One Of Ours Makes Every Trip Difficult

You love them. Start there, because you are about to be told you do not.

Nobody is going to say it out loud, but you have been carrying the accusation yourself for a while: that a good parent would not feel this, and that the dread you get in the week before you go somewhere is evidence about the quality of your love.

It is not. What it is evidence of is that going places with this child is genuinely hard, and it has been hard for years, and you have been managing it mostly alone and mostly without anybody noticing.

I am not going to describe your child, because I do not know them, and because every version of this is different. What is common is the shape.

There is a threshold somewhere. Noise, or unfamiliarity, or the not knowing what happens next, or too many people, or the food being wrong, or a change nobody warned them about. And past that threshold, everything gets much worse very quickly, and it costs the whole family the afternoon, and you can usually see it coming about ten minutes out and cannot always stop it.

And so the week before any trip has a shadow on it, and the shadow is not about them being bad. It is about you knowing you may be about to spend a day managing something in front of people who do not understand it.

Fearfully and wonderfully made

There is a line in the psalms about how a person came to be the way they are, and where it lands matters.

I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well. (Psalm 139:14, King James Version)

Fearfully and wonderfully made.

The whole passage around it is about God working on somebody in the dark, before anybody had seen them, in a way that was deliberate rather than accidental. Nothing about the person is described there as a mistake that got in.

And the word is made. Not permitted, not tolerated. The making is God's own work and it is called wonderful, and there is no clause anywhere in that psalm that separates the parts we would have chosen from the parts we would not.

I want to be careful here, because there is a cruel version of this that gets said to parents, which is that everything about a difficult situation is wonderful and should be received cheerfully. That is not what I am saying and it would be a lie. Some of what your family carries is hard, and it is allowed to be hard, and saying so is not a complaint against the way your child was made.

What the verse does is settle something about the person rather than about the circumstances. This child is not a fault in your family. They are somebody made on purpose, whose particular wiring makes certain ordinary things genuinely difficult, and both halves of that sentence are true at once.

You are the parent of somebody made on purpose, and the difficulty has never once meant a mistake got into your family. Psalm 139:14 calls the making itself wonderful without dividing a person into acceptable and unacceptable parts, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a parent hold that alongside a hard week.

Plan around what is true

Here is the practical part, and it is the opposite of a method.

You do not have to solve this before you are allowed to go anywhere.

I think you have been waiting for something. For them to grow out of it, or for a strategy that works, or for a version of them that finds a train journey ordinary. And while you wait, the years go by and the family does not go anywhere, and that is a cost being paid by everybody including them.

Go as you are. And plan around what is actually true rather than around the child you would find easier.

If they need to know exactly what happens next, tell them everything in advance, twice. If they cannot manage the middle of a day, do the thing in the morning and go home. If a particular food ends the afternoon, take that food with you and do not make it a lesson about flexibility. If two hours is the limit, plan two hours.

None of that is giving in and none of it is lowering expectations. It is arranging a day around a real person, which is what you would do for any adult you loved.

You are able to plan around what is true rather than around what would be easier, and it has never once been the same as giving in. The written word calls the making deliberate rather than accidental, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a parent stop waiting for a different child.

Ask them, and do not fix it

So here is the assignment, and the second half is the hard half.

Ask that child one question about what they find hardest. Then listen without fixing it.

Not in the week before a trip. On an ordinary day, sideways, while doing something else. Something like: when we go places, what is the worst bit for you?

And then let them answer, and do not solve it. Do not explain why it happens, do not offer three ways round it, and do not reassure them that it will not be like that this time. Just take it in and say something like: right, that makes sense, thank you for telling me.

The not fixing is the whole exercise, and it will be uncomfortable, because your instinct is to make it better and you have spent years doing exactly that.

And what they say may surprise you. Very often the thing that ends a day for a child is not the thing the parent has been managing.

Psalm 139:14 says the making is wonderful and known right well, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a parent listens to a child describe their own difficulty without being corrected.

You are able to ask and to leave the answer alone, and it has never once needed solving in the same conversation. Psalm 139:14 calls the works marvelous and the knowing certain, and the Spirit of God is the one who is there while a child says something true about themselves.