Upside Down is now available in its entirety – complete, revised, and expanded – through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and WestBow Press. Enjoy this excerpt here. :)
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A child comes up to me, takes my hand, and brings me to the living room. She wants to show me what she’s been playing. This, by itself, isn’t remarkable.
What is remarkable is the child doing it.
It’s Reagan, and she’s showing her own imaginative play, all by herself — not just going along with someone else’s idea, but making up her own story. Not copying a familiar scenario, but coming up with something totally on her own.
We’ve never seen her do this before.
She points to a baby doll, wrapped in a messy blanket on the couch.
“Oh, mama. See baby…”
I look at the baby, and I look at her. “Oh, mama…oh, baby…baby ick at de puh ook mama!”
Nope, I had no idea what she said, either. We affectionately call our smallest three kids “the minions” and it’s mostly because of how Reagan speaks.
“Baby ick, mama! Baby seep on cowse, baby pook!” She vividly illustrates with a gagging sound, repeats the phrase, and then busts out laughing.
Ah. Baby asleep on couch, baby puke. Gotcha.
“Oh! Baby’s sick? Baby puked?”
Affirmative, enthusiastic nodding. “Oh, poor baby…” she says, totally grinning.
“Aww, should we pray for the baby?”
She raises her eyebrows in an are-you-serious kind of look. Still grinning, though.
“Dear Jesus — Reagan, put your hand on the baby — please heal Baby and help her sleep and not puke anymore.” She’s laughing outright now, as if it’s okay for her to pretend a doll is sick, but totally nuts for me to pretend to pray for it.
Giggles burst out of her, overflowing, minion-style.
That night I’m making dinner, and she’s still concerned about food, but not usually in the panicking, freaky-outy kind of way anymore — just a slightly anxious and very curious way. There’s still a quiz at almost every meal.
“Eskoose me, Mama? You make bockbock?”
“Nope, not popcorn…”
“You make soup?”
“Yep…”
“An den you make…biscuit?!”
“No biscuits tonight, sorry.”
But in my head I’m screaming, You said “and then!” You are thinking about a logical sequence of events, and grouping things together!
You know that soup usually goes with biscuits! Awesome!!!
This, the same week she took on sledding all by herself, hauling her sled across the ice and up the bunny hill, over and over again, and loving it.
Just stir the soup and keep it together, Mama. Sheesh.
We fought fear often that she would never do these things. We still fight, really. Will our kids ever be able to do the things they are supposed to do? Will they ever stop doing the things they’re not supposed to do? Will we ever catch up, meet deadlines, achieve milestones, remember appointments, and slow down?
At one am, praying in the shower, I’m totally exhausted, emptied, and discouraged after a day of herding uncooperative minions. It all intensifies into one question:
What do I do?
The battle we fight looks different maybe, but we know what it is to be under fire, overwhelmed, and out of answers. You, me, the whole mess of us.
And He who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.
Romans 8:27
Oh, God…what do I do? My biggest concerns don’t even fit on my to-do list for tomorrow. The cease-fire ends in less than eight hours, and I’m running out of hot water.
Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.
Romans 8:34 (ESV)
Trust Me, He says. You’ve never seen Me do this before.
He reminds me to lay low, refusing to be provoked, while the chaos drifts overhead — it’s a bully looking for a reaction and an easy target. The person who falls for it is a reckless shooter who rarely hits the right target, and usually only creates more victims.
There are enough angry people out there, bleeding insecurity in the form of rash arrogance. Refuse to be provoked.
You have My permission to take it slow. To aim before you fire. Just one thing at a time, and let Me handle the big picture. Watch and listen for it, Love, while you reload. You just wait.
The volume doesn’t necessarily change, but a calm settles.
Your babies have been sick, but I’m praying for them.
Therefore He is able to save completely those who come to God through Him, because He always lives to intercede for them.
Hebrews 7:25
I’m not copying an old scenario that you’ve seen before. I’m making a whole new story.
There are no regimented minute-by-minute agendas here. Just a loose schedule with firm standards, attempting to run a tight ship in choppy waters. It’s a little nuts.
I’m learning a lot about not being in control…about doing things differently than we’re used to.
It’s not an overnight process for me; there’s lots of trial and error for this detail-oriented INTJ. As other things speed up and complicate in life, other things have had to slow down and simplify…and my conversion from Type A to Type B is still in the highly experimental beta stage.
But there’s progress: I broke up with Martha Stewart. Her photos are gorgeous, her style is impressive, but I think meals categorized as “quick and simple dinners” should require less than 35 steps, 2 food processors, and a therapist.
When I actually make myself a lunch instead of just microwaving leftovers, it’s pretty simple fare. Veggies, toast, an egg…nothing fancy. But I crowd the mushrooms and can only take a couple of photos of the process before I make a mess and wreck the egg, thereby reminding myself why I write about peace in sentence fragments and stick to making coffee, leaving the world of food blogging to the capable hands of those who have more patience than I do.
We do school differently now. After teaching our first three kids to read by age six, teaching preschool to our new 8-year-olds who are learning letters and sounds and shapes with our four-year-old is new territory for me.
Writing was a trying business to Charley, who seemed to have no natural power over a pen, but in whose hand every pen appeared to become perversely animated, and to go wrong and crooked, and to stop, and splash, and sidle into corners, like a saddle-donkey.
– Charles Dickens, Bleak House
The milestones are different, the challenges are different, and my involvement with them is different than it has been with any of our other kids.
Sensory issues. Institutional autism. Trauma. Attachment issues. Fetal alcohol spectrum.
photo courtesy of Unchained
Or, commonly abbreviated: SPD, IA, PTSD, RAD, and FAS. It’s quite a cocktail, made more complex by the fact that some conditions are typically dealt with in ways that are counter-productive to others. For example, with attachment issues, you do ABC, and never, ever do XYZ…but with FAS, you usually do XYZ because ABC doesn’t even apply. Awesome.
And for a child who has both, and more? Fortunately, we have 20 more letters of the alphabet to tinker with in trial and error. Nothing fancy, try not to make a mess, and for crying out loud, don’t worry about wrecking the egg. Priorities.
Which means I’m letting go. Teaching Andrey and Reagan in the normal way usually becomes a mutinous game of manipulation – if I point to a red circle and ask them what it is, they’re just as likely to give me the wrong answer on purpose (“yellow square”) as they are to give me the right answer on accident.
So preschool, for now, is sneaky.
It looks like me teaching Chamberlain while they are playing nearby or looking at a book.
In reality though, they’re eavesdropping. They’re watching closely, listening in, often pretending not to. And they’re learning, in spite of the alphabet soup of diagnoses they could be labelled with.
Sometimes they join us to play with letters and numbers and such. I’m learning to haul up the anchor and move on after just a few minutes while they’re still cooperating – if I don’t, three seconds later there is testing, manipulation, and mutiny, and we’re sucked into the vortex again.
Keep it short, keep it happy, keep it simple. And then change course, before it’s too late.
We write letters on little sticky notes. We write letters on the windows with dry erase markers, and then cover them with the matching sticky notes.
We write big letters in glue, and cover them with tiny pieces of torn paper (learning letters + sensory play + motor skills = big win).
We color and scribble and fill up notebooks with lines and curves that often don’t make sense. And assessment doesn’t come in questions and answers – it comes in the turning of the tables, when we eavesdrop on their play and conversations with each other.
Do they know colors? Heck yes – just listen to them argue over lego pieces. Can they count? Depends on who’s asking – but listening to them play Hide and Seek reveals quite a bit. There’s progress, and the simplicity keeps me sane.
Of her childhood, Helen says herself that, save for a few impressions, “the shadows of the prison-house” enveloped it. But there were always roses, and she had the sense of smell; and there was love – but she was not loving then. When she was seven Miss Sullivan came to her. This lady had herself been blind for some years…
It is not too much to say that imprisoned and desolate child entered upon such a large inheritance of thought and knowledge, of gladness and vision, as few of us of the seeing and hearing world attain to.
Like all great discoveries, this, of a soul, was in all its steps marked by simplicity.
– Charlotte Mason, vol. 1, Home Education
I need Him to remind me often about why they choose to stay in the dark, and why He chose us to be their family. This lady had herself been blind for some years…
Learning is not merely the two-way street of give and take between teacher and student anymore.
It’s an ocean to navigate, and the familiar constellations are upside down in this new hemisphere, along with new ones we’ve never seen before. We yield to the Captain who calms the storm…and there’s fresh coffee in the galley.
