One morning this week, Zoe walked in my bathroom (where I was getting physically and mentally “dressed” for the day) and said, “Mom, you’re the only one who loves me.”

I blinked a few times, put down whatever I was holding in my hand and turned to look at her.  ”I love you more than you can imagine, Honey, but no, I am not the only one who loves you.”

“Yes, you are.”

“What about Daddy?”

She considered this.  ”Okay, so you and Daddy are the only ones who love me.”

“What about Grandma and Papa?”

She started twisting her torso, one shoe pointed out in front of her.  She sighed.  ”Okay, so you, Daddy, Grandma, and Papa are the only ones who love me.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“What about Adam and Riley?”

“Okay, so you, Daddy, Grandma, Papa, Riley, and Adam are the only ones who love me.”

“What about Opa?”

She sighed.  ”Okay.  Opa too, but you guys are the only ones.”

“What about Uncle Scott and Aunt Monica?”

A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth, but she looked down, still twisting, another sigh escaping her lips.  ”Okay, but it just feels like you’re the only one who loves me.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.  It just does.”

I scooped her up in my arms and sat down on the side of the bath tub.   It’s amazing how many big talks happen in my bathroom.  I’m beginning to think I should move my computer in there and just make it my office.

“You know, I feel that way sometimes, too.  But I need to tell you something.  I’m not even a quarter of the way through the list of people who love you.  You have more love in your life than you can imagine.  You will be loved by people you don’t even know love you.  Whenever you feel like there aren’t very many people who love you, remember.  Think hard.  Make a list.  That simply isn’t true.  And, I’ll tell you  a secret.”

At this, she giggled and leaned in to me.  Zoe loves  secrets.  I pushed back her hair and whispered in her ear: The more love you give, the more love you’ll have.

As Zoe left the room, I thought, “How early does that have to start?”  She’s only 5, and she already wonders if she’s significant.

At least every other week, one or more of my amazing friends—all beautiful, passionate, fun and gifted women–will admit to me that she feels alone, unloved (or at least not loved by many), and insignificant. 

The worst lie I have ever believed is that I don’t matter to anyone else, and that whatever I’m facing, I’m facing it alone.   Ella  Wheeler Wilcox began her late-19th century poem Solitude with the words, “Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone.”  The funny thing is, she felt inspired to write those lines after she spent an entire train ride sharing grief with a complete stranger.  Having absorbed so much of her new aquaintance’s grief and carried it herself that long way, she couldn’t see that for this weeping woman, she was the someone else.  Indeed, the woman hadn’t wept alone.  She’d wept with Ella Wheeler Wilcox sitting by consoling her!

For every “nobody loves me” conversation I’ve had with Zoe, I’ve had three more of my own with my mom.  Even as an adult, there have been times when I’ve said, “Mom, I just feel so alone.  Like I just don’t matter to anyone else.”  Fortunately for me, Mom has never met these comments with any cooing and consoling.  I’ll never forget the first time she shocked me out of my self-pitying reverie with a sharp, “Now that is just ridiculous.”  I blinked, thinking, Did she just say ridiculous?  Before I could wonder more, she said, “You’ve got lots and lots of people who love you.  Then she listed and listed and listed and listed and listed until I saw what a fool I had been for believing the lie.  

Have you ever noticed that single predators in the wild rarely attack an entire herd?  They stalk the herd, waiting for one to get alienated from the group.  It’s the one struggling to keep up, the one left alone, that gets attacked.  Whenever I believe that I am truly alone and no one cares, that’s when I begin to wonder if I can survive.

I’ll let you in on a little secret:  For years, I hated the fact that I was always the youngest person at every table.  I have always been an “old soul,” and for most of my life, my friends have been older than I am (though these days I find that I have an equal number who are my age and younger too:)).  I’ve always seen a clear difference between the age of my body and the age of my experience and ideas, and I’ve never been uncomfortable having friends who are physically much older than I am.  In fact, the truth is that I never really think much about chronological age, unless a friend or family member makes note of it.  For as long as I can remember, other people have made an issue of my youth.  I’ll be caught up in laughter, thinking about how much I am enjoying the group I am with, and then someone will have to say something like, “What would you know about that?  You’re still a baby.”  Those words have always felt like a push away, an invisible hand that strikes out and separates me.  The worst is when the issue is pressed still further.  ”What were you doing in 1982?  You were probably still in diapers.”  No matter what I say in these conversations (“No, no.  I was actually in elementary school…”), there are rejoinders that seem to push me farther and farther away.  Suddenly, I feel alienated and insignificant, as though the strength of who I am is not enough to sustain my place in the group.  I hear the whispered lie, You really don’t belong here.  You really don’t matter.

For a long time, I believed the lie when I heard it.  For days, I wondered if my friends really found value in our friendships.  I carried on silent conversations with them.  Do you realize that making an issue out of the age of my body is like deciding how relevant I am to you on the basis of the age of the car I drive?  ”Oh, what do you know about love?  Your car is brand new.”  My body is nothing more than a vehicle in which my soul lives, laughs, loves…”

The point is that for years, this was the thing that alienated me.  Of course, everybody has at least one of those.  The trigger for the lie.  The thing that is said or not said that makes you feel alone and insignificant.  I always feel sorry for preacher’s wives because they are alienated on the basis of their husband’s profession.  More than once I’ve been in a laughing group of women and someone has said, “Uh oh, we’d better not talk about that, the preacher’s wife is listening.”  Suddenly she feels the invisible hand, pushing her back from the group.  It’s an innocent gesture, one I don’t think any of us usually think about unless we’re the one that feels the shove.    Sadly enough, most of us don’t ever confess the thing that sets us apart, so our alienators are innocent, never knowing that they have pushed us away.

For a lot of years, autism alienated me from other moms.  It still does sometimes, but these are usually young moms who don’t know that the secret to motherhood isn’t just spending quality time with your nearly-perfect baby who hasn’t gotten old enough yet to need any discipline or guidance.  One afternoon this week, we were at the pool for some sun and “decompressing” before the evening chaos.  I don’t know why (because he can’t really tell me), but Adam was in a very grumpy mood.  In general, Adam is a pretty steady kid (which is amazing given all of his challenges), but like the rest of us, sometimes he’s just grumpy.  The problem is that grumpy for Adam comes out differently than grumpy for a typically verbal 7-year-old.  Adam grouses and complains and sounds like an old man with an attitude.  Over the years, I’ve learned the difference between this grumpy chatter and disrespectfulness.  The grumpy chatter I respond to (“I know, you’re having a tough day.”) but then ignore.  This particular pool day, a new mom was bobbing around with her baby (who looked to be about 9 months old).  She sang to him, smiled at him, stared adoringly into his too-young-to-drive-her-nuts baby blues.  At one point, they bobbed right in front of Adam, who had started having a little fun splashing the water into his own face (I know, but whatever floats his boat:)).  Adam splashed baby-angel.  The mother frowned significantly at Adam (which means absolutely nothing to Adam), and whirled “baby-a” a little further away.  I got Adam’s attention and said, “No splashing people.”  I think it was an accident for Adam, but I wanted him to be aware that the mom and her baby were close by.  I gestured toward them.  Normally, Adam would have accepted this without much comment and probably just moved away from the mom and her baby.  Grumpy-Adam complained in his old man “nobody every lets me do what I want” voice.  The mother frowned again, raised an eyebrow at Adam, shook her head slightly at me (never making eye contact) and asked baby-a, “Are you ready to go home, honey?”

There was a time when this exchange really would’ve bothered me.  I’d have heard the old lies: You are alone.  No one understands.  She thinks you’re a horrible mom. In the past, there were situations like this one in which I actually went over and apologized, explaining my children’s challenges.  Not this time.  I guess this time, I recognized that mom.  I used to be her.  I used to think that if a kid was acting inappropriately, somebody wasn’t doing something right.  I don’t resent those moms anymore.  More than that though, I have so many friends these days who do understand.  I have friends with children who have ASD, I read books and blogs and listen to podcasts composed by parents and individuals living with ASD, and it’s impossible for me to believe that I am alone or that my situation is unique.  

The lies have been exposed.

I think because I’m no longer usually the youngest person at the table, I don’t often hear the you are just so young comments anymore.  Maybe it helps that on a few occasions I’ve actually admitted that those comments alienate me.  Maybe it also helps that I’ve turned it into a joke.  ”You know, you’re absolutely right.  One day, I’ll be pushing your wheel chair.”:)  I think more than all that, it just helps that the lies have been exposed.  When I start to believe that I don’t matter, I’ve learned to do exactly what I told Zoe to do.  I remember.  I make lists in my head of all the people who love me—family and friends (the truest friends…the ones who’d sit in the ashes with me) old and new.  It becomes impossible for me to believe that I am alone and insignificant, on any basis.

I’ve learned the freedom found in exposing the lie.  I’m telling you, do not believe it.  That thing that makes us say, “Nobody loves me” has no power over us if we refuse to believe the lie.  The truth is, there are very few people who really alone, and no one is insignfiicant.  Everyone matters, and not just to one soul, but to many.

I love John Donne’s Meditation XVII:

…all mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated.  God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all the scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.  If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were.  Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind…

This is the truth, and this is what I believe.  It’s exactly the message in one of my favorite movies of all time, Lars and the Real Girl:

An entire town supports Lars while he works out his fear, pretending that a plastic doll is his girlfriend.  I can’t even count the number of people who smile at Riley’s crazy hair, let her call them silly names, have one-sided conversations with Adam about numbers, letters, books, and all sorts of other things, and tear up when Adam sings a solo in worship, all because they really do love us and we really are significant to them.

Still, especially in my lowest moments, I hear the lie.  I feel the shove—the invisible push that alienates me from the people who truly love me.  It’s exactly what Elijah did in 1 Kings 19, after the most amazing battle of his ministry.  ”I have had enough,” he said to God.  ”Take my life.  I am no better than my ancestors.  …I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty…I’m the only one left.”

I’ll never forget a day when my kids were still really small, and I was completely out of energy.  It was one of those days when I felt like I had absolutely nothing left, a day spent mothering a year-old baby and two extremely sensory autistic preschoolers.  Having shuttled everyone from therapy to therapy and then tried to cram normal household maintenance and even some quality time into our day, I felt overwhelmed and largely unsuccessful.  I fell asleep that night knowing that I would wake up the next day feeling more exhausted still, with yet more work to do.  My emotions seemed to be bubbling and frothing and dangerously near boil-over.

 At breakfast the next morning, I had no sooner sat down to eat when one of the kids spilled their milk all over the floor below the table.  I got up, grabbed a pile of paper towels—some wet, some dry, and knelt down to sop up the mess.  One of the kids was crying, another was trying to walk into the milk, another was asking for more of something, and I just sobbed.  I sopped up the milk with one hand and caught my tears with another.  I prayed.  God, help me.  Please.  I’m all alone, and I don’t think I can do this another day.  Help me, please.

I sat back on my heels and realized that I was crying over spilled milk.  Just as I started laughing at the irony, the phone rang.  It was a friend.  I am sure she heard some quaver in my voice, because she asked me how I was doing.  I sobbed again, but denied her offer of help.  Another friend called just a few minutes later.  She heard me say just a few words and said, “I’m coming over.  I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”  No sooner had I hung up the phone, than another friend called.  She talked to me for a few minutes, hung up, and then showed up on my doorstep about half an hour later, with flowers.  When I opened the door (and the first friend was already there, scrubbing the kitchen floor), she said, “Okay, put me to work.”  

That morning, as I sobbed over a puddle of milk in the kitchen floor, I offered the lie up to God in much the way that Elijah had.  I’m all alone and I just don’t matter.  Help me, please.

In the space of a few hours, I heard the same mighty answer God gave Elijah, too:  Oh no you’re not.  You are not alone.  You are loved.