I had been anticipating this tricky time for a long while. My son, Sam, is bright, sparky, funny and diagnosed with Autism. In particular, change, transitions and sensory overload can be a struggle. Sam was 11 and about to transition to secondary school having been at a small local primary school since the age of 3 years. I had deliberately chosen a small primary school with lots of natural light, a simple layout and a strong emphasis on pastoral care. I knew that Sam was often confused and disorientated by busy social environments and the main thing that helped him was to be emotionally anchored by adults with whom he felt secure and known; adults who could help him navigate the expectations, explain what was happening and also structure experiences for him to help things make sense. He would often look to these adults for comfort and reassurance when overloaded by demands and expectations and this would help him to feel safe and get back to a place where he was able to learn.
Parenting is about remembering to breathe. It doesn’t stop when your baby is delivered warmly wet and squirming into your arms. Breathing and letting go, releasing them to explore, fall and grow, keeps going and going through every stage of their unsquashable, insistent life. Sam had cried hard the day before starting secondary school upon realising that he would routinely arrive 30 minutes early, with no idea on that first day where to go and knowing no one. I quickly realised that this would be terrifying; it’s major change, a point of transition and requiring social skills with unknown people, with no social script to fall back on.
I did what I could, whilst trying to ignore my own creeping panic; knowing that there was a hefty gap here that Sam needed to leap, because there was little recourse from which to draw. I did not know this school. I didn’t know the staff, the layout, the places to go, the availability of support staff to help him. I trusted that this had been covered with him on his transition day, but Sam hadn’t remembered any of this, true to his short-term-memory form. I had always been the interface between Sam and school; his primary school had quickly asked what worked for him at home and had implemented these practices in the school setting. From the beginning they recognised how ‘muddly’ he was at the many transition points of the school day. Along with the sensory overload that led to dinner hall and playground meltdowns and Sam retreating to stay close and hold staff’s hands, explaining that he was just feeling ‘a little bit wobbly’. They had welcomed my input from the start and I had been grateful to do whatever I could, to provide a good container and a good place to grow for my young son.
As a parent, you don’t need to recall all of these memories deliberately, one-by-one, for them to weigh-in on the growing alarm signalling through your body. They are stacked like cards, piled up and visceral, like muscle memory of the heart, all of your knowledge, intuition, observation and love for them from all the years gone by capsulated in this one response that holds all of it. Having a child is like having your heart walking around on the outside of you and watching them have hard times is like seeing your heart getting kicked around by heavy boots on dusty ground. Sam has always had his heart in his eyes, I can see it all over his face, like an unguarded exposure that draws out the goodness in people or can occasionally attract tormentors.
All I could do was to tell Jesus clearly that I needed Him to help Sam in this massive gap that I could not bridge. It was an SOS, no other options. The urgency and my desperation meant that I didn’t bother with any other words.
What I did feel quickly come back to me were the words ‘Watch and see what I can do. Let Me do the heavy lifting’. This is typical of how He speaks to me. No specifics. No reassurance that my son will actually be ok, that he will have a good start, that he won’t be hurt or distressed. No promise of outcome at all. I clock this and it’s frustrating. But He does always speak about who He is; He invites me to know Him, His character and His heart and to trust that. Like a modern day “I AM WHO I AM”. Like a modern day “Don’t look at the waves, just look at Me”. Because if I know who He is, then I don’t need to know what the outcome will be because I know that He is holding it all and working it all for my good, for Sam’s good, whatever happens. He responds to the deep root of my need, to be anchored in the deepest of places for the roughest of seas, even if this isn’t my quick-fix want.
So I stopped and let this sink in, to settle over me. And through the next few days as my son started his new school, I continually handed the load of my worries to Him and let Him hold the weight of me; my tension, my surfacing fear, my tumbling concerns. I kept returning to His words to hold and recalibrate me, as my compass point and north star.
If I had hoped that those words meant that the week would be smooth and without upset, I was wrong. There were repeated sleeping terrors through the nights, the worst I had seen. Sam kicked, screamed and flailed his arms, fighting off dreams of attackers, not seeming to be winning. Running out of ideas, I finally started to tell him to look for Jesus in the dreams…Look! Can you see Him? There He is… coming in and swiping them away with His massive light sabre…He’s laughing, can you see Him…?! And you’re hidden, safe in His shadow, watching as He sweeps them all away… Sam looked around in his sleep calling for ‘Papa…?’, then quickly quietened as I described what Jesus was doing, settling back to sleep.
Even recalling this, tears come as I realise how God was walking us both through this, giving both Sam and I what we needed in the moments that we needed it. I was unnerved by the terrors, very aware that Sam was seeming overwhelmed and beyond capacity, struggling to process the day and all the newness. Stretching around new things is unnerving and uncomfortable. I had been teetering and quoting back to God that He had promised to do the heavy lifting and He was gently responding “I am. But he is still your son and he still needs to process the way he processes”. God is so beautiful. He loves our humanity and honours how He created us to be, how He created my son to be, even with all the bumps and glitches, even when I would like to smooth all these away for an easier ride, when I struggle to honour my son in the same way.
On the Thursday of that first week my fears were realised. I got a call from the Deputy Head to say that my son had been very distressed, there had been an incident with several other older boys in the toilets. Picking up the message, I was frantic, with no idea what had happened, how bad it was, how Sam had got out of the toilets, what I was going to be dealing with.
It turned out that Sam hadn’t picked up on territoriality cues from much older boys. He’d used a toilet against their wishes and consequently, they kicked the walls and doors of his cubicle, shouting over the walls at him. My son somehow held it together and got out, got to the pastoral hub of the school, climbed under a table and melt down. He couldn’t speak when staff asked his name and if he was hurt. So staff passed him a box of fiddle toys and waited. The rest of the day was used talking through what had happened, resolving the situation with the older boys, with Sam getting back to feeling calm and helping to arrange the new school sensory room. He had a day by himself with the pastoral team, getting to know them and them getting to know him; Sam being supported and cared for through a difficult situation, seeing quickly how they would deal with him when hard things come, with time to laugh and relax and Sam feeling affirmed and welcomed as they invited him to arrange their sensory room. Within the first week, Sam was on their radar, they had figured what works for him and he had found the emotional anchor that he consistently needs. They arranged toilet passes and all kinds of other small but significant things. When we left the school I told my son that he had massive cajonas for getting through that and he grinned back at me.
I still had my own gritted-teeth questions for God; that this wasn’t what I expected or what I thought He promised. This was the height of the storm, where it can be difficult to keep perspective, to see what is happening, where there is nothing to grip onto other than trust, other than Him. Trying to keep our eyes on Him, finding Him as the eye of the storm, is hard when we’re thrown and buffetted from all directions.
The following morning, in the aftermath of the day before, Sam begged me not to make him go back to school, told me he was terrified. There was a lot to juggle, with school runs for my daughter, my own work to get to. I did the only thing I could do, holding onto the basics I know: I asked Sam if he could just do the thing in front of him now; could he just get dressed and we would go and talk to school, knowing that He gives us enough for this moment and hoping that He will do what He says, that He will go ahead and do the rest for us. Trusting that The Way is already clearing a way. Sam agreed, so we dressed and drove to school.
I had no plan. No idea what I would do if school did not turn this around, if Sam refused to go back. But after a meeting where Sam explained that yesterday had just been the icing on a very sensory overloaded school cake, with squashed corridors, noisy halls, many new faces, names and teachers, school said that they understood, to go home, relax and start fresh on Monday. We left the school and Sam turned to me smiling and said ‘they really understand additional needs’. Never before has he spoken these words about an educational setting.
Following that difficult first week, Sam had a good year. There were ups and downs, but a secure base with school was formed that very first week, from which to be able to grow and explore, fall and flourish. That week was a fast-track, sailing into the wind, getting Sam quickly to where he needed to be, so that he didn’t need to hold his breath and hold himself together for the rest of the school year, but swiftly landing in a confident place where he felt known, secure, knowing where to go and who was there to help him. Sometimes we are sailing into the wind, but Jesus is the wind.
I know this to be true: that God sometimes speaks ahead of hard times because He knows that we are going to need something to hold onto, just to get us through. Like the children’s book, ‘We’re Going On a Bear Hunt’: we can’t go over it, we can’t under it, we have to go through it. There is no escaping the tough parts. Because if He simply gave us the gift of a smooth journey with a happy ending, if we simply went straight to the outcome as the gift, we would miss the real gift of Him. We would never look to get close to Him, never look for Him in the mess, never learn how to lean on Him, or know the relief of Him taking our weight and doing the heavy lifting. When there are gaps between the demands of our circumstances and our capacity to meet them, this allows Him room to move, to work for us, to fight for us, to carry us, to dance over us, roar LIFE over us so that fear can no longer hold its grip on us. His purpose and delight is so much more that fixing our circumstances: He wants to go to the deep places where anxiety can no longer have a hold, where circumstances don’t define us, where we can just rest and breathe in Him. In the pause where we wait to catch our breath, He becomes the inhale and exhale, steadying us and sustaining us in each moment, becoming all the certainty that we need, even in the uncertain circumstances around us. Always held and carried.