Clean, Dirty

Do you ever feel like the day can just turn on a dime?  One minute you are having a lovely, laughter-fulled time and the next minute things can go so very, very wrong so very, very quickly.

Today, Hope and I went to Pet Food Express to give a bath to Luna, a friend's golden retriever who is staying with us for the summer.  Since Hope was a toddler, we've been going into this place to watch dogs being bathed here at our neighborhood pet food store.  I could drink almost a half of a cup of coffee while I allowed Hope and her sister to stand around and watch as dog owners cleansed their canine family members in neat little stalls with all sorts of hoses and nozzles.  And because there were things that looked like shower heads there, Josh often enjoyed being there as well.  It was a fascinating look into the exotic world of dog ownership.  

Today was the first time for both of us that we got to do it for ourselves.  We gladly paid our money and got a shiny, golden token.  A very friendly staff person gave us an introduction to the marvelous dog shower system and then we invited our slightly smelly dog to go into the wash area.  

Luna was not thrilled but, because she is the world's most obedient golden retriever, she obliged.  You have no idea how good it feels to rub a dog's golden hair with almond scented dog shampoo-- really rubbing it in.  It's like a sensory meditation. We took turns giving her the free treats that they had at the store.  We had aprons on but we got wet anyways.  We were laughing.  It was awesome.  

Luna even sat very still as we dried her now lovely smelling fur.  Hope and I felt good about how well we had accomplished this task.  We sauntered out of the store refreshed and energized.  I paused on the sidewalk while Luna politely smelled a few butts of dogs who were headed into the stores.  Hope was considering purchasing a dog cookie for Luna.  I noticed what a beautiful day it was.  The day was sunny but not too hot.  I could smell the coffee from the Peets coffee shop a few stores down.  What a beautiful scent is coffee, that wonderful elixer.  The scent was smooth, nutty and surprisingly strong.  It was like the smell of an old friend.  I couldn't help but to smile.  

I clicked my key to open the side door to my van, which was parked directly in front of the pet food store in the disabled parking spot.  Josh had been unhappy in the store so I had brought him back to the car, rolled the windows down and left him there to occupy himself with a cup of ice.  As the door opened, I realized why the smell of coffee was so strong.  Coffee grounds had been sprinkled all over the back of my van.  It was in the cup holder, on the floor, on the ceiling and on the seat.  It was all over Josh and the bag had been tossed onto the floor below him.  

In that moment, I realized that Josh must have reached up to the front seat and had found the bag of ground coffee that I had purchased at Peets just before we went to bathe Luna.  It must have looked or felt like sand to him because he had poured it all over himself and my van.  My son loves to pour things.  At parks, Josh loves to watch sand pouring out of his hands.  He could do it for hours.  It appeared as if he had also attempted to dry-shampoo his hair with it. 

I took a deep breath and tried to not cry.  Why is it that you can turn a quick corner and then have chaos whack you across the face with no warning?  I guess because life is just like that, a diverse array of scenes and emotions that remind us that we have very little control. 

Ecclesiastes Chapter 3 says, "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

2 a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
3 a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4 a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5 a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6 a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
7 a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
8 a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.

Apparently, there are times to be clean and times to be dirty.  And the thing about these different times is that we usually don't get to determine them.  They come upon us and what we can do is to be in it and respond well. Sometimes these different types of times happen within the same hour.  Sometimes we wait for a long time for the season to keep silence to end and for the season to speak to start.  Time and the seasons are in God's hands.  We have very little power to determine these things.  

It was a small victory that I did not yell at anyone as I drove my van with a wet girl, a clean dog and a dirty boy home.  For the second time that afternoon, I stuck Josh in the bathtub and tried to explain to him that we do not pour coffee grounds on ourselves.  He simply said back to me echolalically, "We do not pour coffee grounds on ourselves" and went back to happily pouring water from a cup into the bathtub with utter delight.  

Grace and Stress: A Day in the Life of a Mom

Sometimes I feel like my life is so chock full of moments of profound grace sprinkled with immense stress that I can't process either one.  Today was an especially demanding, full day because my husband is out of town so I'm single parenting this week.  Here is a brief description of the mixture of grace and stress in one day.

6:33 am       I wake up to a small, formerly unfriendly dog licking my toes.  We are dog sitting Frankie who was very anxious when his owners dropped him off.  I guess sleeping at the foot of my bed has made him decide that I am worth his affection.  This is a small but welcome little grace.   I get up out of bed to let Frankie out for his morning pee.

6:58 am       I discover that Frankie has elected to take his morning poo on the carpet immediately outside of our family bathroom.  The poops are lined up very neatly, almost like Morse code.  Is he trying to tell me something?  I fly into a whirlwind of deep cleaning my carpet with a variety of chemical cleaners and two different vacuums.  Stress.

7:30 am       I coax my the girls out of bed and encourage them to get ready for the day.  They are unusually compliant.  Small but significant grace.  We need to leave the house by 8:10 so I can drop the girls off at their respective summer day camps and get Josh to his doctor's appointment.

7:45 am     I pull Josh out of bed and he is one grumpy pre-teen.  He is standing at the toilet screaming the words which I usually say to him every morning, "Aim for the middle, Josh!  Aim for the middle!" He is not aiming for the middle.  The combination of autism and visual impairment usually means that I have to clean the bathroom after every morning pee.  Today is no exception.   Stress.

8:25 am       We finally pull out of our driveway after 7 separate trips back into the house to bring out various forgotten items which are necessary for the day; sunscreen, swimsuit, snack, can of pink hair color spray.  Stress.

9:18 am    Josh and I arrive at his endocrinology appointment only three minutes late.  This is a minor miracle.  Despite my having made the appointment as early as I could in the day, they are already running late.  Clearly, these people do not understand that most autistic children are seriously not good at waiting.  Josh inhales all of the snacks that I have brought with me and has moved on to wanting to eat breath mints, the only food-like items left in my purse.  I let my son eat 13 vanilla mints, spaced out for as long as I could.  Josh and I spend some time taking selfies on my phone.  Finally, an administrator walks into our room to try to work out a complication that we are having getting Josh's growth hormone covered by insurance. Without coverage, growth hormone is several thousand dollars per month.  This lady talks to me with a mix of cloyingly sweet words and a strong undercurrent of hostility and blame. She reminds me three separate times that this complication is due to my missing an appointment six months ago.  She also tells me that I should be grateful because other patients of hers have it much worse.  Stress.  I resist the urge to talk back to her with full snark or to slap her upside the head. Grace.

10:52 am     I meet up with Josh's summer school class at at the Magical Bridge Playground where they are on a field trip.  This is a place that has just opened in our town after a number of moms with special needs kids raised many millions of dollars.  It's an amazing, inspirational, inclusive space that is designed to help kids of all abilities to play alongside typically developing kids.  Today, there is some sort of event going on with a band, free pizza and about 50 kids with special needs and their caregivers having a blast.  I drop off Josh and watch him head to his favorite sensorily safe play structure.  The kids in his class are excited that Josh has arrived and head toward him to greet him with high gives.  Big grace.

11:11 am   I arrive at my work place only eleven minutes late for our staff meeting.  My colleagues greet me with friendly, empathetic faces.  I love my job.  I love that I have a place to work and belong that uses parts of my brain that have nothing to do with taking care of children or managing their needs.  After eight years of being a full time mom, I have recently started to work part time.  I cannot express what a blessed grace this is to me.

7:54 pm    The children have been picked up from their various camps, fed, and bathed.  Medications have been given.  At evening prayer time I have to tell the girls the news that the dog of some dear family friends was hit by a car yesterday and died.  Molly was the first dog that has ever stayed with us.  She was our introduction to becoming dog lovers and dog sitters.  Hope and Anna respond with loud wailing and big, fat droplets of tears.  I imagine that this is how the wailers at funerals in the biblical times sounded except that, I think a lot of those folks where hired.  My daughters' sadness comes straight from the heart.  Out of our lamentation comes a conversation about heaven, grief and the purpose of pets in our lives.  During our prayer time, while I am praying, one of them starts to make vague whispering noises.  When we stop to ask her what she was doing she tells us that she was "praying in tongues" because someone has told her that sometimes he prayed in tongues when he was overwhelmed by a situation and didn't have the words to pray but still wanted to pray.  We decide that this was fine.  In that moment, I conclude for the millionth time that parenting is wonderful and worth all of the nonsense.

8:52 pm     I have my first moment alone all day.  I am thinking about how life is so full of  beauty, ugliness, life, death, kindness, rudeness, stress and grace all in a big, fat jumble.  Contrary to what reading Facebook might make you think, life is not a constant stream of joyful, sweet, picturesque, insightful moments.  It's more of a tangle of the good, the bad and the mind numbingly boring stuff in between.  But I thank God for His gift of reflection for it is one of the things in life that help us to digest it and make sense of it all  it.  As I process and pray about my day, Grace wins over stress.

How is My Son Different From a Dog?

A few months ago, my husband saw a request for a dog sitter on a neighborhood email list.  It was Christmas break so we thought it might be a good opportunity for our girls to learn responsibility and to see if Josh was at the place where he might enjoy or benefit from a dog.  Well, one thing has led to another and we are now on our ninth canine guest in our home having become official dog sitters on Rover.com.  Hope and Anna have become quite the savvy internet business gals, updating our website regularly and passing out our business cards to anyone with a dog at the neighborhood park. The girls are saving up to buy Kindles and thanks to our dog sitting business, they are pretty close to their goal.

One of our favorite guests was Molly (the black dog in the photos above).  We really bonded with her because she stayed with us for four nights.  She's a passionately relational family dog from a household with three energetic kids.  Molly was a long-suffering angel with Josh, snuggling in his bed for hours at a time patiently abiding his awkward pats and obsession with her tail.  We all bonded quickly and deeply with her.

During Molly's visit, I was running errands with the kids and the dog when Hope astutely observed, "Hey, Molly is like Josh in a lot of ways.  She doesn't talk, she has black hair and she has to be taken on walks, just like Joshie."

I smiled because Hope was tapping into a conversation that Alex and I have been having.  Don't tell anyone but sometimes we (sort of, semi-jokingly) ask each other "What is the difference between having Josh and having a dog?"

After all, life with Josh is still based on primarily non-verbal communication.  We still have to help facilitate his toileting, manage his food needs, and make sure that Josh gets proper exercise.  Josh communicates his love and affection for us primarily by snuggling, just being around and being himself.   Honestly, having Josh is not unlike having a pet.

And a part of me realizes that this is not entirely an insult to Josh's humanity.  Having had a number of dogs in my house recently, I've come to realize how precious and profound animal companions can be.  When one of  my daughters found out that she didn't get into a play that she had auditioned for, the first thing that she asked me was whether we had a dog at our house that day.  She wanted some unconditional love and connection to comfort her.

I also read an article from a local psychologist who was commenting about what parents can do to help our stressed out adolescents to grow up with good mental health.  (Our town has had a disturbing number of teen suicides in the past couple of years.)  One of his suggestions was to have a pet.  The role of pets in enhancing human well being is both well-documented and intuitive.

Some theologians such as Andrew Linzey have written about a "theology of animals" exploring what the Bible may have to say about a compassionate, respectful relationship between Christians and animals.

We live in a country that clearly values our pets, even to the degree that we are projected to spend $80 billion on our pets this year.  This is remarkable given the fact that the United Nations estimates that the cost to end world hunger (for people) would be about $30 billion.

Yet, the reality is that although Josh is like a pet in some ways, Josh is not our pet.  He is our son. Genesis 1:24-31 illustrates God's intention that people are the pinnacle of God's intent for His creation.  People alone, of all of God's creation, are created in the image of God.  Despite Josh's limitations in communication, productivity, and independence, he still embodies a special reflection of who God is.  Even in his brokenness, he has a place among those of us who, as people, have a unique, though not exclusive, role in the history of God's redemption of the world. Furthermore, I'm not sure what the eternal destination of animals or pets will be.  I do know that all people, no matter our physical or intellectual abilities, have set before us the invitation to eternal communion with God.

It's hard to explain these thoughts to my nine year old daughter.  To her, I simply said, "Yes, Hope, Josh is like a dog in many ways.  But he's not just a member of our family like I dog might be if we had one.  He's your brother and our son.  And that's very, very special."  She smiled and said, "I know, Mommy."