No More Waiting

I spent this morning looking for therapists.  Well, doing work on a freelance web design job that came up quickly and needs to be done quickly, and looking for therapists. It kind of feels good to be honest about it, frankly.  I think I spend a lot of time projecting to the world what I [...]

Struggling

It’s not been an easy time in my head the last week. After I wrote the previous post here, I stayed up most of the night feeling very alone.  Very despondent.  Wanting things to be different, but not knowing at all how to make them so. As the hours wore on, the darkness kept encroaching [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Hotel Rooms and Pills

I got to the hotel first. R’s sense of drama had been on full display when he chose the scene for his suicide attempt:  he’d taken a room in the same hotel we’d spent our wedding night in.  I raced down the hall and found the door cracked open so that I didn’t have to [...]

What The ….

“I don’t know where he is,” I said to R’s mother on the phone late that evening.  “Have you heard from him?” R had spent the first month or so of our separation living in the sleeper cabin of his boat the marina.  We’d gone to marriage counseling every week in order to help repair [...]

Brothers and Fathers and Sons

What’s funny to me about my father’s rose colored views of my ugly awkward teenage years is that he seems to be like that about everything. I love him, but it’s clear to me that he lives in a world where everything is supposed to be a certain way. And when it’s not, the first [...]