People Before Things

I can’t remember if we were dating or married when my husband Will shared something his mother had said to him over and over when he was a child. “People are more important than things.” It’s a simple phrase, but it proved foundational. Will believed it, and he showed me again and again, until I began to believe it, too. This core belief would become invaluable when we began parenting our son Raylan, who lives with severe autism. 

I value creating a beautiful home for my family, but I’ll never be able to hold an appreciation for beautiful surroundings too dearly. So many of our things are broken now. Look in any direction in our house and you’ll find evidence of a non-preferred task or a sensory meltdown or a time when we said “No,” before we knew what reaction that word could elicit. (Tossed chairs, pictures thrown from walls, doors slammed off hinges, lamps shattered, walls dented, in case you were wondering.) This wake of brokenness is where Autism meets Things.

Raylan with his Compassionate Companions at Hope Heals Camp in 2019 (Photo by Ashley Monogue)

Will and I used to talk about autism as splinters in the heart—small afflictions that no one else really saw, but they were there all the same. A conversation among friends about their children’s inevitable future dating lives. A drop-off birthday party Raylan wasn’t invited to, for a kid my son considered a best friend. Watching my daughter learn to spell her name in an afternoon, when it took my son a full year. 

Autism promises nothing. In fact, it proved to be the threshing of my dreams. It sifted out any well-intended or automatic assumptions about life and left me with the reality of many unknowns.

But hope does not require certainty. In fact, hope thrives in the unknown. Like everything else, it just takes work. 

I’ve come to accept the broken things, although I haven’t accepted the breaking of them. My house, much like my heart, has taken on the hurt that most people will never see. The hurt is in the broken pieces, yes, but the hurt also presents itself in the safeguards. Like the incredibly complicated plastic safety lock that protects Raylan from unlocking our front door. There’s hurt in the mere presence of that precaution.

I think about some of the safeguards I’ve placed on my own heart. The conversations I often avoid on the playground, for fear that a meltdown will happen or a behavior will need explanation. How my advocacy can be a distraction or a means of avoidance. If I keep pushing forward for my son then I don’t have the time or space to concentrate on just how far he’s being left behind in a world where things are usually more important than people. Left behind because of his differences in being able to make things so he can buy things that are better than everybody else’s things.

But in this world we have an upside-down haven—a beautiful, broken place where beautiful, broken people come first. 

All of us happen to be broken in some way or another. It’s a lesson that I wish everyone else knew, but one that I had to learn splinter by splinter. Broken people are way more important than things.