I don’t know if it’s irony or a case of be-careful-what-you-wish-for, the aching in my introverted heart for my three-year-old to start talking to us. I’ve always been thrilled at his ability to entertain himself, whether in his exersaucer at six months old or among his blocks at two years, while I cooked dinner or wrote posts or…lingered over that month’s copy of InStyle. Now I try to draw him out, clapping for every sound as though I’m in the audience at the Metropolitan Opera, and he loves being applauded. But he’s a watcher: he takes everything in, studies each aspect of his environment, and he’s not letting us in yet on what he thinks about it all.

On our 2015 Screening Tour, we hit up a speech school here in town last week. I knew going in that he wasn’t having it–the screener’s tiny office, close walls, limited toy selection. I sat in the lobby with Little Brother and thirty minutes later, The Kid emerged through the double doors. “He…struggled,” the screener began, and I wanted to tell her that after merely thirty minutes of watching him, she didn’t know from struggle, what this boy has endured. But I listened instead as she told me that he doesn’t speak enough to qualify for their program. Their school for kids with speech delays. And I hustled back out into the fifteen-degree temperature with TK on one arm and LB on the other, arranging everyone into their seats and climbing into mine, caught between laughing and crying at the ridiculous waste of time.

Then the tugging on my heart: What if you saw it as a gift? What if you gave thanks?

I had prayed the day before, the night before, the hour before, for clear direction if this was to be the place for him. And if it was not. Clearly, it was not. So…answered prayer, there. Answered through a frigid journey and a $145 dollar check and a thirty-minute ordeal for TK, but still: answered. And just because no falls harder than yes, is it any less a gift? Any less a hand directing us along the path for which we’re meant? 

I kept driving, because the two of them are captive while we’re in the car and the little one falls asleep and this is when I can breathe, think, pray. The closed door behind us, the apparent dead end of the morning, I thought about it and about the reasons it upset me rather than inspiring gratitude. I admitted the fears that come with not having the answers yet, the difficulties that would be allayed if he began speaking in sentences today, the frustration that would cease if we all spoke the same language. One thought broke through: I just wish someone would really understand. My introverted heart, it wanted to feel less alone. Irony?

The next day, a friend of a friend on Facebook and a comment over email and the following words:

he is still who he is and we should never assume that there is any limit to how far he can go.  If there is a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum…so what…(I think we’re all on it somewhere!)

this is what I see: a child full of life and joy, learning how to live and be in this world, and filled with potential for contributing to the world things no one else can contribute. I fully believe there will be a depth of “knowing” in him that enables him to see and feel deeply, and respond to others in ways the rest of us wish we could.

The day after that, and the woman who lights up when we take him to childcare at the gym, she smiled at me: “I just have a special place in my heart for him. I look out for him. He is so easy to love.”

They were seeing him, really seeing him. He was understood. I was never alone.

And I realized that communication can take a million different appearances, can sound a thousand different ways, but grace speaks a language that transcends them all. Grace takes everything we’re given in the moment–the no and the yes and the sound and the silence–and makes it enough.

A few days later I hear his tiny footsteps pad into our room, before LB has awoken, before The Husband has stirred, and I tiptoe over to him in the early-morning darkness. He grabs my hand and we walk silently to his room, climb on top of his bed, and I put my face next to his and rub his back. This is our moment, so empty of words and yet so full of everything. A few minutes later and the other two are awake, the alarm has sounded and the day begun. As we move through it, I watch, and I listen, and I see and hear the language spoken here: the language of bubbles at the breakfast table, of foot-grabbing while I nurse, of toothless smiles, of arms encircling a leg, of purest laughter punctuating so many moments. Deeper than words, this language speaks love. After words, it still will.

And then, stripped of my agenda and open to grace, I sit beside him on the couch and say it–the fact, the promise, the words: “I love you.” He turns to me, holds my gaze. “Ah la,” he says with purpose, then grins and turns back to Mickey.

Tears in my eyes. We’re speaking the same language.