Dear Omie

Excerpt from my book: A Time To Be Born

I had a nasty cold. I hated colds. They were bad enough to make life miserable but not quite bad enough to put you to bed. I’d take a fever over a cold any day. Fevers came in with authority—clear, commanding, no questions asked. They struck you down like a proper enemy and made their presence known.

But colds? Colds were guerrilla warfare—sneaky, persistent, always just under the threshold of “sick enough.” They nibbled at your edges. They dripped from your nose and clawed at your throat and muffled your brain until you felt like you were wrapped in gauze and stored in the back of a dusty drawer where static crackled faintly behind your ears.

I needed a C-clamp for my nose, which had been replaced by a leaking faucet. And my head throbbed in time with the hum of the window unit, a sound that felt too sharp for morning and too dull for thought. I didn’t have time for this. School was waiting. Prenatal exams had been canceled. Babies were due any moment.

Well, first things first. I’d try to salvage the school day.

Christopher couldn’t afford to miss a day of therapy, structure, connection. His disabilities didn’t allow for drifting days. So I pulled out the box of emotion cards, 5x7 photographs of faces locked in grief or joy or confusion. A bored teenager slumped against a wall. A baby red-faced with rage. A woman looking off into the middle distance with tears just about to spill.

I held one up. “This boy is bored. Why would he be bored?”

We built stories from there. And when we finished talking, Christopher would march over to the mirror, place his small hands on the rim of the sink, and twist his face into the expression. Trying, with all his might, to feel it inside himself.

It was my heart’s prayer that one day he would not only mimic, but recognize, that he would feel a smile coming before it reached someone’s lips, or sense smothered sadness in a person before a single word was spoken.

Some days, his therapy looked like sign language. Other days, it was colored balls rolling across the floor—red, blue, yellow, green, each one named out loud, again and again, until names stuck to color. Often, it meant crawling alongside him when he crawled, or rolling when he rolled. Anything to break through the barrier of his private universe and coax him out for a while. To laugh. To wonder. To look.

And it was working. Once, when he stuffed himself into a pillow sham, I stuffed myself into one, too. And when he started to laugh, I knew I’d breached his autistic wall. When he began to roll, Helen rolled beside him. And slowly, day by day, the distance began to shrink.

But not this morning. He was distracted, his eyes fixed on the boxy window unit buzzing in the corner. I knelt beside him.

“Christopher,” I said, turning his face toward mine, “look at Mommy.”

His eyes flickered toward me, then back to the machine.

Then I heard the unmistakable sound of tires on gravel. Omie’s car. Just the whisper of tread on our driveway sent a thrill through the air.

“Christopher,” I said, straightening, “Omie is here!”

And he sprang up like he’d been uncoiled. He gave a delighted leap, a squeal, a kind of half-dance, half-bow as he bounded toward the door.

“Omie is here. Omie is here. Omie is here!” he called, echoing my words with rising joy.

He loved her. He would never say that, not directly. But his joy told the truth. His ritual of repetition. His light-footed dash. Omie meant something to him—someone real and steady and good.

She was a retired speech therapist, a longtime member of our church, and one of the most generous people I’d ever known. Four days a week, two hours a day, she gave herself to him. No money, no fanfare.

“So you can give that time to your other children,” she’d said.

She came bearing games and songs and steadiness. And love. I truly could not have done it without her.

As he disappeared out the door with her, I sank into the wicker chair on the porch, a tissue box close at hand. I blew my nose again and looked across the sweet potato field. Just beyond it, I could see Jessie, my neighbor, moving through her yard. She was carrying something to the chickens, three children trailing behind her like ducklings. They were close enough to see, but a little too far to call to across the way.

I watched for a while, then shuffled inside and collapsed on the schoolroom sofa.

“Family reading time,” I rasped.

The older kids brought their books and took turns reading aloud, my voice too hoarse to do much. I let my eyes close more than once.

“Mommy, are you listening?”

“Yes,” I mumbled. “Keep reading. I’m just closing my eyes because of my cold.”

Around lunchtime, the doorbell rang. There stood Jessie, her glowing face freckle-sprinkled, green eyes bright beneath sandy hair. She was holding a steaming casserole dish, and her three children stood behind her, one with a basket of bread, one with a pitcher of juice, another with a salad. Tucked under her arm was a little quart jar.

“I thought you might could use some lunch,” she said. “And this chicken soup is for you.”

“How did you know I was sick?”

“Oh, a little bird told me,” she said, grinning.

I never did find out who the bird was. But Jessie had a way of listening to birds. She took “Love your neighbor as yourself” quite literally.

Just before lunch, Omie brought Christopher back home, and we returned to school.

We’d come a million miles together, further than I’d ever dreamed possible when Omie began helping him five years earlier. No one had thought he’d ever talk. But now he did. English might seem like his second language, but it was his. He was even beginning to read. Picture cards had been our gateway: monkey, chair, bed. It was sight reading, but it was reading.

Still, I had come up against another wall.

“Christopher,” I said, “I want you to write a sentence.”

“Yes, Mom. What should I write?”

“Whatever you want. Look out the window. What do you see?”

“I see a tree.”

“Okay, write one sentence about the tree.”

“Yes, Mom. What do you want me to write about the tree?”

“I want you to write what you see.”

“I see a tree?”

“Yes. Can you write that?”

“Write what?”

Back and forth we went. He could copy anything. He could take dictation without flaw. But he could not, ever, originate a sentence. Not one.

I didn’t understand. Maybe it was part of the mystery of his mind. There were so many. And somehow, I loved that—this puzzle of him. As hard as it was, it made me feel alive.

I talked to Dan. I prayed. I knew Christopher had something to say. I could feel it. I could see it shimmering behind his eyes. And I believed. Deep down, I believed God wanted him to write. That there was a key. Somewhere. Somehow I had to find it.

So I began to look. I prayed when I walked to the mailbox. I flipped through catalogs with sharp eyes. I listened at church meetings, read Scripture slowly, pondered every conversation for a glint of insight.

Then, one night we went to a gathering with a meal, worship, and a few visiting missionaries. I ended up making small talk with one of the mothers. She told me about a correspondence course they used on the mission field to home-school their children.

She said something almost in passing: “It’s really centered around letter writing; most missionaries want their children to write home to family and friends.”

And right then, it clicked.

That was it.

Christopher didn’t write because he wasn’t talking to anyone. There was no recipient in his mind. No purpose, no context. It was all too abstract. He needed someone on the other end of the line.

I could hardly wait until morning.

“Christopher,” I said, setting out paper and pencil, “how would you like to write a letter to Omie?”

“I’ll write a letter to Omie,” he echoed. He took the pencil. He sat down. And he wrote, with no prompts whatsoever:

Dear Omie,

I am sitting at the table, learning school.

My mommy is teaching me.

My dog Puzzle is sitting beside me. He’s watching.

I love you.

Love, Christopher.

I had to get a tissue—not for my cold this time, but to keep the tears from falling on the page.

He had never written anything before.

From that day forward, his school days were full of letters, one for Omie, one for my father, one for Bonnie, one for our neighbor Shosh. His writing blossomed. And more than that, his relationships began to blossom, too.

It was only fitting that Omie received the first letter. Omie, who brought with her each day a little breath of fresh air, a little more room for love.