Susan Senator

Every Friday I hope to post an excerpt from my forthcoming book, The Autism Mom’s Survival Guide: Creating a Balanced and Happy Life While Raising a Child With Autism. This will be the first of nine excerpts, which will end the week the book comes out (March 3oth). Enjoy!

A happy life consists not in the absence, but
in the mastery of hardships.
—Helen Keller, “The Simplest Way to Be Happy”

W h e n m y s o n Nat was diagnosed with autism at the age of
three, I had no idea how much autism was going to force me
to change: how I parented, how I made plans, who I hung out
with, how I felt about family, how I felt about my life. Those
changes were huge and fraught with emotion and intensity.
We didn’t know what to tackle first—finding him a school
program, educating ourselves, finding specialists for him and
for us—but we realized fairly quickly that we had to do all of
these at once.

“How can I bear it?” I wrote in my journal a few months
after diagnosis. “Nat is being called a ‘special ed’ kid, the very
thing I dreaded. If I let everyone else decide that is what he is,
I feel like I’m giving up on him. I see myself as his last hope.”

Back then I thought that if I accepted his diagnosis, it would
make Nat’s condition worse. I feared that it would change
how we all saw him and treated him, in a way that would be
harmful to him. This may have been magical thinking, but it
is what I felt at the time.

I eventually realized that I had to let go of the old idea
of him, of the prediagnosis innocence, and the visions I had
of him that never really matched who he was…

…How do we get to the blessed point where we finally step
back and understand deeply that our children are whole, not
broken? And that our own lives, by extension, are also whole
and full of potential? In talking to parents, I learned that
achieving this knowledge has nothing to do with our age, our
child’s age, or the severity of our child’s problems; nor does
it have to do with income, race, or any other factors we usually
think of.