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 [...]

Another Day In the Life

Michael lost it the other night. It had been a good day for him, in fact a great start to the school year so far.  Last year, he stumbled so badly at the beginning of the school year, in terms of academics and behavior, that I actually phoned his teacher on Friday in tears wondering [...]

Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Back

“You need to come to the school and pick him up,” said the voice of my son’s special education teacher on the phone. We’d been riding a positive wave of good news as far as Michael had been concerned.  His last conference had brought me to tears; he was working on grade level, in the [...]

Finding the Right Fit

I sighed as I listened to the speaker on the other end of the phone line.  ”Really?  He’s going to switch special education teachers for the third time in three years?” It was a week before the close of Michael’s first grade year.  It had not been a stellar year, by any account, from the [...]

Moving Forward

I walked into the coffee shop that Saturday morning in April and was surprised to find so many people waiting there for me. It was the weekend after our first failed budget attempt, and our First Selectman (what our tiny little town called the person who acted as its mayor) had offered to meet a [...]

Small Town Budgets

I walked into the high school library, looking for the crowd. I expected a fair amount of people to show up to this meeting, our small town’s discussion of our school budget.  In the few years we’d lived in our tiny town, I’d discovered that funding here for the schools worked far differently than I [...]

First Day of School

I got in my car and followed the school bus.  R followed me in his car, both of us nervous and wanting to make sure that Michael didn’t freak out or meltdown on his first day of kindergarten. It was a big day at our house, a warm late August day.  R had almost missed [...]

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, [...]

Never Normal

It was time for our monthly meeting at Michael’s preschool.   To keep tabs on Michael’s progress, his school scheduled family meetings once a month to update the parents on the progress of their special needs child.  It was at these meetings that they would make suggestions about what could be done at home, if [...]

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 [...]