forms as they swirl and dance around and among each other is beautiful.

You can capture that image on paper, it is visually stunning and it makes people stop to stare into it. An image that, had you not moved, would have been lost forever.