Once a site for my own confessions about being a mom of an autistic son. Now a site where we can both share our writing.
Another Autism Awareness month is upon us. And for some reason, I feel duty-bound to gather together the scraps of life lessons I’m stumbled across during the past year. Autism is for Life. Each time I am required to submit a form or show up to an office and display my son for the purposes…
So I clearly can’t speak for my son. I’m not even going to try. And since I have no idea what he thinks, other than when he is happy, sad, sleepy, hungry, or angry in a general sort of way, I am putting everything that follows within a bracket: I am not attempting to speak for…
We’re not actually in the middle of nowhere. That’s just what it feels like to our friends in DC. We’re actually only about 65 miles from our old house, and can be back on Capitol Hill in about an hour and 15 minutes. See? Not that far. (But just far enough to flee to, should…
Lately, it has occurred to me to that we don’t give a shit about much, and that is a good thing. Of course, we shower, keep the house clean, and pay our bills. We feed our children and tell them that we love them. We schedule the right doctors’ appointments and react appropriately to serious…
I’m spending the night in the city again. I drag my suitcase quickly out of the car, aware that I don’t want to lean into the car for too long at this point of night and lose track of what might be happening behind me on the city sidewalk. After heading into our escape hatch…
You might not like me very much after this post, but that’s something I’ll have to live with. After all, the main point of this post is just that–the truth is not very popular. I can only speak for my husband and myself here when I say that we lie every single day. We lie…
Before I get too far down 2014, a year that has started out with an exhausted, unmotivated version of myself, I figured that I should catalog, in prose form, where we are in our “Autistic Life”. If I wait any longer to document this particular moment, it will quickly melt into the daily landscape of…
Dear Baby D, Before I knew who you would become, I somehow selected the perfect middle name for you: Grace*. You are filled with it, even though you do not yet know this. Last week one night, while your brother raged, attempted to bite your Mommy and Daddy’s faces, pull our hair, and throw everything…
On some nights, as my daughter watches her pre-bed TV downstairs in our living room with my husband, I opt for putting my son to sleep in our bed, rather than lying with him in the darkness of his. I dim the sconce lights low on either side of our bed, and get some work…
Just a list. In case a random earthquake causes a mountain to pop up and stand in my path, I want to document a few nice things for the record. All of these things parallel my son’s transition into his new school (we’re still paying for it out of pocket, and driving up there four…