What happens when you take two young families who really enjoy one another and make them live, work, eat, and minister together? Eventually I ruin it. I’ll explain later. I’m really struggling with how to tell this part of the story because there was so much happening in every avenue of our lives that it seems an impossible task to get it all across in an understandable way, but when have I ever let a little thing like making sense get in my way?
Hannah and I bought a building that used to be a funeral home for $25,000 to turn it into a home. We borrowed $35,000 in order to have a little money to pay for the renovations. We discovered that if you get a change of address form from the U.S. Postal service you receive a coupon from Home Depot for 10% off purchases up to $2,000 so we talked to everyone we knew who had moved recently and bought all of our materials in 5 $2,000 trips to Home Depot.
Jacob and Lindsey (Hannah’s youngest brother and his wife) had moved from MO to come help us with the house and work with me in carpentry and remodeling. Jake was a more accomplished electrician than I was and he had experience in all types of construction so he was a welcomed addition to my fledgling little business. I started quoting all my jobs with two employees and we were partners. I made shirts and everything. Jacob is also a more accomplished musician than I am so I was very happy to have him come lead worship for the students at church. It took a huge weight off of my shoulders not having to sing and then preach every Wednesday night. Plus he had his own sound system which helped a lot. Jacob is also a little smaller fellow than I am, so I was infinitely grateful he was around for things like crawling into attics and plumbing in my bathtubs at the new house. (Evidently I surround myself with people who are better than me and then take credit for their work. A guy like me has got to get some credibility somewhere right?)
Things at church seemed to be settling in a bit. We were into the school year now and falling into a weekly pattern. Hannah and Lindsey still lived in the rental house 50 miles away and would drive over two or three times a week to see us and attend church together. Jacob and I mostly lived off of convenience store burritos and frozen pizzas here at this house trying to get things ready to move in. It was a fiasco. When we first turned the water on, the pipes had frozen at some point so it leaked everywhere. We wanted a functional toilet so we re-plumbed all the pressure side. Two days after we got the water running the toilet backed up. I REALLY did not want to dig up another sewer line by hand (I had done several as a teenager for family) so I was avoiding the work. Finally an extremely generous couple from church paid a plumber to come out, dig up the line and replace it. It meant so much to Hannah and I that there was someone willing to give to us like that.
One Sunday night I was visiting with the pastor and some church members while Hannah went to retrieve the wild men from the church nursery. She took a little longer than normal, but I didn’t think much of it. Often times we had to spend a few minutes running damage control for their behavior. We loaded up in the mini-van for the long drive back to the rental house.
“The pastors wife talked with me tonight.”
“Yeah? And?”
“Well, you know, she’s the special needs teacher for the school…”
“And?”
“Well, she had a suggestion, or a thought. I don’t know, but I thought we needed to talk about it, or consider it, or at least look into it or something…”
“……and?”
“She thinks that the twins might have autism.”
We talked about it the whole drive home. I know what reaction she was expecting, which is why she approached it so carefully. She expected me to proceed to tell her how stupid every party involved was and how autism is just a fake thing created to make parents feel better about themselves. I completely understand why that’s what she expected because that’s how I was at that time. I was self-righteous and self-absorbed. I was hurting so deeply and so confused by everything in our lives that I lashed out at whoever was closest when anything threatened my standing. Fortunately God softened my spirit for that conversation because it was one that changed our lives.
Neither of us knew much of autism. “Rain Man” was autism as far as I was concerned (ironically the man the movie was based on didn’t actually have autism and I’d never actually seen the whole movie). What we did know was that we had done everything we knew how to raise our children to be healthy, happy, well behaved little boys. It had only worked on one out of three. Every time someone talked to us about the twins there was the slight overtone that they suspected it was our skills as parents that led them to be these little terrors that screamed and bit and punched and cried and hid in the corner. Even if the tone wasn’t there, we read it because we were so scared of failing as parents that we assumed everyone believed us to be failures. Autism gave us an answer. It gave us an enemy. We had been swinging wildly in the dark at this unseen foe that had come in the night and stolen our sweet precious children only to leave us with these demons in their place, but now our enemy had a face. We had something to punch.
How do I ruin things with close friends and family? I sabotage them. I thought I was making the wise choice by leaving Hannah and Lindsey and the kids far away from the chaos and construction in the new house, but I was running from the madness and leaving them to fight my battles for me. I thought I was offering myself some much needed relaxation and fun when Jacob and I brought the projector home from church and played video games late into the night, but I was just indulging in selfishness. I was sacrificing my marriage and putting undue stress on Jacob’s all because I was too much of a coward to face my own crippling fears. I screamed like a wild banshee and ran around throwing fits because I wanted people to think I was a mature, competent parent. Maybe that’s why people thought it was our fault the boys behaved as they did?
All that had to have been rough. How old were the twins when you found out that they had autism?
ReplyDelete