Chapter 2: Staring at the Wall

There is no ordinary day in our lives, my autistic nine-year-old, Max, and me.

This morning my son, who hadn’t slept all night, defiantly refused to get out of bed. I knew that if he sensed for a second that I was upset, I’d lose him to a tantrum. So I had to stay calm and happy-faced no matter what, no matter how exhausted I felt. But the rest of the world lives by the clock, so I did the impossible. I swung from a trapeze, stuck my head into the mouth of a lion, did the work of twelve burly men, and viola, my son was ready for school, fresh as a daisy.

An hour later the school called me. “He’s really having a rough time. You need to come down here and get him.” So I jumped into the car as if I’d been struck by lightning and rushed back to Max.

Chapter 7: Falling Down the Stairs

Our little church, unconventional and nondenominational, with its stark warehouse setting, spoon fed us tiny mouthfuls of love and warmth. Max loved to come to church with me, bouncing on my lap during the music and running wild during coffee hour. One day, the church gave each of the single mothers a check when it had “extra money.” I needed the help more than I would have admitted. And it was at this church where we met Patti and her husband, Nick. The first time I arrived at church, suddenly alone with Max, they scooped us up as if we were family and brought us into their lovely home.

Chapter 8: Grace

At age three, Max certainly wasn’t growing out of any of the problems. He wasn’t even speaking except for a few partial words like “mah” for mom and “ju” for juice. His energy level was unlike any hypercaffeinated state I had ever achieved. On our first visit to his special-needs preschool Max careened around the room pulling out every drawer and dumping the contents on the floor. The teacher looked at me with her eyes buggging out, probably wondering how I managed to actually get dressed that morning, and said, “Oh, my. You must be a little busy.”

Chapter 9: Locked in a Closet

I was relieved, actually, to finally have a diagnosis. Little did I know then that labeling Max “autistic” would place me smack in the center of a war zone. For the next three years I would find myself fighting to get the services Max needed forcing my foot in the door of every specialist. I became a self-confessed autism-conference-junkie, a Dead Head following the different specialists wherever they were speaking. I read everything I could get my hands on, sat up at night studying medical journals written with words that aren’t even in the dictionary. And I would cart around my notepad of strategies like Moses carrying the Ten Commandments.

Chapter 11: Picture Talks

Every day I would pull out paper and pen and ask Max what he wanted to talk about. His language would pour out onto the page as I took dictation and drew the images he was describing. He trusted me with his most intimate thoughts, fears hopes dreams, likes, dislikes–all the things I longed to know but until now had been hidden from view.

Picture Talks, as we later came to call them, eventually became so powerful that in the midst of a tantrum I could hold out a sheet of paper like a white flag on the battlefield and offer him a peace talk. Max would hold his fire, cease his thrashing, and cross enemy lines to sit beside me and calmly work it through on paper. And he would tell me things I never could have imagined were in his thoughts.

Chapter 16: Falling Up

In earlier grades, placing Max in the regular-education classroom had met with some success. But now, in fourth grade, the other students might as well have been managing hedge funds and transplanting one another’s kidneys. Max was out of place and overwhelmed, spending much of his day crouching down on the polished white linoleum floor of the hallway and balling up like a caterpillar when someone tried to intervene. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have pushed so hard to keep him there.

Chapter 18: Out of Time

One day I watched Max as he sat at our dining room table and held a pencil in his hand. I told myself to memorize this moment, to hold it in my mind as if it were a photograph. Max was trying his best to make his uncooperative muscles behave, to pinch his fingers together around the thin yellow pencil. The point was poised to paper, and my twelve-year-old was writing, or rather, he was trying. There wasn’t a hint of frustration as he looked at the page and traced over the letterforms I had lightly sketched. I was close enough to hear the scratching sound of the graphite, to see the glow of his smile It wasn’t exactly the parting of the Red Sea and yet we had escaped something, crossed into a new place. It was our little miracle.

Chapter 19: Superman

I’ve been fascinated by the way strangers react to Max. He brings out the best and worst in humanity, from the rudest remarks to the most genuine acts of selflessness. No one remains neutral. I learn a lot about people when I’m with Max, like the Volvo salesman who was drawn to Max’s joy or the stranger I met in a grocery store one day who was drawn to Max’s needs. While everyone else in the store avoided us as Max lay on the floor in a tantrum, one woman didn’t walk by. She stayed beside me until I thought of a way for her to help. She made me feel like we’re all playing on the same team.

Chapter 26: Jumping Off the Bridge

A soft wind wrapped around me, as if the very breath of God was covering us with a layer of love so impenetrable that even the harshest judgments couldn’t touch us, like Holy Spirit Teflon. And I remembered a voice. It was a beautiful, melodic voice–creme brulee with a Canadian accent. It was my friend Peppermint Patti’s voice, her words alive and dancing in the sand. “God works through these children. Max is a gift. These children are a gift.”

There is no ordinary day in our lives, Max and Me.

Sometimes there is only one thing you can do, one thing you should do. And I don’t want to miss that open window. So right now, I’m going to dance with my son.

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Learn more about Emily Colson’s ministry at emilycolson.com.