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"Dear Everyone, Many of you know that I am a single Mom of two very special children. One of them turned twelve today, and I&amp;#039;m still having a hard time wrapping my head around that. The other is nine, and he happens to have autism. Please believe me when I tell you that it took me a good long while to wrap my head around that when it was first presented as a diagnosis. I was terrified. Lost. Oh my God, this was my kid we were talking about! We had to fix this! We had to cure it! We had to make it all go away! Except, it doesn&amp;#039;t work like that. Autism doesn&amp;#039;t just go away. And regardless of what all the charlatans will tell you, there is no magic cure. There are therapies (both documented and undocumented) and strategies that work in general, and a whole variety that will work only on certain kids, or at certain times, or in certain situations. When they first diagnosed my son, I became an Autism Expert. I knew everything about everything so that I could write the book about David and Autism and it would have the happy ending I was demanding. I soon came to realize that I don&amp;#039;t and can&amp;#039;t know everything, because not enough is known. Not yet. And it&amp;#039;s not a book I&amp;#039;m writing, but an essay. An endless essay full of twists and sub-plots that can totally alter a timeline. The central character to it all can change the direction on a whim, and does frequently. I never know what&amp;#039;s coming next with David, and that&amp;#039;s a good thing. A wide open thing. A &amp;quot;the sky&amp;#039;s the limit&amp;quot; thing. And if I don&amp;#039;t know how far or how big or how amazing David will grow to be, it stands to reason, neither does anyone else. Just like any other kid, David gets to work toward his own future, and define it on his own terms. That&amp;#039;s all he wants, you know. That&amp;#039;s all I want for him - what every other kid should have - even though he&amp;#039;s not always like the other kids. If this column has made you realize just how many kids you know (directly or indirectly) that are different like David, if outlining my struggles with parenting a child who experiences the world on a different level, if my shining a spotlight on the fact that there are entirely too many single parents doing the same thing brings this all out into the open where we can talk about it and work toward solutions, then I&amp;#039;ve done my job. And I&amp;#039;m not just talking about the blogger job (which I love). I&amp;#039;m talking about my Mom job. I owe it to my son to tell you all this, because he can&amp;#039;t tell you himself. Not yet, but I&amp;#039;m hopeful maybe someday. Today is World Autism Awareness Day. Tell me your stories, please. Let&amp;#039;s put them all out there! "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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