Friday, September 3, 2010

The Beautiful Difference By Rinda Ki

Being told that your child is autistic is rough. A little over a year from when I heard the blunt announcement—now I can sit back and think. When you get it, it feels as though you are being taken and roughly thrown into the heart of what it’s like to live in the world.

All the books you pick up seem to suffer from the same theme. Are you hurt? We know. . . now get over it! Your child needs help! Rush! Rush! Never give them a bare moment. Never let them just stare off into space. New treatments. New experiments. Have you heard about immunizations? Try changing their diet—but you have to be perfect! But don’t get stressed, because that won’t help anyone. Organize yourself, get your programs together. Hire a lawyer for the IEP. It’s best if you can hire a local college student to help you out for the hour a day you need a break from being an interactive, treatment-providing, entertainment device for your autistic child. Oh, and did we mention that the success rate for all the treatments are actually fairly low? Did we mention that your child will always be autistic? Did we mention that this disorder is completely unpredictable, and some will respond better than others? Hey! We told you getting stressed wouldn’t help!

A few deep breaths.

It’s a mad house. It’s like having all the problems of the American culture slapped across your face with the tag, “if you love your child . . .” attached. You have to rush, you have to spend lots of money, even though you aren’t really sure why, and you are pretty sure it won’t do much good.

I would look at my little boy in one of our calm moments (I had calm moments? Why wasn’t he in treatment?!? ) and he would be staring out at the world, seeing things in a way I will never be able to see them. I tried anyways. I wanted to know this little boy beside me.

Did you know that leaves twitching in the wind make a lovely skirmish of movement that you can stare at for hours? Did you know that neon lights seen through glass bricks flex and move when you turn your head? It’s true. My little boy showed me.

Did you know that the whole world loves a child, and that there are beautiful people everywhere you go? You walk a different path when you have a child with special needs, and you begin to see things differently.

It was during some of those calm moments that I also began to think about where God and I fit into my son’s life, and if there was a better way to help him live his life.

From my books I learned about the nature of the disorder. Then I could tell what advice was valuable, and what wasn’t. From the calm moments, I understood that my little boy was God’s little boy first. Then I knew I had an all-powerful, all-knowing ally who is providence. Nothing is outside His plan, or His care.

Not even my little boy.

This matters more than you realize. Because, you see, he isn’t normal. He doesn’t fit in charts, or easy check-lists. He is outside the normal plans, and we have to write new ones just for him, and often those plans don’t work out either. But he does fit it in God’s plan. He was written in from the beginning, he belongs there. He is anticipated, and there won’t be any re-writes on this one.

So I could let go of all the fretting and rushing, and painful panic. For all the treatments out there, I was never in control. God is. For all the well meaning advice, they don’t always know what’s going on. God does. God knew my son before he was, and God is more his Father than I know.

Now when I need help, I go to God and ask for it. He’s the perfect parent; all-knowing, and utterly loving. He cares about how I raise the beautiful little boy He created. So I can trust he will help me raise my son right, and I know that for all my imperfections God’s plans won’t be frustrated. I have freedom to let my little boy be who he is. If I am doing my best, and my child isn’t fitting in the newly-constructed, state-of-the-art, cutting-edge-research, neatly designed plans . . . then that is just what he’s going to do. I can’t change that. And he still fits in God’s plans.

But this is really true for all of us. All that panic and rushing about for so little return, doesn’t have to be our way of life. We can trust in our loving and provident God. I look around at the tables bracing up people with strained faces, and I wonder how many have realized it yet. Maybe I could let them borrow my child, teeming with possible insights, until they get it? Then I look out at the twitching leaves.

And I still let my son stare out into space, and play with his fingers, and line up all his Hot Wheels. The world is a wider place when I try to see it from eyes that will never be like mine. It’s God’s world in a new context. There is more here than any of us suspect.

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