Playdate

So, Anna had been begging me to have a playdate. I kept procrastinating about it but over the last few weeks as I caught her outside having detailed conversations with her imaginary friend I thought, "This is crazy! This girl NEEDS to have someone over." So the other day a friend from school got off the bus with her, and I led them inside and helped them put down their backpacks --

and started to feel my heart pounding.

We were in the living room, which is also Anna's makeshift playroom until we put together her new room in our current office, and I suddenly found myself explaining to Ainsley. "This is Anna's playroom right now, because she shares a room with her brother and there's not enough room for her toys up there, and we're going to..."

Meanwhile, Ainsley and Anna had pulled out a ton of My Little Ponies and were screeching about their little amusement park. What are you doing?? I chided myself. The girl is not listening. She doesn't care about that! Within a few minutes, the kids were in the backyard out on the swings, having the time of their lives.

I didn't start thinking about it all until I just woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't sleep. Something had made me remember Gilbertville, my childhood, and our subsequent move to a tiny apartment in Springfield.

Until I was 10 I lived in a dying mill town, full of apartment houses (four families, built across, not up). Ours was the shabbiest, with weathered rough gray shingles. I'm not sure if I always knew that, but I remember the day I heard my best friend Ryan say to another kid, "Her house is really ugly outside, but her mom made it real nice inside." He meant well. The thing is, the inside wasn't all that great, either. There was the creepy hole in the wall in the downstairs bathroom (I wondered: would a spider crawl out of there?). And the upstairs bathroom that contained a toilet. That's it. No sink. And our shabby furniture that my mom did her best with. At that time, my dad worked at one of the mills still running, over in Ware, a neighboring town. At lunchtime they all used to go sit on the roof and eat their lunches. Sometimes we'd drive by and see them.

The house was not so great, but when I was younger I still had people over. I'm not quite sure when it all began to change. I wonder sometimes when I began to close in on myself. I can't seem to quite pick an exact moment, or even a year. I just know that by the time we moved to Springfield when I was 10, I had decided that no one was coming over my house to play, if I could help it.

I'm sure my brother Andy had something to do with it. When we moved to Spring Meadow Apartments in Springfield, he was three and in the midst of what we all remember as an extremely destructive phase. I wish I knew why this happens with autism, specifically severe autism. Is it sensory seeking behavior? Did a part of Andy feel so frustrated with his condition that he needed to lash out? Was it the only way he felt he could communicate? Maybe all of the above.

Whatever it was, something, everything, drove Andy to destroy things. He threw my parents' wedding rings down the toilet. He'd go into the refrigerator, grab things, and dump it all out. Grated cheese, everywhere. Worse, much worse -- he'd poop and smear it all over the walls of his room. I remember my mom crying (sometimes) and cleaning. Always cleaning. Sometimes he'd get it all over toys and games. Or he'd just tear games apart until most of the pieces were lost. "Andy wrecked it," was a common theme in our house. Even our furniture (anything wooden) was all nicked up because of his need to tap on it with spoons or other objects.

Despite all this, at first I didn't want to keep people away. I remember a day at a friend's house when I was about 12. I'd just slept over and was getting ready to leave. I'd been over to Mia's several times and really liked her. I wanted to have her over my house. I wanted to open up my world to her and stop living with what I felt was almost an awful secret...there was school, and then there was my crazy world at home with a brother running around making messes and unintelligable noises. Mia was sweet and kind. I sat on her stairs while she ran up to her room and her dad was getting ready to take her home.

Tell her, my thoughts were screaming. Just tell her about your house and Andy. Make her understand, and then it will be okay to invite her over. I could hear Mia coming back down the stairs.

Tell her.

Mia came down and I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. My heart was pounding. I opened my mouth again. I just couldn't do it.

When I got home that day, Andy was sitting in his underwear right in front of the window, hands over his ears, making strange sounds. I remember looking out the window and seeing the neighborhood kids laughing. "He's in his underwear!" they were saying. I would have laughed, too, if it hadn't been my family. If I hadn't understood.

After that moment, there was no longer any debate in my mind. My family was just off limits, unless they already knew us from somewhere else, and this all wouldn't be so shocking. And so for the next five years I didn't have a birthday party at home. I didn't have a sleepover. I had two friends from church over and that was rare. I didn't learn to open up my home and my life and to be social and hospitable, but rather to hide within myself and my family's pain.

And so when Anna arrived home with her little friend I started to look around and think about everything that was wrong with my house. And when Ethan woke up from his nap I imagined her saying to Anna, "Why doesn't he really talk?" I imagined him doing something and Anna having to explain about him and thought about her having to say, "My brother's different." Maybe that will happen some day. But on this day, Ethan walked down the stairs and gave Anna and Ainsley a big smile, and Ainsley said, "Wow, he's tall" and they ran away to play dress up.

There's something I've been thinking about lately, every time I go back and think of the horrid times, growing up, and especially those years in the little apartment. I had forgotten for awhile. I can't seem to remember all of Andy's antics, and the tears and yelling and all of that, without thinking of my mom's flute.

My mom has always played the flute and at that time played on the church worship team. She's always played beautifully and in fact at one time wanted to go to music school. Some days in the midst of all of the craziness, after cleaning up Andy's messes, lugging laundry over to the laundromat or throwing out more broken toys, she'd sit down and play. The sweetness filled the house and my heart. It calmed everyone. Andy would stop and listen and a part of him would drink it all in. One of my favorite songs was from church, and is taken from one of the psalms. I used to hum along the words as she played. The first part goes:

At all times I will bless Him
His praise will be in my mouth
My soul makes its boast in the Lord
The humble man will hear of Him
The afflicted will be glad
And join with me to magnify the Lord

Let us exalt His name together, forever
I sought the Lord, He heard me
and delivered me from my fears
Let us exalt His name together, forever
O sing His praises, magnify the Lord

I sit writing in the darkest and quietest hours before dawn and can hear the song echoing in my head, can see the sheet music on the floor and my mom sitting on the bed near Andy and playing, just playing and getting lost in the melody and the meaning.

I know now that yes, things were bad, but that even then, I could have made better choices. I am convinced God would have been faithful. If I had opened up my home and my heart, who knows what I would have discovered? I may have been hurt but I also may have seen my friends develop a love for someone different from them, and learn that all of it didn't make me so different after all. Who knows?

There is no need to beat myself up over what any of us did or didn't do. I have now, and I have the same trustworthy and loving God, who looks at all of us, yes, all of us, and sees our faults and shortcomings and yet desperately loves us and gives us the strength to face the seemingly impossible.

Yup. I think it's time to schedule another playdate.