Living alongside of autism can be very, very hard. It is demanding and confusing and scary and weird. It’s easy for me to become negative, and maybe even a little bitter, about my 11-year old son Jack’s diagnosis. I mean after all, the tantrums! The rigidity! And don’t even get me started on the stimming. Jack […]
My son Jack’s latest thing is Redbox. You know, the big red box at the front of the grocery store where you can rent movies? For over a year he wandered over to it when we stood in the checkout line, and he pressed his nose up against the screen to read all the titles. […]
I don’t really know much about you, except you want to be elected for President of the United States and a lot of people seem to have opinions about this. I’ve heard some people say you tell the truth. Some say your delivery is off. Others say you are a hate monger. I don’t know […]
Oh, Jack. I don’t know where to begin. You’re so different lately. You’re angry and irritable, and for the life of me I can’t figure out what’s wrong. You’ve always been a bit on the cranky side—you’re what someone might call a curmudgeon, which is a big fancy word that describes a person who complains […]
Dear Santa, In our house, we are really excited about Christmas this year. Our tree is up and the elf named Cooper is out and every night we eat dinner off of our red and green plates. My older brother Joey is acting a little weird though. Whenever we talk about reindeer and elves and […]
(Editor’s note: I wrote this from Jack’s perspective, based on conversations and observations of him in Disney and in life.) Dear World, Last week my family went to Disney. We went to the one in Florida, not California. The one in California is called Disneyland and it opened on July 17th, 1955. Disney World opened in 1971. Anyway, […]
In high school I played the flute for both the marching band and the school orchestra, and sometimes, we traveled to perform at musicals. I think we got paid something like $20 a show, which I promptly squirreled away for my next pair of parachute pants, because I wore those nylon trousers like a boss […]
When I was pregnant with my oldest son, Joey, I worried about a million things; car seats and strollers, sudden infant death syndrome and folic acid. I worried he might be born a hermaphrodite, or with cleft a palate, or a pointy head. (I worried about the pointy-head thing because my brother had a pointy […]
Dear Adam, I saw you in concert about seven years ago outside of Boston, when Maroon Five opened the show for the Counting Crows. Ever since then I’ve really enjoyed watching your rise to meteoric stardom. I actually have a lot in common with your lovely wife, Behati Prinsloo. We both have unusual names, for […]
The story about United Airlines asking a family and their teenage daughter to leave the plane was all over the news last week. Some people described it as a new low for the autism community. I’ve read so much about it that I really don’t have anything to add, except this: it scares the heck […]