I hear the scuffle from the basement as I am putting laundry away. “No, Cannon! It’s my turn to pick the show!” our four-year-old, Jordi, yells in frustration as his older brother fights him for the remote. I know before I go back upstairs who will win this battle.

“Nooooo!” Jordi continues, frustration now turning into sobs and anger as his big brother refuses to give back the tv remote. I walk in the family room and he begins pleading his case with me in one breath between the sobs. “Mom, Cannon took the remote and it’s not his turn it’s my turn and he just took it and I was watching sumfing!” 

“I know Jo, let’s ask him nicely and with self-control if he will give it back.”

“Nooooo!” Self-control be damned, Jordi takes a swing at Cannon’s back, who yells a little bit but continues trying to navigate the buttons on the remote without acknowledgement of his brother’s feelings. 

Jordi’s cheeks grow redder and redder and his voice more and more upset. He and I both know what will happen if we force the remote back out of Cannon’s hand: aggressive swings and high pitched yells and a little boy who will be unable to calm back down for who knows how long. 

Finally, Jordi finds the sentence, the thing that makes him more upset than just having the channel changed in the middle of his show: “Autism boys don’t get to pick! Only boss boys get to pick. I am the boss boy! Cannon is an autism boy!”

I stand there looking at my boys, one wildly upset and the other seemingly indifferent just two feet away. It is the first time I realize Jordi knows his big brother has autism; the first time I understand that he is well-aware of the differences in his brother, and that those differences feel frustrating and at times, very unfair to a four-year-old mind. 

And it is the first time I realize I need to help Jordi figure out something I am still very unsure how to do every single day. 

“Oh JoJo, come here,” I say as I pull him into our bedroom and onto my lap. We sit there in silence for a few minutes, as I pretend my big four-year-old is more like a baby so he can snuggle up really close. His body isn’t the only thing I am holding; the heavy feeling of his sadness about his brother and mine at not knowing what to tell him next felt like more weight than his body. 

“Hey bud,” I finally break the silence. “Let’s talk about Cannon, and about why you are sad, and how we can help him learn to do better.”

Jordi sniffs a little, then nods his head. 

//

For the last four and a half years, our family has been learning how to live with autism, and for almost all of that time, I have seen the struggle through two sets of eyes: the parents, and my son’s on the spectrum. I’ve sat and held him tightly to keep him from hitting his own head on the wall. I’ve reacted in anger when he slapped me in the face for asking him to put his clothes on. I’ve researched and googled and read books and spent a lot of money on oils and supplements and vitamins and anything that promised the slightest glimmer of hope that tomorrow would be better than today. And of course, I’ve wondered how impossible it must feel for a little boy to be living with a mind that will not form the words he needs to tell me what hurts, why he is sad, what he wants to do, or what happened at school today. It’s been me and my husband, and it’s been Cannon - the three of us living in this little complex word; and because our other children were so young, I have enjoyed a few years of compartmentalizing my parenting into two categories: autism - with it’s stringent therapy schedule and special diet and separate classrooms - and “typical” children - with social rules and manners and reasonable expectations for what the day will bring.

But now, I see there are not two categories. There is just us.

Special needs is a road the whole family has to walk, but the truth is—separating the paths is easier, for my heart and for my hands, than bringing everyone on the same one. But here we are, my husband and I leading the way with a trail of Cannon’s siblings behind us, who are too young to fully understand developmental disabilities, but plenty old enough to know it makes them frustrated. And right now, I have to find the words to tell another little boy what it means for his brother to be an “autism boy”, and after more than four years of searching, I still don’t know the answer.

//

I sat there with Jordi on my lap, still reeling at the injustice of having his tv show taken from him so abruptly, and knowing full well I would never let him do that to someone else. I truly thought when the time came, I would be ready for this moment, this delicate conversation that introduces two opposing truths to the world for my kids: Cannon is a good boy, but autism is a very hard thing. 

Paradox is hard for everyone, but it can be especially disorienting for a child. 

Alas, I’m not ready for the conversation, because on any given day, I deal with that paradox differently as well: sometimes with solid faith in a good God and other times with desperate cries and genuine anger that sovereignty could allow a child to struggle so much. 

“Jo,” I whisper to him as I scratch his back and watch his sad breaths slow to a calmer cadence, “I know this is so hard sometimes, to have a brother who has different rules than you.” 

He nods again, lulled into listening with the magic of a mom’s light touch.

“And bud, I get upset too, but I also know this: Cannon loves you, and he loves jumping on the trampoline with you, and chasing you, and squirting you with the hose!”

“Yeah, Cannon loves that,” Jordi says with the slightest hint of a smile as he pictures the hose and the backyard and the laughter from the day before in his mind. “He likes to put it on my head!”

“I know, he thinks you are the most fun brother ever!”

“Mmm hmm,” Jordi responds, a satisfied smirk settling in on his face.

“So I think, Jordi, in the really hard moments when we don’t understand what Cannon is doing, or why he is doing it, we just have to work really, really hard to remember how much we love each other. Autism makes so many things hard for him that are not hard for me and you. But,” I lean my face in as close to his as I could get and heighten my pitch with a little bit of excitement, “God knew he needed a little brother exactly like you to make him laugh and to play with him, didn’t he? No one will love him better than you will, JoJo.”

Another nod and smile - not one of resolution, there will always be much to be resolved, but one of acceptance.

“We will keep learning together, Jo. And so will Cannon!”

Maybe the only answer to two opposing truths is a third one: we love each other.

And wouldn’t you know, Cannon walks in the bedroom just a moment later, holds out his hand and says, “Heee go, Jordi,” and hands him the tv remote.

“Fanks, Cannon,” Jordi responds, then walks back out to the living room to finish his show.

//

*This essay first appeared on the Coffee + Crumbs Patreon site.
If you have been encouraged by my writing here or on the C+C blog, consider becoming a patron and joining the community for as little as $1 a month.

I don’t pretend to know what I am doing in the kitchen. My culinary accomplishments max out at chocolate chip cookies that are not flat or overcooked, an achievement that is still one I pat myself on the back for. And while I have yet to put much in to practice, I do love a good cooking show and have watched enough Top Chef to learn a few things about the basics of culinary excellence, my favorite among those tenants being the concept of mise en place.

‘Mise en place’ is a French phrase that means “everything in its place.” It refers to the setup required before cooking: chopping all the vegetables, measuring out all the spices, preparing the cuts of meat or any other ingredient needed for the dish. It means all of the necessary utensils are ready, the pots and pans are out, and the oven is preheated. For the chef, mise en place is all about being prepared. Having ‘everything in its place’ helps ensures that when the cooking begins there are fewer errors, interruptions, forgotten ingredients or time wasted. And as I watch the seasoned chefs on television take their craft so seriously, from the setup to the plating and presentation, I can’t help but think about how mise en place works in my writing, too.

The image that first comes to my mind is my big white desk. I love this desk. It is beat up and scratched, the middle drawer is broken and the whole thing needs to be sanded and re-painted, but this desk has been good to me. It’s seen me cry more than my husband, it knows how much time I’ve wasted on social media when I should have been working, and it’s given me a place big enough for my Bible and books and all the bills, too. This desk would be the first thing that goes on my mise en place list. Next would be my coffee. Cold brew coffee, that is, and maybe French press if we are out, because I’m rather picky and I cannot drink just any ole kind of coffee if I’m going to be productive. Then I would probably light a candle, because I write mostly early in the morning, and those pre-dawn hours are complimented so beautifully by the company of a pretty candle. I’d certainly have my journal and my sharpie pens out, and likely the book I am currently reading in case I remember a sentence that had given me an idea while I read. And finally my computer, placed gently in the middle of it all. Of course the house would have to be quiet, because I tend to need total silence to write anything decent. And as mentioned, it would be about 5:30am, before anyone is awake and any events of the day have stolen my mental margin for creating. Yes, this is a good mise en place.

The problem is, I hardly ever write like that.

And I think one of the biggest problems plaguing writers and creators of all kinds, is that we think we need that in order to write.

I have spent so much time pinning pictures of writing spaces or researching the best planners, hoping that if I can just organize what writing looks like it will somehow inspire the words in a new way. And I don’t think I am alone in this, as I have seen a whole lot of great flat lay pictures  of hands around a coffee cup with an open computer on someone’s lap. They are usually in bed, often with a decorative throw blanket nearby for some color and if they are really spiritual, an open Bible, too.

(I meant no offense if you have recently taken that very picture. I’m all about the pretty flat lays and I would totally open my Bible for a picture, too. I am that girl.)

I can get so caught up in thinking I need everything in its place to write that I don’t have any time left to do the actual work of writing. I want to create, but I’m stalling. I love the mental image of a writer and I sure love the finished product, but that space in between –  when it is just me and my words, battling for territory in the most true and honest places – that’s not always an easy place to be.

It is so much easier to just take the pretty picture, and in the meantime, see what everyone else is doing with what was supposed to be my writing time.

I would love to simplify writing down to a three-step formula, or the ever-popular five-point list of ‘things you need to write, and write well’. But like so much of life, writing has proven to me again and again how low-maintenance its friendship is, and that it simply does not need all that much in place. Sure, a big desk and a nice candle are luxuries, but I’ve written some of the most profound and honest words of my life in the most unlikely of places: on the small screen of my phone in the waiting room at the hospital; in the basement of my parents’ house while we lived with them in the middle of our move; short sentences that inspired entire essays while I waited for coffee or in the carpool line at preschool; at the kitchen table with Daniel Tiger in the background – because the idea came and I knew it was fleeting, and I needed thirty more minutes of help from the screen to occupy my kids before that idea left for good.

When I think about all of the writing I have done for the last eight years, I would have completed virtually none of it if I had waited until everything was in its perfect place. Because inspiration rarely waits for you to get ready; if you’re going to write, you need to be ready. Thinking that I need more than I already have in order to write is writing from a place of scarcity. But knowing, believing, and being confident that I already have far more than I need is looking at what is right in front of me and seeing the generosity of it all, and then writing from a place of abundance. And it’s a reminder I preach to myself every single day.

For me, the creative process has been so generous and so forgiving, and also so unpredictable. Our hearts don’t follow a schedule as much as they capitalize on a mind that has been searching for that inspiration all along. When I am constantly looking, always learning, and disciplined enough to be writing in as many margins as I can find, that is usually when the best words come to life.

Mise en place is an ethic, a mindset, that I love. But when it comes to creating, there are truly only a few things I need in place – and they aren’t really things at all: a love of writing and a desire to keep at it no matter what, and a belief that God, our creator, delights in creation. I do my best to live, learn, pray, write, and repeat. And I keep at it, wanting all the stories I tell to point back to One who gave them to me.

(and maybe a helpful way for you to, too).

“Everywhere we go, it’s work.” Alex confessed his thoughts to me as we wrangled wet swimsuits off our kids and searched the oversized bag for the dry undies.

I stared back at him, unsure of what he really meant and how to take it. My silence was enough. Sometimes parenting leaves all kinds of room for misunderstandings and taking offense.

“Babe, don’t be mad at that statement. I’m just processing. I’m telling you what I see and how I feel, and I have to be able to tell you that.”

“I know,” I said in return. “But I thought we had a great time swimming. I thought the kids did awesome, and I thought Cannon had a blast.”

“He did! We did! It was a great time. I’m just admitting to you what I feel, that it never gets easier to do things that are ‘normal’. That we have to always be prepared to work.”

Of course, Alex was right. He had just spent the better part of an hour micro-managing almost every aspect of our trip to the pool. “Cannon, walk buddy!” he would yell from the water, no less than two dozen times. And each time, Cannon would only pick up speed and continue sprinting from the concrete to the shallow entrance, with a smile across his face a mile wide.

Does he not hear us? I don’t know.

Do his receptive language deficiencies inhibit the understanding of the words “do not” and “run”? Maybe.

Is he just bad? No.

Nonetheless, it was work. When Cannon would not walk on the slippery pool edge, Alex would get out with him, grab the buckle strap of his water wings, and force him to slow down all the while repeating the command: “walk, walk, walk.” Over and over and over. Cannon never seemed distressed, he never threw a fit about being held back. That sweet boy was having the time of his life at the pool, and we loved seeing the joy on his face. But when all around you other parents are warning their young children to slow down and walk, and those kids forcefully slow their steps even when everything in them wants to run, you see it – you see the autism. And you feel it. You feel the autism. And you wonder, will we ever get there? To that place when you tell your child to do something, and they just… do it?

*****

I saw an article a few weeks ago that a friend had shared, something about a new thing called ‘virtual autism’ and how too much screen time could be the cause of the rise in autism. Of course they still had to actually study it, but whoever the authors were felt confident enough in their guesses that it was worth sufficiently scaring parents everywhere about the iPad. I also recently heard that there is a new wave of thinking about autism – that it is perhaps the newest form of “evolution” in human history: since a very small percentage of autistic men and women also can be savants in certain categories, and since we need those highly articulate thinkers in an increasingly complex and technological world, natural selection is just one step ahead of medicine and is ‘creating’ them for us. And there is one of the latest P.E.T.A. campaigns, landing blame for autism squarely on the dairy industry and all the mothers who did exactly what they were told when transitioning their twelve-month old from the breast to whole milk.

And of course there are the less stretching potential causes: vaccines, a toxic environment, maternal age, too many medical interventions, genetics.

I don’t know.

Or an unnamed second trimester abnormality that causes essential cells in brain development to “lose their way” to their proper place.

Maybe.

I am not sure who or what to blame for autism. But I also don’t stay in the blame place, because it is crippling. The far more important question for us to ask is this: did God forget about Cannon and the millions of children and adults, some stumbling and some making their way alright in this world, with a brain that sees and takes it all in so very differently?

No.

*****

Our first red flag with Cannon was his speech. He was always quiet, and he has remained quiet. Our little guy never really developed words: once or twice he said “buh-buh” (bye-bye) and a rare “mom” or “dad” or “doo-doo” (thank you), but Cannon’s story is not one of normal verbal development and then regression. He did go through a few months where he stopped saying even the four or five sounds he did have, but the regression was minor compared to the level he had ever initially attained. He started speech therapy at nineteen months old (he hated it), we moved to the Early Intervention Services and added occupational therapy to his repertoire (he tolerated it) and by two years old we knew what we were looking at. He was rarely responding to his name. He wasn’t too interested in other people. He could not follow simple commands.

There are so many moments in those months that stick out in my mind. Like just before his second birthday when I had him on my hip at the refrigerator. I knew what he wanted, he had pulled me over to the door which was his clear indication for milk. So I picked him up and said, “Cannon, say please.” I knew he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, but I persisted. “Cannon, say p-p-p-please.” Silence. “CANNON, say p-p-p-lease!” He reached harder for the door, I forcefully grabbed his tiny hand and rubbed it on his chest to mimic the sign language. “SAY PLEASE!” He whined, I commanded louder. After a dozen requests, I started to cry. Why won’t he just say “PLEASE?” I put him down without the milk, thinking my hardline parenting would help force him to talk, but it only caused him to fall apart.

Is he even able to say ‘please’? I don’t know.

Will he ever talk? Maybe.

Can I just quit, because this is too hard? No.

It was all so painful, to say that A-word out loud and know it belongs to your child. It’s not anymore - but oh, it was back then. I was living on the brink of tears every single day.

*****

Autism falls under the broad category of Pervasive Development Disorders. This is how I very un-scientifically define it:

Pervasive – all over the place

Development – how things should grow

Disorder – something went wrong

Pretty simple: something went wrong with how Cannon should have been growing in several ways. If we think of the brain like a map, directing information, feelings, language and emotions to their correct places, I think of the autistic brain like a map with holes in it. The information may start where it is supposed to, but pretty quickly runs into a big hole and has no idea where to go next, so it either falls into the hole and disappears, or it takes a wrong turn and ends up in the wrong place. This is not science*, but it’s how my mind makes sense of it.

But here’s the thing: every single brain with autism has holes in different places. And every single brain with autism has holes of different sizes. And all this means that sometimes the holes are not at all in the way of where you're going, and other times they mean you cannot get there at all.

The map might have a hole where the information is actually supposed to start, so it never gets going. Like language: some kids have zero indication of autism in the language category – there are no holes there. Some kids have no words and not even any sounds, so there is very likely a large hole right where language was supposed to begin. They just can’t get going, no matter how hard they work. Or emotional attachment: some children cannot be touched without anxiety and others snuggle in and want their back rubbed with no issues at all.

Maybe the holes are in emotional regulation. Maybe they are in sensory processing. And maybe the holes are two steps in to the journey or maybe they are further down the road, allowing the child to start without any issues, but then running into a hard stop at an unpredictable moment. He used to talk quite a bit, why did he stop? We arrived at our friend’s house just fine, why did he fall apart once we walked through the door? And how big these holes are may indicate how long it takes to recover from getting lost or falling in. For some, it’s a fairly quick rebound. For others, the whole afternoon might be lost to a meltdown, or months of progress derailed.

So what do we do? Well, we do every single thing we can to fill the holes in the map, even though we don’t know how big or exactly where they all are. We watch. We listen. We make a hundred mistakes and try again. We commit to therapies and healthy diets and giving the brain and the body the best fuel we possibly can. And when our son simply cannot hear/understand/process what we mean when we yell “walk, please!” … we get out of the pool two dozen times and show him.

And do you want to know something? That night at the pool, just before we left, Cannon started to get out of the water one last time so he could run his short lap around again. But Alex kept at his persistent teaching, and yelled one more time, “Cannon, walk buddy.”

And finally, Cannon turned around to Alex, stopped in his tracks and said back to his daddy as if he was so proud of himself for finally getting it, “Good job!”

Yes, good job indeed, Cannon.

The holes can be made smaller, friends. And I also believe many – in some cases a lot of them – can be filled completely. And yes, it is a lot of work. Like Alex was honest enough to say out loud, everywhere we go, it’s work. Still, long gone are the days I stood at the refrigerator with a silent little boy on my hip. Cannon’s language is still very far behind and we still have to work hard to pull it out of him, but he can repeat and say virtually everything we ask him to. And more and more, he is putting meaning to those words his mouth can finally say. The road ahead is long, but when you look behind to see all the patches covering the holes and all the places he used to get lost that he’s not anymore, you look ahead and say “ok, let’s find the next one.”

*****

I don’t know. Maybe. No. Three phrases that have defined our journey with special needs more than any other. But while they may be the most used, they don’t carry the most weight. With every step of the journey, we remind ourselves of this:

God is sovereign. This, I know.

Is God working in all things – even disability – for one incredible purpose: to make His name and glory known? Absolutely.

Is He good? Yes.

*****

*I want to be sure I note that research and brain MRI’s do not show any visible “holes” in the brain of a person with autism. For the sake of both storytelling and understanding, that is an image made up entirely on my own. Like most metaphors, it both over-simplifies and falls short of capturing autism perfectly, but it has been a very helpful framework for us as parents to understand the work before us in loving and teaching our incredibly sweet boy.

Harper had quietly snuck down the stairs earlier than usual, and surprised me with her little voice at the office door. “Hi mommy.”

Startled, I turned around from my chair. “Hi love. Good morning! You’re up early, did you sleep well?”

“I think so,” she said as she rubbed her eyes. With her blanket and stuffy still in her hands, she came and sat on my lap, looking at all that was on the desk in front of us: my Bible, an open computer screen, an assortment of colored pens and stray pieces of paper with all manner of verses and quotes and ideas I’m still trying to organize. Taking it all in, she asked the simplest question. “Mommy, what are you doing?”

*****

“You have to take care of yourself first,” the speech therapist kindly, but firmly, told me. “There are support groups, and they can help you find qualified babysitters if you don’t have someone who can watch your kids while you get out.” She handed me the pamphlet for one of the local gatherings of special needs parents. "You'll be a better mom to all of your kids when you practice some good self care."

“Thank you,” I smiled back. As I glanced down at the information, all still too new and too raw for me to read without tears in my eyes, the theme was clear: We will not have it in us to raise a child with special needs alone. And the resolution to that was being offered right back to me: you have to take care of yourself first.

And you know what, more than a year later, I agree.

*****

When I look back at the first five years of my own motherhood, it’s marked with both incredible memories, and a sufficient amount of fear. I remember holding my 8-day old baby girl when the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting happened, and with so much of the nation, sat on the rocking chair sobbing uncontrollably at even the thought that something like that could happen to a classroom of kindergartners. Cannon was just over a year old when the Syrian refugee crisis finally grabbed our attention, with the image of a little boy’s body washed up on the shores of a Turkish beach. I was weeks away from giving birth to Jordi when the terrorists chose Paris as their target, and there have been countless others since then. I spent many nights awake and anxious and wondering what kind of a world I was raising children in. And all of this was before autism, which brought an entirely new set of anxieties and inconveniences.  

Being a mom has surprised me in so many ways - the highs of irreplaceable joy and lows of sleep-deprived fighting with whoever catches me off guard first. But it is not a stretch for me to say that the most surprising thing it it has shown me is how ugly my heart can be. When fear and frustration and exhaustion and the completely unexplainable descend on my home, the person that has showed up is not the one I am most proud to be. I’m irritable, impatient, arguing with my husband, and oh yes I did yell at my daughter for spilling three cups of water that she was bringing to me on a tray. To serve me. It still hurts to remember that convicting moment.  

So when it came to self-care, it was becoming painfully obvious that a little time away and a pedicure, while wonderful, were going to fall short.

The sirens were going off around me: the fear, the what-ifs, the “how do I talk to my children about this” and the diagnoses –  and it was only then that I started looking for safety.

What motherhood has taught me more than anything else can be summed up in one simple lesson, the same thing that pamphlet the therapist gave me said: I cannot do this alone. The problem with the solutions, with the ‘take care of yourself first’ mentality, is that it encourages escapes, not healing. As wonderful as escapes are (I don’t even need to tell you how much I love a good spa day), they make the surface look pretty, they don’t sustain you from day to day. There isn’t a wrinkle cream, injection, nail polish, aromatherapy, essential oil, or massage strong enough to do what my heart constantly needs: to be examined, and then healed.

God’s Word, however, has an exceptional way of doing both.

Time and life and motherhood and the reality that life is an unpredictable dance of truly beautiful and remarkably hard has taught me that self-care is less about what I do and more about who and what I am consistently with. When God’s Word is churning in my heart before the tasks of the day and three little people ask me to consistently adjust what I had in mind, everything changes. I’m humbled by this work, not inconvenienced by it. I’m heartbroken by the reality of sin and evil in a broken world, not paralyzed by it. I’m patient with autism, not bitter about it. I’m rejoicing about the work God saw fit to give us, not comparing it to the work he gave others.  And I remember that no matter what changes around us, we have “the promise of the unchangeable character of His purpose,” which is to make His name and glory known in all things and to all people. The way I live in this world, with every victory and every challenge, is either going to do that, or it's not. 

And more than anything, I want it to. 

So yes, I had better take care of myself first.

*****

When Harper asked me that simple question, “Mommy, what are you doing?” I thought about the many ways I could answer her: I’m studying the Bible, I’m writing, I’m praying, I'm asking God to show me who He is through this book He left us, or simply that I am just spending time with Jesus. All of those are good answers, and all things I think she would understand. But in that moment, I told her exactly what I was thinking.

“Mommy is just taking care of herself this morning, sweetie.”   

a third birthday reflection for just enough brave

On the bottom of our six-level bookshelf, a dozen journals are stacked and cozied up against the left hand corner. That’s my childhood, I think whenever I see them there. And not just my childhood, but my angsty teen years and thought-I-knew-it-all college years, and even the combination of lonely + intense + amazing graduate school years.  Every now and then, I pull out these journals that I have kept for a few decades now, and I read through some of the entries. Allow me to entertain you for a moment with a few highlights:

November 5, 2001

Dear Journal - Well, I don’t know where to start; my life’s been crazy lately with school, soccer and a boyfriend. It’s almost too much stress for me to handle. I seriously can’t get anything done.

December 5, 2001

Dear Journal - Guess what, I made All-American! Pretty cool huh? Oh, and Chris left yesterday for the Marines! He left so quickly! I’m really gonna miss him! My mom is really sad about it! 

December 26, 2001

Dear Journal - It’s the day after X-mas and winter break is going on right now! It’s so awesome. I’m still doing ok on my diet, but I’ve cheated a few times! Brian and I are still 2together. He got me some really pretty earrings and a Bop It for X-mas. Our 2-month anniversary was last Thursday! Wow, huh?

December 18, 2002

Dear Journal - Well here it’s been a whole year and I haven’t written! I’m so sorry! But I’m not gonna forget for a while now, I promise! Here’s what’s happened: Broke up with Brian (he was so dumb and I had absolutely no regrets), went to Homecoming with Kevin Madsen and it was fun. I didn’t go to my Junior Prom because I was coming home from Florida with the National Team that day, but it was totally ok ‘cuz I didn’t really want to go. Hard to explain but I really didn’t. I played really bad in Florida, and I know it was because I screwed myself over by not eating enough. But I won’t let that happen again! Rage finally beat the Blues in the semis at Regionals. It was so awesome! Then we won the whole thing. But the week before Nationals I tore my ACL at Regional Camp. But I’ll be back on that National Team, I will! And one of the coolest things happened: I’m going to Arizona State! I absolutely love it there and couldn’t be happier about my decision. Gosh a lot has happened that I can’t believe I never told you about. But I promise more details later. This was just a quick recap! I’ll write tomorrow, but it is 12:17 and I have to wake up in 6 hours! Bye!

A few reflections:

*Almost too much stress for me to handle. Oh my. Tell me about it, fifteen-year-old Katie.

*Brian, if you ever read this, you were not dumb. You were a very sweet first boyfriend to me.

*I remember the day my older brother left for the Marines, just three months after 9/11 and with everyone thinking war would be imminent at some point soon. My mom wasn’t just sad about it, she was devastated. I can still picture that day so well, and I remember that I had never seen her like that, with swollen eyes from crying and so few words to even talk about it. I could not have understood that feeling as a teenager, but with three of my own now, I think get it.

*The diet stuff. Ugh. What I see as I read it now is the start of almost a decade of stronghold for me; almost ten years of starving, bingeing, purging, writing down every single calorie that I put in my mouth and now a lifetime of stomach issues that are very likely a result of the way I treated my poor body for too long. All because a fifteen-year-old really wanted a six pack.

*The people in my life as a teenager helped define it. I think I’ll be holding on to that thought quite a bit.

Of course my journal entries got deeper as my faith and maturity did. I wrote through the next decade in much the same way: highlight by highlight - more soccer and more injuries, more food issues, more boy issues. In fact, that last topic took over around 2008, because I had been in about six weddings at that point and had never had a date to bring to one, and a clear sense of longing seemed to accost my words for the next few years. Then children came in to the picture, and it wasn’t so much a place of longing I was writing from, but a place of desperation, with Lord, please help me! sentiments of all kinds.

And that emotion is usually where I still write from.

Three years ago, just enough brave was born. After four years of blogging with my best friend, I had planned on putting the words—at least the ones for the internet—to rest for a while. But when a friend asked me over breakfast one morning why I wasn’t writing, I realized I didn’t have a good answer, and I definitely did not have a God answer. (Side note: these kind of friends are good ones. Keep them around). So I started again from the most honest place I could think of, and that was the desire to be brave. Just enough brave.

Life and motherhood have taken a hard turn off the map I had spent a few decades of life plotting and following, walking me and Alex straight into unknown and fairly scary territory. But I kept writing, and this tiny space on the internet has safely held some of the most vulnerable words that have ever come out of my heart. I have always, always loved this about writing: it helps me see what is true about me in ways I could not have seen before I wrote it all down. And still, the best part comes a few years (sometimes decades) later, when you can look back and laugh at the things you thought were stressful, cry at the hard lessons you thought you understood but had to really learn the hard way, and mostly see how far God has brought you - how his provision has never wavered, and how he has been good enough to not give us what we want, but what we need. My words have truly become an anthology of getting what I needed.

For that reason alone, I’m so glad I wrote it all down.

Here’s the truth: writing for my own heart and writing for an audience are two very different things, and I have found that I am not very good at doing both. But I have also found that when I do the former, the later seems to happen organically. Unforced rhythms are the most sustainable rhythms, and I think that is true in every area of life, but certainly in writing.

Writing has taught me so much; more than I know how to sum up and wrap a bow around, because the lessons never stop. It has taught me to be honest and to be brave. It has shown me my pride and my tendency to compare myself to others. It has been the friend that has never kept score but welcomed me with open arms when I returned after a long break. And it has been what God has used to lift my eyes back up to him. I have loved words my whole life, but now I need them.

An anthology of getting what I needed. Thank you, Jesus.

The sun was falling slowly to the west, lighting up the tops of the wheat and the scattered wildflowers just gently enough to paint a layer of gold around them. I will never get over the way the world looks right before the sun sets; like it is at peace, content with itself for having given its best, ready for the rest it well deserves.

We had driven to the north side of town to meet our family at the orchard, dressed in corresponding colors for the yearly pictures. “I forgot the lollipops,” I said out loud.

“We will be fine,” Alex responded. “It will be quick.” Always hopeful, that one.

Cannon fell asleep on the drive, so when we pulled up we decided to just let him rest until we were ready to go take our pictures. It is easy now to see where we started to go sideways on this endeavor, and the decision to not wake him right then was the beginning.

After a few minutes the photographer arrived, and we made our way toward the blooming sunflowers for the big group shot first. Alex unbuckled Cannon and gently picked him up, whispering in his ear that it was time for pictures. He was out of sorts right away, I could tell. He woke up in an unfamiliar place with a lot of expectations, and then we started asking him to look at a camera and say cheese, which makes the list of the ‘hardest things’ for his mind to execute.

Even if I had remembered the lollipops, I’m sure this would have gone the way it did.

We tried. I tickled him and kissed his cheeks and let him hang the full weight of his body on mine, but this boy wanted no part of family pictures in that moment. So, after a few minutes, I told the group to keep on without us, and Cannon and I headed back toward the car.

That’s when I really noticed the sunset, and the visceral peace hovering all around. Everything I saw looked, well, perfect. The blemishes that cannot hide under the midday sun disappear under the filter of dusk, reminding me that Instagram has nothing on nature. The cooler air and the softer surroundings, all of it announcing the end of its work for the day. Then I noticed my heart, and even against the weight of a struggling boy, who was exceptionally difficult to carry while walking through the dirt in wedges, it was totally at peace.

No tears. No frustration. No embarrassment. No compelling draw to explain anything to the rest of the family or the photographer. In that moment I was just a mom doing what her son needed.

I’ve come a long way from the mom who needed her son to do what I wanted.

*****

It has been just over a year since we knew Cannon was autistic. I remember this time a year ago, at the end of a long summer, texting a friend who is a bit further ahead of us on a similar journey. She responded with such sweet empathy, and told me the first year was the hardest, but that her little one was improving all the time, that he has so many incredible strengths, and that it’s not easy but it’s going to be ok.

She was exactly right.

The first year was really, really hard. I did not know what to do with my son, I did not know what to do with all the opinions on why he is autistic, and I did not have the first idea how to internalize the comments and stories of others. I had no bandwidth for any one of the books a well-intentioned friend had heard was a good read, but I’d send a “thank you so much, I’ll look in to it” response anyway. I could not have named it at the time, but I spent much of the first year unraveling. I had put together a whole narrative on both God and myself as a mom, and thread by thread it was all being pulled apart.

What I can tell you now is this: I was looking at the world and trying to make sense of God. And I was looking at my children and trying to make sense of myself as a mom. When you get those things backwards, nothing really seems to fit. But when God graciously takes apart the story you believe you are narrating and puts it back together as the only fitting Author, it makes a lot more sense.

When I started with God, with his character, his story, his purposes, and all of the realities of life in a broken world, then everything else had so much meaning. But this did not happen for me overnight. In fact, I didn’t really notice how far we have come until the sunset over the orchard reminded me that just as the world makes its way around the sun every day and not the other way around, so does God need his rightful place at the center of each of our days, and not the other way around. As John Piper so beautifully says, "The healing of the soul begins by restoring the glory of God to its flaming, all-attracting place at the center."

So much of life comes down to hope, doesn’t it? And when it comes to autism—perhaps even parenting in general—the first thing you lose when your child is not doing something they are supposed to be doing is hope. I can look back at last summer and realize that what I had always believed about life, the story I had weaved together, was written around a lifetime of accomplishments, good reputation, “blessings” and other renditions of the beautiful American Dream. The foundation of my whole narrative was hope, but hope that was in those good things. I have had to learn that hope is only as unshakable as its object. 

So a year ago, God took it all apart and re-wrote the beginning. It is still hope, but it is in Him.

And when my hope is really in Jesus, all of a sudden my heart is bursting at the seems to have real hope for Cannon, too. Not just in progress, but in the story God will tell with his precious life, and the glory a little boy who sees the world so differently could bring to Him.  

*****

Once Cannon and I made it back to the cars, I found his juice cup and sat down with him at a picnic table. Together we waited for a moment, looking out at the horizon and breathing in the peace all around us. In just a few minutes, he smiled up at me and then got down off my lap—his physical indication that he was fine now. We went and found the rest of the family, and while I don’t think we got one picture with all the cousins that night, or even one where all of us were looking, we drove away with smiles on our faces. Alex reached over and grabbed my hand, and we laughed a little bit wondering why on earth we didn’t wake him up and give him a few minutes to run around in the place before throwing a chorus of resounding “say cheese!” at him.

This is our beautiful life. Not one day of it has taken God by surprise, and not one of them will be wasted.

The other night, Cannon joined his siblings and me in a game of tag— he has never done that before. He turns when we call his name now, he asks for what he wants with words and not pictures. He sleeps all night. He hugs his siblings. In life we tend to measure progress by big things or in big moments—like family pictures. He didn’t do so well in that moment, but he has had a thousand amazing little moments before and after that one.  

So, I hope. And I’ll keep hoping. Because this progress, these everyday miracles, is in its rightful place on the periphery, like the stars and the moon lighting up our lives. They are no longer at the center. Our life, and our hope, moves around the Son.

“Cannon, stop please!”

He keeps running, hard and fast down the dirt row lined with blueberry bushes.

“Cannon,” I raise my voice, “stop now!”

His little legs pick up their pace, as if my words are sideline encouragement from a proud mama rather than the desperate plea of a weary one that I mean them to be. But I follow up with one last effort: “Cannon Lee, STOP!”

At this point, I realize the futility and start running after him, leaving my other two children behind with my mom and friend, and hoping I can catch him before I can’t see what row his little head turned down. As soon as I turn the corner there he is, totally still and turned to face me with a big smile on his face. He had stopped, just like I told him to. 

“Cannon, mommy needs you to stay near me while we pick blueberries, ok?”

He tilts his head with his precious grin still beaming, his acknowledgement of my words even though we both know they were not understood. He was playing a game: a clear dirt path signaled to him the freedom to make his way down it the only way he knows how—running. He grabbed my hand and walked back to the group with me.

We got in line to grab our fruit picking baskets, and as we waited our turn I held tightly to his little hand as he pulled and pulled, willing us both back to the dirt path. This is fairly standard in unfamiliar places; Cannon’s little body is overcome with the urge to explore and understand and run around in every inch of new territory, and his little ears seem deaf to anything his own little mind is not telling him to do.

When it was our turn for the farm’s director to tell us how to properly secure our blueberries from the bush, she looked down at Cannon, who was reaching down for handfuls of bark with his free hand.

“Is this the one who was running?”

“Yes, this is him,” I replied with a smile. “He gets excited.”

“Hmm. Well, he’s not a very good listener is he? Young man, don’t pick that up.”

Cannon grabbed another handful.

“Young man, don’t touch that. We don’t do that.”

He continues to look at the ground, spotting his next grab.

“Excuse me,” she responded with irritation in her voice, “do you need to go inside the farm and learn to be obedient, young man?”

In moments like these, I usually just focus on Cannon, try to distract him from the behavior that he shouldn’t be doing and give him a positive one instead. I was short on options for those in the moment, so I did something I rarely do.

“Ma’am, he is autistic. I am not sure how much sense this all makes to him. Don’t worry, I will watch him very closely out here.”

“Oh.” A pause. “There was an 18-year-old like that out here yesterday. Her mother couldn’t do anything with her.”

'Like that?' Deep breath, mama, deep breath. Adding this to the list of unhelpful things people tend to say without really thinking about them.

A year ago, that comment would have made me break out in a sob right then and there. Six months ago, I would have been frustrated, stomped my way through the rest of our time and then vented about it to a few trusted friends, toying with the idea of writing a pithy “open letter to the rude farm owner,” but my husband would have talked me down from that place. But last week, I just smiled back, emotionally numb to her insensitivity because that’s really all it was, an insensitive comment from someone who doesn’t understand.

But today, a week later, what I wish I would have said is this:

A mom came out here with her 18 year old autistic daughter? Wow, how cool! You know, she’s a brave mama. Autism is so unpredictable and all we want for our kids is to be able to participate in great things like this, like picking blueberries on a beautiful summer day, so the fact that she came out here and tried, that’s amazing, and I’m sure it wasn’t easy for her. Yes, brave mama indeed. If you see her or anyone like her again, you should tell her that. Sounds like she’s doing a great job.

I missed the chance to say that last week, but I won’t next time.

Cannon has a defender much great than me, and that’s God. But God made me his mama and therefore his advocate, and I think I am finally strong enough to be just that. I don’t plan on arguing and I certainly don’t plan on crying; most comments come from ignorance, not maliciousness, and they are simply part of the journey of special needs—I think in particular a special need that on the outside doesn’t look like a special need. But I am so very ready to tell the next person who just doesn’t understand what she is seeing one very true thing:  we, special needs mamas, are a brave, brave crew.

*****

We brought home almost 4 pounds of blueberries that day, and even though the owner told me not to I kept sneaking Cannon a few as we picked. I believe in that boy, and I believe in the story God is writing in all of us, because His stories are always heading toward what is good, toward our forever home. They are not always easy, but always good. Moments like that just remind to not be afraid to tell it. 

“Mommmm! How do you spell ‘Great Grandma?”

“Harper, please don’t yell across the house. Come out here and I will tell you how to spell it.”

“But mom! It’s a surprise for Great Grandma. You can’t see it.”

“But I am not going to wake up your brothers, Harper. Can you come to the couch and I’ll tell you the letters?”

She sauntered out to the living room just a minute later, arms full of supplies and awkwardly cut paper hearts. After she spilled the contents of her tiny arms onto our oversized ottoman, she warned me not to come too close. “I just need the letters, mom. I’m making a card for Great Grandma. But you can’t see it yet.”

“Oh, Harper girl, that is really sweet, love! Great Grandma will be so excited to get that.”

“Yeah she will.” (Harper does not often lack confidence in her ideas.)

“Ok, are you ready for the letters? G-R-E-A-T, then a space, G-R-A-N-D-M-A. Great Grandma.”

Harper elaborately decorated the rest of the card with drawings of stick figures and hearts, swirly circles and even a depiction of her great grandma getting the letter out of the mailbox. She finally showed me her masterpiece with a beaming smile of pride, then folded it approximately 18 times into a thick, unrecognizable shape, and put it in an envelope. We sent it off, and I gave the card no more thought than that.

Last week a letter came in the mail from my grandma, Harper’s great grandma. She is my only living grandparent, having lost my grandpa and her sweet soulmate exactly two years ago. Since then, grandma JoNell has sold the big, beautiful home that held every memory of the last 45 years, moved in to a small retirement center, and spent many, many hours in the company of silence. When I opened the letter, it was a simple seven lines of beautiful, classic handwriting, the kind we just don’t see anymore.

Thank you so much for your nice letter and the sweet things you said.
I think your letter and the things you said were very good for a child of your age.
If you keep trying, I’ll bet you can be writing a book by the time you’re in school!
You are a very smart girl.
I’d love to have letters from you anytime.
Love, Grandma Mahoney

When I read this letter to Harper, she beamed, the image of her wise and gentle great grandma held in her heart as she took in the words that told her that special woman was proud of her. She brought the letter to her room and it is still on her dresser. I imagine we will put it someplace safe soon, but for now, Harper likes to see it.

I have done a lot of work in the last two years, things that I am proud of and that I hope have meant something. I’ve taught many classes and written many essays, some that have reached more people than I would have ever imagined. We bought a new house and a new car and we have diligently kept our debt at zero. I contributed to a book and celebrated it with parties and beautiful pictures. I’ve participated in Bible studies and book clubs, submitted articles at a few dream publications, read heavy theology and again and again set lofty goals for myself.

But I have not written a letter to my grandma.

Harper did, because my four-year-old seems to have a radar for what is important, one that I might have misplaced in my pursuit of doing important things.

Zack Eswine wrote these beautiful words about the mission of Jesus, saying that while we go big, fast and, popular, Jesus went small, slow, and overlooked. I want to say that the small, slow and overlook are my heart, but I wonder if my life has backed that up. The tiny letter from my grandma hit me with the conviction of a bag of bricks.   

There’s a world of people out there I tend to think I need to applause of, and there are people right in front of me I actually know but can so easily value less. The silent cheers of likes and comments can feel so loud and affirming, a moment of a fleeting "I matter!"-- gone as quickly as it came. I think it is time I switched things up a bit, and stop simply saying small, slow, and overlooked but living them.

I’d love to have letters from you anytime. You got it, grandma. 

For Cannon, on his third birthday

He came into the world so easily—one push, two pushes, then a baby boy on my chest, with a precious little face that mirrored his daddy’s from the very beginning. We wrapped him in a yellow, gray and blue blanket, the one he still spends every night with, and brought him home the day before Mother’s Day. I wish I had written more during those first few months of his life, or maybe taken more pictures. I don’t remember them like I want to, or like I remember them with his big sister. The details escape me every single time I try to recall them and for this, I feel so guilty. But I do remember that everything about him was gentle: the way he slept, his smile, his cuddle, his coos, even his yellow, gray and blue blanket.

But three years and three kids are not kind to a tired mama’s memory. And when we add the hazy details about when it all started to change, when the gentleness faded into disconnection and the coos stopped attempting to become words, it gets even hazier. It was an eighteen-month well-check, then a speech therapist, then a special school, then a specialist, and a hundred thousand moments of is this what I think it is?

It was. It is.

The tears still come, all the time I’m afraid. I would love to report that we’ve moved in to the rhythm of autism and we’ve got it, but that’s a lie. All we’ve got is Jesus, but that’s enough.

Because even through the fog that has been the last three years, and the way it got so thick and scary since the diagnosis, I do know this: when something is wrong, you have to make sense pretty quickly of a God who only does what is right. And this does not happen in a few peaceful quiet times and some tranquilly answered prayers in a journal. For me, it has been more like a street fight, questions thrown like punches and protests of my heart held out in self-defense. A broken record of Why? How? When? My fault? on repeat in my head the whole time.

It took me many months to understand I was asking the wrong questions. The only one I really needed answered was who?

The simplicity of it all still catches me off guard, because the everyday reality of life is anything but simple. I was drowning, spending all of my strength to keep my head above the water and when you’re working that hard to just fight the current you cannot hold anything else. But a new question and a new answer came in like a life preserver—it didn’t take me out of the ocean but it allowed to catch my breath, rest, and not have to fight so hard. It told me we would make it.

The answer to who was this: a perfect God, and a precious little boy.

If God had not given me Cannon, I wonder if I would have ever cared to look and learn how big He truly is? I could not even see the shoreline from where I was, yet God holds the entire ocean in the palm of his hand. This, still, is the most miraculous thing in the world to me.

The road ahead is long, and it is for a lifetime. I won’t pretend that the lessons are done being taught and that we can wrap this all up in a pretty bow and call it complete. In fact, I think it’s the opposite. After the hardest, most tear-filled year, I think we are only just starting. But if at one time I was drowning and unable to see the shore, today I have a life preserver and I do, very clearly in fact, see the shore: it’s God’s glory, his eternal purpose and redemptive plan for all of life. It’s not going to be easy to get there, but we will.

I went in to watch Cannon sleep last night; he is still so gentle in everything he does, even in his sleep. As I watched his chest rise and fall all I could think about were the words “It’s your breath in our lungs, so we pour out our praise…” God’s breath, Cannon’s lungs, my praise. And then I thought about this: we are never really drowning when God is doing the breathing.

*****

I had no idea three years ago what life would look like today. And I have no idea what it will look like in another three. I know so much more and so much less at the very same time, and I am ok with that. But it’s His breath, our lungs, and for His glory. And I do know that’s enough to get us to the shore.

Cannon Lee, who would I be if it weren’t for you? Love you forever, sweet boy. We will get there together, I know it. 

My desk faces east, looking out the window onto our quiet street and beyond, where I can just barely see the tips of the mountain peaks in the distance, all still covered with snow from what has been a long winter and what has turned into a long and still-cold Spring. I meet the day right here, every morning, every season.

For most of my life I have been somewhat of a 'morning person'. Even in my teen and young adult years when it was an option, I was never naturally one to sleep until noon. But being a ‘morning person’ always meant waking up in a relatively good mood, and outside of that the standards were low. Before children I set the alarm for enough time to get ready for work, and after children, I simply let them be my alarm, and I learned quickly that with little ones no one is 'morning person' because motherhood demands you learn to be an ‘all hours of the day’ person, good mood optional.

But when my second was five months old, everything changed. I was drowning—faking it pretty well, but drowning. Parenting a baby and a difficult toddler, wrestling with questions about who I was, the work I had left behind that I was very confident in my ability to do in order to pursue the work of motherhood that I felt like I was terrible at, and all of it was messing with me. And when I really started paying attention to my heart I realized how noisy I had let my life get; from sun up to sun down, invited and uninvited noise at every turn and I could not find a counterbalance to it all.

Then one day, after spending the weekend with a friend who I watched beautifully live out this practice in her own life, I set my alarm for 5:00am. I read the Bible, I wrote, I prayed, and I marveled at how quiet the whole world felt at that hour, at how quiet my heart finally felt. And then I did it again the next day. And the next day. And the next.

That was two and a half years ago.

(And yes, I did want to take a nap about 3:00pm every day that first month. Sometimes I still do. Power through and be willing to go to bed at 9:00pm.)

Today, I think there are ‘morning people’- those who can get up and do what needs to be done and might even have a skip in their step as they do- and there are ‘before the morning people’- those who get up before the chaos, the demands for milk, the diaper changes, and the frenetic search for matching socks. Those things still happen, but they don't happen first. I knew I had officially become a ‘before the morning’ person the day after we brought our youngest home from the hospital. He was an every-three-hours eater from day one, but even then, when my alarm went off at 5:00am I knew what was waiting for me if I could just get my feet on the ground, and the allure of that quiet, it was enough. I pushed the baby’s Rock ‘n Play out to the table with me, and my little man joined my morning routines until he was big enough to sleep through them (which took almost fourteen months by the way—because what is this ‘sleep training’ you speak of? Apparently my children were born immune to it.)

When I think of the woman and mom I was two and a half years ago and the one I am today, I know the difference, and it is the morning. I am not more or less saved, not more or less holy, and not more or less accomplished (though I am rather efficient with my earliest hours). And I don't have a sense of pride built up in my morning routine as much as a sense of desperation; I need it, my heart needs it. Because when I did find the quiet, the counterbalance to the loud world we all live in, it was in that quiet, with—finally—nothing competing for His attention, that God got big. He was too small in my loud world, an equal part of equal size of the thousand moments that made up an average day. It was in the quiet, before the morning, that He finally became unmatched.

And with all that the journey of this last year has brought us, my heart has desperately needed Jesus to be big, to be unmatched. Really, haven’t we all?

On a technical and politically correct level, there is nothing magic about the morning, no command that says if you want to hear from Jesus he has office hours only before dawn. And yes, technically, that is correct. But I push back a little, because I think there is something magic about the morning: it is untouched, not yet derailed by a day that did not unfold like I planned. It is fresh, renewed, and I will say it again, so beautifully quiet. I think the Psalmists were on to something as the chorus of their praise echoes with sentiments of in the morning, show us Your steadfast love, Lord. I cannot prepare for everything the day will bring, but I can prepare my heart to trust who is writing it all, who has commanded the morning since my days began, and who has taught the dawn to know its place. *

For months the sun has stayed stubbornly behind those mountain tops out my window, as if it were too cold itself to want to come out and play. But as we inch our way toward a new season, the day turns gold a little bit earlier every morning, offering to light the day longer and longer, warmer and warmer. These are the mornings I wait all winter long for, when I can look out the window and watch the magic that turns dark to light so quietly and effortlessly, just like it has been doing every day since God called it all 'good'.

But I think the real magic is that in these same hours of quiet at the desk by the window, as the day comes alive and greets the world, so does my heart.

Morning glory, indeed.   

*Job 38:12