(no subject)

[hazelk]

My younger son is autistic. His brother is too, they’re identical twins.

Today the bathroom repair man wins my heart, talking about younger son.

“He cracks me up, the way he laughs. He’s so happy.”

Comments

[azdak.livejournal.com]

He sounds like a nice guy - I hope he did as good a job on your bathroom as he did on your heart ;-)

How old are the kids?

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

The bathroom is a thing of functional beauty once more. Goodbye to stinkiness!

I still have a tendency to be a little on the defensive about how people react to the boys. It’s really nice when someone just sees them as funny little kids. They have slightly different problems but these days they both seem quite happy with life a lot of the time. When they were younger it was if the world were a very strange, often hostile place and no-one had given them a manual. They seem to have worked out enough to start to get by now. We’ve had a lot of help.
They’re seven.

[azdak.livejournal.com]

I think dealing with other people's reactions must be incredibly difficult - I would be defensive and overly sensitive, too. Because, you know, you love your kids and you want everyone else to see how wonderful they are, and you feel protective towards them and it hurts like hell when other people look at them askance. When I was pregnant with my older daughter we had a little bit of a scare about Down's syndrome, and decided to have further tests but not an abortion, and the doctor said "Why do you want to have the tests if you're not going to act on the results?" And the answer was because if the baby was going to be handicapped we wanted to be able to write to all our friends and say "Look, we know the baby will have Down's, but we still love her and we want you to be happy for us when she's born." It turned out that everything was all right, but it really brought home to me how heavily other people's reactions weigh on you.