I Can Sleep Because He Does Not
“You look stressed.” Thanks. It’s all the stress.
I saw that little graphic this week and laughed harder than it probably deserved.
Jack has autism, and this week his nervous system simply had more than it could manage. Puberty. A new school campus. That darn full moon (don’t come at me; it’s so very valid). Changes in routine. Expectations. Sensory input. Fight or flight. The amygdala. Life.
Whatever combination finally tipped the scale, it tipped. I need to try to stop figuring out the tipping point, really. It was all of it. And because his nervous system and mine have been intertwined for his entire life, mine eventually tipped too.
I won’t tell his story here. He deserves the dignity of having hard days and weeks without his hardest moments becoming content for the internet.
But I can tell you mine. I have spent hours praying. Researching. Reading. Looking for patterns. Thinking through antecedents and triggers and regulation and environment. Talking with the people who both love him and work with him. Making changes. Reconsidering those changes. Communicating with his team, sometimes multiple times throughout the day in between my patients. (Many of whom have autism and their own issues that I’m unraveling.)
Watching. Anticipating. Trying to stay three steps ahead of a brain whose needs cannot always be communicated to me.
And doing all of that while working a demanding full-time job in healthcare during a demanding week, while also trying to help manage a family health situation from another town.
At some point, my body decided that my mind was no longer in charge. Wednesday I shook for nearly four hours. And not a little trembling; my whole body shook as though I were standing outside in the snow. It was 108 degrees outside. I was not sick.
Then came the nightmares. The waking during the night. The weeping at completely unexpected moments.
And then, finally, when things became quieter and my brain determined that perhaps we were safe enough for a minute: exhaustion hit today. Deep, cellular exhaustion.
There is actually science behind this. Research on mothers raising children with autism has documented unusually high levels of chronic stress and measurable differences in the body’s stress-response systems, including cortisol regulation. Other research has found increased physiological responses to acute stress and an elevated risk of post-traumatic stress symptoms.
I have seen those studies reduced on social media to the claim that autism moms experience the same stress as combat veterans. That’s not exactly what the research says, and I don’t want to or need to borrow someone else’s trauma to validate mine.
The truth is enough.
The body keeps track of prolonged vigilance.
And some mothers live vigilant lives. I am “some mothers” going on 15+ years.
Managing Jack’s needs can be a full-time job layered invisibly on top of my actual full-time job. And I absolutely love him beyond words. And when he’s away from me I miss him terribly.
Both things are true. But love does not make something weightless; it actually gives it more weight.
Which may be one reason the Church placing the feast days of St. Monica and St. Augustine back-to-back (August 27 and 28) has felt more significant to me this year.
We tend to tell their story from the ending.
Augustine the saint, the bishop, the Doctor of the Church. Augustine whose theology would help shape Western Christianity and whose words are still being read more than sixteen centuries later:
“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
But before the saint was St. Augustine, he was Monica’s son. And she worried about him, pursued him, prayed for him, wept for him. And she waited.
Augustine later wrote that his mother wept for him before God “more than mothers are wont to weep the bodily death of their children.”
I understand something about a mother who weeps over her son. Our circumstances are entirely different, of course. Monica was praying for Augustine’s conversion. I am not waiting for Jack to become someone other than who he is.
Pope Francis once described Monica’s love beautifully as “the restlessness of love” - the ceaseless pursuit of the good of the beloved, even when that pursuit leads to tears. I recognize the restlessness of a mother’s love. The relentless desire to find the thing that will help your child flourish.
The restlessness of love. Love isn’t always a sentimental feeling. Sometimes it’s a mother making meds in the dark because her son can’t handle the light. It’s a mother praying a rosary every morning before the sun peeks. It’s a mother awake at 2:00 a.m. researching something she wishes she didn’t need to know.
Sometimes love is an email. A meeting. Another phone call. A changed plan. An accommodation. A prayer whispered from the driver’s seat.
Sometimes love shakes and cries in inconvenient places.
Monica reminds me that none of those hidden hours are wasted. There is a line from Augustine’s Confessions that has followed mothers for centuries. A bishop, weary of Monica’s pleading with him to intervene with Augustine, finally told her:
“It is not possible that the son of these tears should perish.”
I don’t read that as a formula. “Cry enough and God will give you the child you imagined. Pray enough and autism disappears. Believe enough and every story resolves neatly.”
That isn’t Christianity.
The Cross should have cured us of the idea that God’s faithfulness always looks like the avoidance of suffering.
In fact, today’s first reading on Augustine’s feast says precisely the opposite: the Cross looks like foolishness and weakness according to the world’s measurements, but in it is “the power of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:18)
Perhaps that is where Monica has something especially important to teach me. She could not see the ending while she was living the middle. She didn’t know that the son she cried over would become St. Augustine of Hippo. She didn’t know people like me would still be reading his words sixteen hundred years later.
She only knew that he was her son. And she knew God was God.
Jack will never write Confessions. He will never read Augustine although it sits on my bookshelf within his reach. He will almost certainly never live independently. By the measurements the world usually uses (degrees, careers, productivity, independence, influence) his life may never look particularly impressive. But Christianity has never permitted me to measure a human life that way.
“God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.”
—1 Corinthians 1:27
Jack’s worth does not depend upon what he produces. His purpose does not depend upon whether others can see it. And God’s ability to use his life does not depend upon Jack’s ability to explain that life to anyone.
Augustine changed the world with words. Jack will change a much smaller world without them. And who am I to decide which matters more in the economy of God? His vocation is not something I will ever be able to put into a neat sentence.
I think part of it is already happening. I know that loving him has changed me. He has taught me things about dignity that textbooks never could; about communication beyond language. His life highlights the difference between behavior and suffering. He reminds me about dependence in a culture obsessed with independence. He reminds every group about making room for him if he’s to join. He reminds those entrusted to his care about seeing the person everyone else is tempted to reduce to a problem that needs solving; about love that cannot be earned through accomplishment.
Those are not small things.
And yesterday, on Monica’s feast, the Church gave us this promise:
“God is faithful.”
—1 Corinthians 1:9
Not everything will be easy.
Not you will understand everything.
Not your child will become what you hoped.
God is faithful.
Then today, on Augustine’s feast, Jesus tells the story of women waiting through the night with lamps in their hands.
The Bridegroom is delayed.
The night gets long.
They become tired.
In fact, they fall asleep.
I’ve always found that detail merciful.
Faithfulness apparently does not require pretending we aren’t tired. The wise women simply made sure they had oil enough for the waiting. (Matthew 25:1–13)
I have thought about that oil today. This week I have felt frighteningly close to empty. Wisdom isn’t having an inexhaustible lamp; wisdom is knowing that I actually don’t. Part of faithfulness is admitting that my body is tired and I cannot remain hypervigilant forever.
Sleep is holy too.
I can research and advocate and communicate and plan, and eventually I have to put down the phone, close the laptop, unclench my jaw and entrust my child to the God who does not sleep.
“He will not slumber, he who guards you.”
—Psalm 121:3
I can sleep because He does not. I can stop thinking because He does not. I can loosen my grip because Jack was God’s beloved before he was ever mine.
I think that was Monica’s great secret. Not that she never worried. Clearly, she did. Not that she never wept. She wept oceans; enough for people to comment on it and me to read about it centuries later.
But underneath all that maternal restlessness was an even deeper conviction:
God loved Augustine more than Monica did.
And God loves Jack more than I do, and that is also the only reason I can rest.
Near the end of Monica’s life, after all those years of prayers and tears, she looked at what God had done in Augustine and said:
“My God has exceeded my expectations abundantly.”
I don’t know what God’s abundance will look like in Jack’s life. I don’t know what tomorrow will look like, if I’m being truthful. But I don’t have to know.
Tonight, my lamp is still burning. It is flickering a little. Its keeper is very, very tired. But there is still oil.
And when there isn’t, I am learning that my job isn’t to manufacture more through sheer force of will. It is to go back to the One who supplies it.
So, St. Monica, mother of many tears, pray for me.
St. Augustine, restless heart finally at rest in God, pray for my boy.
And Lord, when my hands have done everything they know to do, teach them how to open.
You stay awake.
I need to sleep.
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