A New Reality

It should have been more momentous. Sitting there, in a classroom last week, listening to my autistic son’s teacher tell me that he was doing well in all his subjects was the stuff of my dreams a few years ago.  A reality I couldn’t imagine, but one I hoped to attain in the far away [...]

Playing the Game

I cornered Michael’s afternoon teacher at the end of the day.  Normally he came home on a special bus, the “short bus” as it was commonly known.  A bus that I’d sometimes had to belt him into, kicking and screaming as traffic backed up behind its red lights.  But today I was picking Michael up, [...]

It’s Official

It was September, and I was sitting in a small chair in a doctor’s office not far from Yale University Medical Center. It had taken exactly one week of school before I begged the teachers and therapists for advice, help, something that I could be doing for my son that I wasn’t already doing.  He [...]

Dramarama

It was late.  I was sitting at my computer desk in the kitchen, listening to the quiet of the house, wondering when I’d be done.   There were three days left before the Rick Springfield HDNet special in Illinois, and I had a million things to do. The pressure was on, and none of the [...]

A New World

I looked around the classroom, slowly, holding Michael’s hand.  It looked a great deal like your standard issue preschool classroom:   letter block foam play area, bins of toys tucked neatly into cubbies, perfectly penned nametags pasted to the wall near coat hooks.  R stood silently next to me, his face unreadable. “Look, Michael,” I [...]

Special Education

“Do you have the paperwork?” asked the school psychologist, one of five people assembled around the table. Before we’d moved, the Help Me Grow people in Ohio had told me that there was a federal law governing special needs children.  It didn’t matter where we lived, if a child was identified by the “Birth to [...]

Pointing the Way

I sat on the floor with my little boy, him ensconced in the safe area between my legs, feeling my apprehension rise. We were in the middle of an evaluation at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, a screening for possible developmental delays.  We’d already paid $200 for a similar battery of mind numbing hoops for Michael to [...]

The A Word

“What do you think, Anne Marie?” I asked my friend, not at all meaning the blouse I was looking at on the rack. Anne Marie was another mother I’d gotten to know through our Gymboree classes.  We had a very convienence based friendship, one based on our children and their ages more than much in [...]

Am I Being Fired?

I grabbed the phone off of the charger on the second ring, hoping that it would not wake up Michael from his nap.  I recognized the 818 area code as somewhere in the San Fernando Valley; that was Rick’s tour manager, Ronnie.  He called from time to time to mention this thing that Rick didn’t [...]

Like a Foreign Country

I could see the voicemail icon blinking on my cell phone, but it was going to have to wait. “Look over here, Michael, look at the balls, which one is this, let’s see it go down the tunnel, can you try, can you try?” I looked at the speech therapist working with Michael.  She was [...]