Page 25 - 2018 AdventDevo-Flip book

It would be many months before Sean and I learned that our baby was
significantly impacted by autism. He was so wrapped in his own cocoon
against our world that a church Sunday school teacher told me she feared
he may be deaf. A physician later told us that he may be silent forever.
He might injure himself or others in his attempts to communicate. But
we must never give up our work to help him be heard. And we should
never stop trying to teach the world how to respond to him.

One day, out of the blue, my grandmother and I spoke on the phone.
Casually, she mentioned her old friend Carol Hodges. Carol wanted me
to know that she was sorry she had forgotten to include a card with the
nativity she sent me before Judson was born. She had found the statues
in a neglected corner of her basement quite unexpectedly. There was no
good reason for her to even be down there, now that she recalled it. She
just had an itch to go and look through things, and there they were. The
Mary and Joseph figurines had been made by my great grandmother,
Anne Emerson, who had once been in a ceramics class with Carol.
Though my life overlapped with hers for just a few years, we were very
close. The “Emy” I now go by comes from her name.

Carol could not explain it, but something told her that I needed the nativ-
ity then, right in the middle of a Virginia August. The urge to get them in
the mail was so great – she could not explain why – that she had com-
pletely forgotten to include a note. She was sorry. She hoped it had not
frightened me.

Quite the opposite. I laughed through tears. My steadfast Southern
great-grandmother was known for her toughness. And I like to think that
not even death could have stopped her from getting a shower gift to her
first great-great-grandchild. And in her typical style, the selection was
perfect.

The Mary on the donkey remains on my nightstand to this day. She is
fragile and old, but her expression has never wavered. She is a constant
reminder that I am not the first mother to have a child who the world will
not understand. And that every morning, every long road ahead, affords
me not just the chance to help him navigate his journey, but to take the
journey for which I have been created: The one toward being like the