God Drives a Tow Truck (12 page)

1 Samuel 1: 26-27

²⁶
and she said to him, “Pardon me, my lord. As surely as you live, I am the woman who stood here beside you praying to the LORD.
²⁷
I prayed for this child, and the LORD has granted me what I asked of him.

I was always indoctrinated by the public education system that as a responsible consumer of the planet Earth, I should only bring 1.6 children to life. I often wondered how to manage that. What would 6/10ths of a child look like? Who would choose the 4/10ths that I had to send back? I had already exceeded my allowance of progeny when my second 10/10ths of a son, Matthias, was born. He was so active that he might have counted for more than one child, in fact. However, my maternal juices were just beginning to flow, and I longed for a third child as Matt grew out of his colicky babyhood.

I was not aware that it was not
just
a third child I ached for, but that perhaps I longed for a little girl. I tried to convince my husband that we needed a third child. However, he was not convinced. While his career was going fairly well, we seemed always to be scrapping for money with all the things home ownership and two children involved. And we were still years away from the money massacre of college. Arvo was always careful about commitments, and he did not feel it was wise to have another little bank account depleter.

I understood, and even agreed. But that did not change the intense longing of my heart. I had never expected to want children. I had not particularly even liked children. As a young adult, I thought most were brats, and required far more energy and time than I would ever be willing to sacrifice. It was with shocking surprise that I realized that not only did I want children, but I would devote my life work to raising, teaching, and working as a therapist with them.

I would look wistfully at young mothers and try to be happy and satisfied with the two wonderful boys I had. They were smart, and sweet, and talented. I was a greedy ogre to be discontented. For those few years of struggling with the desire for another baby, I prayed that God would change Arvo’s heart. This is my favorite prayer and it has various permutations. I love asking God to change everyone else for the better. Since I am an impartial observer of those around me, it is always easy to see the many areas that they need help with. In great kindness, I lift all their foibles up to the Almighty, and remind Him how much everyone else needs His correcting hand upon them.

After years of my husband’s heart remaining unchanged, I came to a great revelation. Perhaps what I needed to ask was that God would change
my
heart, instead. The yearning for a child was so strong that I was not sure God would ever remove that craving. However, I prayed earnestly that if Arvo did not want another child, then I understood that my own desire must be squelched in that area.

Surprisingly, the longing did subside. I became very busy with my art, my work as an occupational therapist, and my young boys. When Anders reached school age, I began homeschooling and life’s busy-ness accelerated to a near unmanageable level. Running my own business and homeschooling two children was exhausting me. It was at that time that Arvo was offered a job in North Carolina and we happily fled the frozen tundra of the North. I began looking for jobs that would be less demanding than my own business had been in NY. I had several to choose from. By this time, I was highly skilled and experienced and there was no shortage of work. Two good jobs materialized, but they would be working with not only children, but people with other infirmities, including AIDS patients. I had a week to decide between the two jobs, and my heart was not filled with joy. For some strange reason, I felt leaden, unhappy, unsettled.

My unrest extended to a physical level. I was becoming nauseated and dispirited. I was not sure why. I had always worked, at least a few hours a week, while raising my children. Why was I feeling so sickened over the prospect of work now? They were past the ages of the very intense need for me, being nine and eleven years old. Yet I grew paler, and more ill, and less certain of which job to choose. When the grace period to decide had ended and I had to call that day and choose the job, I realized that I had been missing some rather strong clues.

I was forty years old…. It was impossible. However, without telling anyone of my suspicion, I huddled in the bathroom and read the drug store test results. It was unequivocal. I was pregnant.

It was with fear and delight that I met Arvo that evening when he came home from work and told him we needed to talk. I knew that he had never wavered in his conviction that we had our quiver-full of children. I also knew we needed my small income. How would he respond?

He was dumbfounded and then he clutched me to him, and shocked me even further. Not only was he overjoyed, but he told me he wanted me to stay home, to turn down
both
jobs. This baby of my old age would be allowed to nestle every moment of her tiny life against her own mother’s grateful breast. It was a girl. We found that out as soon as we could. I had had enough surprises.

When she was born, I lay awake all night, holding her, gazing at her. The nurses begged me to let them take her so I could rest. They told me I needed to sleep. But I didn’t need to sleep. I needed to whisper over and over her name that I had made up, Asherel, Hebrew for “Blessed of God”. Her name was a prayer of joy, for a gracious gift long delayed, and even unremembered desire of my heart.

Chapter Eighteen

A Friend To the Lonely

Psalm 25: 16-17

¹⁶
Turn to me and be gracious to me,
   for I am lonely and afflicted.
¹⁷
Relieve the troubles of my heart
   and free me from my anguish.

People who are different, quirky, and unique have a burden that the average person does not. We humans are herd animals, and anyone whose antlers are skewed a little from the others is singled out. I was raised to delight in the peculiar. We had little choice. We were definitely odd balls with an oddball dad. My mom would’ve been considered normal in another family perhaps, but she was dusted by the powdering of our collective weirdness. We were a full deck of Jokers.

Therefore, it was no great surprise that my son would be unusual. He really had no chance. Not only did he have the genetic disposition toward eccentricity, but he was a few standard deviations outside the bell curve in intellect. He was making alphabet letters long before his first birthday and taught himself to read before age two. When he began speaking, which was at a very early age, it was in full sentences. He read music and began playing full pieces by ear on his Fisher Price toy piano by age two as well. He enjoyed such common childhood activities as lying on the sidewalk and analyzing the mathematical pattern created by the cracks. When he played soccer as a preschooler, he twirled among the daisies talking out loud about gigabytes and Random Access Memory (RAM). The soccer ball rolled by him, and he would glance at it, then continue talking in Basic Computer code. By age nine, he had taught himself all high school math through calculus and was admitted to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte for a Discrete Math class. At age ten, he was the best student in the college class, by far.

He was my first born, so I just assumed this is what babies did when their mothers read to them. At first, I really didn’t realize how atypical he was. I cannot say that I was not puffed up with pride, though as all parents of ‘different’ kids know, there is no shortage of sadness and struggles for such children. The very gifts that made him so astonishing were an unscalable wall for normal peer relationships. How could a typical five year old relate to someone his age who was deciphering the theory of relativity? Anders was always in classes with people two or three times older than him, and he was the one they went to for help. The older he grew, the less he talked. That was bound to happen. No one but the most elite could understand what he was talking about. I smiled and nodded and tried to follow him, but he quickly discovered that I too was never going to be an intellectual peer. The best I could do was try to ascertain the next step in his prodigious intellectual progress, and procure the experts, books, and resources he needed to remain challenged. I was successful in this, but I was a woeful failure in finding him friends.

He was a lonely child. His frustration with others grew as the distance between his grasp of concepts and others his age widened. He was not arrogant, though some misunderstood his gruffness and his silence for arrogance. He was mercilessly tormented in every social situation I tried to put him in, including church groups, to my great dismay. He was made fun of, laughed at, picked on, and taunted. I tried every group and activity I could think of. I homeschooled him for this reason, and at the unexpected advice of the public school system itself. They assured me no mass education system would ever succeed with so unusual an intellect.

He found peers and joy in the elite math contests he entered, and at age thirteen made the USA math Olympiad camp for the top thirty math students in the nation. That group of friends became the first and only group that he could relate to until he went to MIT for college.

I suffered perhaps as much as he did. I had been a loner growing up, but I always had at least one friend, and I knew how important it was to connect with at least one other member of your species. So I looked everywhere to find Anders a friend. I enrolled him in preschool two days a week with the sole purpose of finding him a friend. Astonishingly, there was a little girl who liked and seemed to understand Anders. Until we left NY when Anders was seven, he had this one wonderful friend, Mallory, who was gentle and kind, and didn’t seem to mind his quirky character.

Once we left NY, we were not so fortunate. Many kids were kind enough to come over and play, but the friendships rarely lasted longer than a few weeks. Anders’ needs and interests were just too unconventional for most children.

I don’t know why I often wait until a situation becomes a crisis before I realize I have not gone to God in specific prayer about the situation. I remember vague prayers, and much angst over my lonely son, but it wasn’t until he was a young teen that I thought to ask God to send him a friend.

That prayer came at the end of Anders’ only organized soccer season. I had signed him up for a team, not knowing that it was the area’s most talented and competitive team. They accepted all kids, but only the best usually bothered to try to join. Uninformed, and perhaps unfortunately, I put Anders on that team. All but one of the team members were cruel to him. The coach was very kind, and sympathetic, and worked with Anders, but soccer was clearly not his forte. When the team made the finals of the entire Charlotte region, the coach had Anders carry the team flag and lead the team onto the field. I had never seen him look so proud before, though I think he played a total of maybe three minutes in the games leading up to that achievement.

At the post-victory party, when Anders arrived, bearing a gift for one of the members whose birthday it was, they all surrounded him and began taunting him. The coach stormed out of the house and told them that the party ended that second, unless Anders was treated kindly. I sat in my car watching this, and sobbing, wondering if I should rescue him, or if that would only make it worse. The coach put his arm around Anders and waved me away, with an understanding look.

That night I went to God in prayer. It was a simple prayer. Please send my son a friend. A real friend.

The next day, Anders and I were walking in the neighborhood just next to ours. I saw a family in the front yard, a boy Anders’ age, and two girls. It was during school hours, so I knew they must be homeschoolers. I stopped and introduced ourselves. Anders never said a word, as usual. The mother came out and we chatted and we learned that Jason, the boy, was a computer programmer and loved taking apart and putting together computers. I invited them all over. Anders and Jason disappeared to his room with the computer, and I could hear excited chattering behind the closed door.

Until Jason moved away several years later, Anders saw him several times a week. It broke my heart when they moved because there was no one to replace him. However, by then, Anders was almost ready to go off to college, and very involved in his math contests and research. God had sent him a friend at the perfect time.