Because I constantly get phone calls from school telling me he tried to stab a teacher with a pencil or attempted to cut himself with a pencil sharpener blade or that he’s mad, and can I please come to calm him down? Because I experience so many questions, raging episodes, and endless arguments that by […]
Why I Need to Remember This Moment… Read More »
The end of summer feels a bit like wandering through the aftermath of a natural disaster. Mentally moving from room to room, I assess all the inflicted damage after several months at home with five kids, namely my autistic son, Grayson. There’s the cracked window in the basement, door jamb plates that have been sneakily
I packed a sack lunch for my oldest son today. I literally can’t even remember the last lunch I packed for him. But today was his first day of work. A real job. Manual labor. Packing that lunch and sending him off on his own made me realize that even though, on the one hand,
The Destabilizing Power of a Sack Lunch Read More »
My dad told me this once. For a wheat seed to come fully into its own, it must become wholly undone. The shell must break open, its insides must come out, and everything must change. If you didn’t understand what life looks like, you might mistake it for complete destruction. —The Broken Way by Ann
A study was conducted in 1967 by a man named Martin Seligman. In Part 1 of this study, three groups of dogs were placed in harnesses. Group 1 dogs were briefly put in harnesses and then released. Groups 2 and 3 consisted of “yoked pairs.” Dogs in Group 2 were given random electric shocks, which
Common But Not Normal Read More »
I’m sitting by the fire in my pajamas at 11:00 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. Everyone is either sleeping or gone. A tinge of wistful sadness settles in with the quieting of the house as I look back over the course of this year. There is a sense of finality with the passing of 2016—another
Nothing New this New Year Read More »
Lately, a few unanswered questions have been rolling around in my head, flaring whenever I sit down to write. They’re as persistent and loud as my children banging on my locked bathroom door, and their redundant, mental interrogations are almost enough to make me wave the white flag of surrender. “What is the point of
I’m Outside Alone. Again. Read More »
When my daughter was young, we visited a women’s monastery where a nun was tending to the chickens. By all cultural standards, the young woman was not pretty. Her face was acne-scattered and scarred, and she had thick glasses and braces. Her dark eyebrows formed a solid line, giving the appearance of a heavy, furrowed
A fourteen-hour glimpse into the holidays with an autistic child: Wednesday December 21, 2016: 3:00 p.m.—Grayson gets into the car with an fantastic bag of Christmas goodies from his teacher and immediately gives everything to his sister because “it’s all stupid…” 3:01 p.m.—…then quickly takes it back because “it’s actually
Christmas Humility Comes Early Read More »
“I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another…I have found it a singular luxury to talk across the pond to a companion on the opposite side. In my house we were
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