your head and say, “That's not what we see at school.” Solutions I bring forward are met with, “That's just not practical,” or “We can't do that,” or “Please be realistic.”
Our perspectives are different, formed in different situations, with different expectations and goals. So are our resources and skills. But my viewpoint is just as valid as yours, even if we disagree. If you don't take the time to listen to me and forge a plan we can both live with, it won't matter how good your plan is. It won't work well. The things you do at school will be undone at home, just as my work will be undone when he goes back the next day. Any progress you make wouldn't be half of what it could have been, if we had worked together.
He is not your child. He is mine. When he is finished with school, you'll hand him back over to me, and he and I are going to have to live with whatever we've accomplished. So although I will share some of the decision-making with you while he is in your care, don't expect me to give it over to you completely.
You wouldn't let someone else decide your child's fate. Neither will I.
It's not my fault my child has autism. When I was pregnant, I didn't drink or do drugs. I didn't ride roller coasters or swing on trapezes or stay up too late at night. I didn't marry a man who was a druggie and whose sperm swam crooked. After my child was born, I didn't neglect him. I played with him and responded to him and laughed and smiled and fed him well and let him watch only a little more TV than he should have. I loved my baby and did all the things that mothers of typically developing children do. But my child turned out to be autistic, and theirs didn't.
We didn't decide to have a child with autism. When my husband and I lay in bed at night dreaming of our angel-to-be, we didn't envision a sweet, wonderful little whirlwind of a child who would get kicked out of preschool twice before he turned 3 years old. We didn't encourage him to obsess over his toys or show him how to line them up in perfect rows or teach him that it was okay to ignore Grandma even though she'd traveled more than 1,000 miles to see him. We disciplined him, and still he took our house apart piece by piece. We taught him not to hit other kids, and still he did it far longer than typically developing toddlers do. We made him ask for things before we gave them to him, and his language was still delayed and garbled. Our son developed autism, and no matter what we do, we can't change that fact.
Why does my child have autism, and yours doesn't? Genetics could play a part. We spun the wheel of chance and received a bundle of joy that came up beautiful, intelligent, and autistic. You spun the wheel and hit a different combination. Environmental factors play their role too, but my son's physical and emotional environment wasn't so different from that of your child. What made mine autistic and yours not? As of right now, no one knows.
When my husband and I decided to have a baby, we didn't know we were making a decision that would radically change our lives forever. While every baby changes the lives of his parents, having a child with special needs launches you onto another planet, with no way back to your old world. Ever. For some parents, this can mean changing diapers well into their 80s. It may mean living the rest of their lives with someone who is angry, anxious, violent, or depressed. It does mean entering a world of isolation, where few of your friends and family understand your child and why you do what you do. It may mean giving up your career and your education, because you can't find anyone else who can care for your child. It can mean designating an unexpectedly large portion of your income to therapies, tutoring, doctor visits, and medicines, because they don't come cheap. Your other children will get less attention and time, and so will your marriage.
We didn't decide to have a child with autism, and we did nothing to cause it. You could have had him as easily as I did. But, the thought of that makes me sad. My life back on “planet normalcy” was a good life, and it was far easier than the one I have now. Yet, when I watch my sweet little whirlwind running in the sunshine, flapping his arms and giggling at some joke only he understands, I feel more blessed than I could have ever imagined. You could have had my son, but you didn't. He is mine, and I'm keeping him—probably for the rest of my life.
We may become parents on the day our first child is born, but our parenting skills take longer to develop. They start as a bunch of ideas we've gathered from our environment: our parents, our relatives, our friends, and the media. We might have picked over those ideas and discarded outdated or harmful ones or those we're certain are for folks not as enlightened as ourselves, but for the most part we didn't invent these ideas. We absorbed them.
When we got pregnant, our ideas about child-rearing began turning into plans. We came to conclusions and etched those plans into stone. We became sure that we knew the proper way to raise children, and we decided to do so accordingly. We would never spank. Our children would watch only 1 hour of television a day. Our marriage would always be a priority. Bribing and manipulating children is bad, so instead, we would help them develop their ability to reason and make good choices.
Then our children are born, and we try to put our plans into action. This is where things get really exciting. We discover that keeping a toddler clean is like having to tidy up the Augean stables. Hercules could do it, but he had help from the gods. We find that breakables left where children can reach them tend to get broken, even though we decided long ago that children need to be respectful of other people's belongings. Our cars begin to smell like old French fries and sour milk, and the dog now lives under the table, where the kids can't reach him. We come to the conclusion that we're lousy parents. In desperation, we turn to the highest authority we have available to us. We call Mom.
Mom laughs. She's been waiting for this phone call for years. She laughs a lot. She makes you hang on for a moment so she can repeat what you said to Dad. He laughs, too. Then Mom tells you how darling your children are and that they must be advanced, because they learned how to write four-letter words on your wall in ketchup far sooner than your cousin's children did. Then you get to listen to several stories about what a rotten little brat you were—stories that your aunts can corroborate because the tales about what you did have become family legend.
Finally, Mom settles down to business. She sets you straight. She tells you everything she's learned about raising children, and, if she's really nice, she does it without reminding you of your sanctimonious preaching of just a few short months ago. She tells you about natural consequences, like when a kid eats the cat's dinner, he shouldn't get dessert, and he must fill the dish back up so the cat won't starve. She tells you that leashes for kids are good safety tools, especially for teenagers. She also reassures you that 20 minutes of playing in toilet water won't kill your toddler, although the things he flushed away are gone for good.
Mom saves the day, or at least part of it. I mean, she's your mother—are you going to believe everything she says? So you ask your friends who have kids, and you ask your pediatrician, and you read some magazines to find tried-and-true parenting solutions. Slowly but surely, you build up your toolbox of tricks, and everything pretty much works out okay.
That is the ancient and time-honored way of learning parenting skills. But, sometimes it doesn't work.
If you have a child with special needs, you're pretty much on your own. Unless your mother raised a child with autism, she probably doesn't know what to do for a child who refuses to be held and cries every time you touch him. Or how to teach a nonverbal 5-year-old how to speak. Or how to get a 7-year-old to quit pulling chunks of hair out of his head so he can throw them into the air and watch them fall. Chances are, your mother's advice is going to
