by Marni Goltsman





I'm sitting in an observation booth watching my 3-year-old in his special needs nursery class and trying to understand why he refuses to participate, why he stands alone eight feet away from the snack table where his favorite snickerdoodle cookies are waiting. For my son, those eight feet of classroom linoleum might as well be a mountain range.

Dangerous terrain is nothing new for him, and every day, our family of three navigates it together. I like to think that my husband and I take the lead in this endeavor, but the truth is that my son, with his life-affirming belly laugh and his beautiful eyes, shows us the way. And we have resisted. Especially in the beginning, when it was all so dark and devastating. One visit to the pediatric neurologist and our lives were forever changed. He was supposed to tell us that we were anxious parents who worried too much, not that our son had autism. Autism? Our lovable, precious 18-month-old who admittedly had some delays was suddenly a stranger with deficits we couldn't understand or make better. We couldn't buy enough books and we couldn't read them fast enough. And we were in too much pain to do much of anything. My husband has never been ashamed of crying when it's appropriate, but never in our 15 year relationship had I heard him sob without abandon. That first week, I couldn't complete the simple task of washing the dishes; instead, I found myself huddled on the kitchen floor with my own new kind of cry: non-cathartic, primal and ugly.

But as the days and weeks passed, we cried less and did more. Yes, it was still horribly unfair that this sweet little boy's brain didn't work properly which meant that he couldn't learn how to talk or even how to play. But an extraordinary group of compassionate doctors, therapists, and teachers gave us hope. "When you catch it this early, there's so much you can do," "autism doesn't have to be a lifelong affliction," "kids on the spectrum tend to do very well in therapy." We played these snippets of promises over and over again in our minds, and we chose to believe them even in the face of inconclusive evidence.

Back in the classroom, the teachers are silently cheering on my son, because he's broken out of his frozen pose and taken a single step toward his snack. It is a silent cheer because they know that if they make eye contact with him, he will sense their expectations and shut down. My son is smart and sensitive. He knows what he's good at, and what he's not, and he doesn't want an audience around when he's taking risks.