When my mom asked me how I felt about creating this list, I told her that it made me feel “incrementally more powerful”.
Category: Parents
The Q&A Essay
This was an idea my mom had, since I was always writing about the same things, and people were probably getting bored. She asked people on Facebook to ask me any question they had for me. My dad and my sister also asked a few questions. I then picked which ones I felt like answering….
Just When You Thought I Was Done Talking About Autism: My Plea for Others
Mom typing here… Everything my son had written before this was just a stream-of-consciousness exercise, followed by a few hours of editing. In an effort to get through the end of a homeschooling book on Middle School English at the beginning of summer, I found a chapter on composition, and used it to help him…
How I Learned to Break Out of My Shell: an Autistic Boy’s Perspective on Communication
I learned to communicate on a letter board this year and it has changed my life in immeasurable ways. A letter board is a plastic stencil board with the alphabet on it that I touch to spell out my thoughts. Before this year, I was locked inside. I couldn’t express myself at all. I didn’t…
Helping My Mother Die
Yup. I’m going there. And nope, this post has nothing to do with autism. Also, this post is definitely going to be a bummer. Here we go… When my mother suggested that I write an essay titled “Watching My Mother Kick the Bucket”, I confessed to her that the idea–if not the title–had already occurred…
Awareness
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…
Disability Olympics / I’m a Terrible Person
Last night, as I staggered back to bed after cleaning my son up from a middle-of-the-night GI tract-related mess (four sheet changes in less than 24 hours – new record!), I checked social media. I’ve slipped a little lately, just scraping off the top of the feed during “desperate” moments (which may or may not…
What I’ve Gained & Lost: Autism Awareness and Acceptance
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…
Some Thoughts on the Social Contract
WARNING: THIS IS A LONG POST. But these thoughts have been simmering for a while, so I’ve had a chance to come up with a lot of material. 🙂 *********** So we really put ourselves out there when we sought out the Huffington Post to share our story (the local Washington Post apparently found nothing…
Being Honest Doesn’t Make Me a Terrible Person
So there’s a big kerfuffle/hullabaloo/blog-a-thon out there at the moment regarding Autism Speaks, its ongoing failures, and its recent call for action to fix/address/cure/prevent the autism crisis in American from spreading. First, I must confess that I don’t pay much attention to Autism Speaks or any major autism groups, whether they’re run by autistic advocates,…