Hello. I have been thinking about you lately. We’ve never met. You live in West Virginia, and I live in New Hampshire. I have five kids. My second son, Jack, has autism. Jack told me West Virginia and New Hampshire are exactly five hundred and forty-six miles apart. He knows stuff like this. I bet […]
Can I tell you a secret? It’s a little embarrassing, to be honest. We always thought our son Jack would recover from autism. We thought he would “get over it,” or heal, or just morph into a regular old kid who likes to toss a baseball around and fly kites on windy days. For years, […]
Mama, how do you build a family? A family? Well, my child, a family is at once the easiest and the hardest thing to build. Think of it as a garden. Maybe you expected rows and rows of neat tulips, standing straight and tall in their church pews, eating organic apples […]
Editor’s note: I wrote this blog based on my son’s diagnosis on paper, and the color he brings to everyday life. Imagine I took away your memory. Not your memory, exactly. You could still remember things like the time you got stung by a bee, and how your family always ate hotdogs in the summer. But […]
I keep a small green box on my desk, and inside are all the letter tiles from an old game of Scrabble. When I sit at my laptop to write, and the words won’t come, I remind myself that inside this box is every sonnet, play, song, and story ever written. Romeo and Juliet. Little […]
My oldest son, Joseph, just started driver’s ed. We usually call him Joey, but lately he’s asked that we call him Joseph, on account of him being fifteen-and-a-half and all. For the uninitiated, driver’s ed is a formal course where teenagers learn how to drive. It’s a combination of classroom work, and time in the […]
Let this be the year we hold the door for one another. We smile at strangers. We plant a tree. We grow a tomato. We stop arguing about red and white and blue and orange. This year, I want to do things. I want to pet my beloved puppy at least a hundred […]
I wrote this piece after conducting extensive research. And by extensive research, I mean asking my son Jack a bunch of questions and hoping he would answer me. All in all, we had some good conversation, which isn’t always the case. Dear Santa, My name is Jack Cariello. I am fourteen years old, and I am very excited for Christmas this […]
Joseph. Joey. My firstborn child, my oldest son. I want to talk to you about something. It’s kind of important. See, lately I’ve been thinking about how, one day, Daddy and I aren’t going to be around anymore. This is a very scary thought for me. I never want to leave any of you behind. […]
