As an Autistic Man with Two Autistic Children I Sure Lucked Out Marrying a Woman Who Has Devoted Her Life to Serving the Neurodivergent
The pandemic made everything so much harder than it needed to be. Those were two very strange, fragile years that I half want to purge from my memory forever because they were so fucking grim, and I half want to explore endlessly precisely because it was such a bizarre time for the whole world.
The pandemic was particularly tough on new parents. Schools are places where children learn to read and write and how to make friends. They are places for socialization as well as education.
For two years my oldest son did school virtually. I’m not sure that’s ideal for anyone, but for a six-year-old with ADHD and Autism, it’s damn near impossible.
Before the pandemic, however, things were still awfully grim. I will never forget teacher-parent meetings where the principal of his school and his teachers told us in no uncertain terms that they did not know what was going on with our child, but it terrified and confused them, and it was more than they could handle.
From the way they treated him and talked about him, you would think that he was the world’s youngest mass murderer, not a high-spirited, creative boy on the spectrum who was fidgety and restless and easily bored because he had undiagnosed ADHD but also because he was a child and that’s how children behave, particularly if in a virtual class.
Throughout that fraught and curious time, we didn’t know if our younger son’s speech delay was a result of the pandemic making everything crazy or a neurological condition. Our youngest wasn’t talking a whole lot, but why would he? What was there to talk about? The whole world had become a weird ghost town. His world shrunk to a house and maybe six people.
It was horrifying having our children get kicked out of one daycare and school after another for what we now understand were merely symptoms of neurological conditions.
We felt like we were flying blind when we learned that the people we had counted upon to help our neurodivergent children grow and evolve and be their best, healthiest, most successful selves didn’t know what they were doing.
We needed an advocate who understood autism and ADHD on a personal level because it is their daily reality, not something that they learned about in a book.
We needed someone who was caring, empathetic, patient, and endlessly compassionate. Someone who would tell us that it was all going to be okay and that while the world might seem scary and uncertain, there were good people who would help us navigate this new terrain.
We needed someone who could talk to autistic children and their parents. We needed someone confident and capable in both capacities.
My wife became the person that we had been seeking and not finding throughout our journey as parents of two neuro-divergent children. She’s able to combine what she learned in graduate school at the University of Chicago and Brown with her firsthand experience as the wife of an autistic man with ADHD and the mother of two neurodivergent children.
Personally and professionally, my wife became an expert on autism. In a world of people who understand and who do not understand, I feel profoundly blessed to be married to someone who has made serving the neurodivergent community her life’s work.
Because she possesses such a rare and necessary gift, she has more work and clients as a therapist than she can handle. We know from firsthand experience just how much someone who understands on a deep, profound, emotional, and intellectual level is worth.
I’m proud of my wife and I’m grateful to have someone who knows so much about this world to help me on my own journey of neurodivergent self-discovery. She certainly did not choose for everybody in her immediate family to be autistic, but she’s transformed that familiarity with the condition into something wonderful not just for me and my boys but for the neurodivergent community of Atlanta as a whole.
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