July 4th is Independence Day here in the United States. It is also Israeli Girl's birthday. My husband's relationship with Israeli Girl was his bottom: it was what finally caused him to admit his sexual behavior was out of control, that he was an addict. I began calling her Israeli Girl contemptuously: while not technically a girl, she was only 19 when my 30+ year old husband met her on a business trip abroad and began a several year long relationship with her. I don't feel the same contempt anymore, yet I still cannot quite bring myself to grace her with a name. Somehow, giving her a name gives her some humanness, some power, that I don't yet want her to have.

For years, Israeli Girl was one of the most worrisome splinters in my brain. I remember one year, on July 4th, Mark spent $70 of our money (I was furious when I saw the price) on a single international phone call to her, to say happy birthday. I listened to the entire call, jealously, edgily, because something seemed wrong, suspicious, off. I listened for any hint in his voice of anything beyond friendliness -- some trace of desire, seduction, attraction, deep caring, love -- but I didn't hear them, although I knew the sound of them well. And I settled back into a dissatisfied uneasiness, which persisted, until years later, everything fell apart, and made sense.

After my husband admitted his addiction, admitted that one April day he had finally hit bottom with Israeli Girl, July 4th was tainted. I imagined all of those beautiful fireworks going off to celebrate her birthday. I remembered the phone call, imagined what he must have written to her in those years e-mail messages they exchanged, and I couldn't stand to leave the house. This night four years ago, new in a black place of crushing, disbelieving pain, I cringed at each pop of a distant firework, each whistling rocket, and felt they were searing and exploding inside of me.

The next year, Mark and I were wondering aloud whether or not to go out and try to see fireworks. He was tired, and I was still angry and depressed. We both understood that subtext, although with the kids listening, we simply said to each other, "Should we go?" My son heard us talking and said, with verbal skills newly developed after a year of speech therapy, "I want to watch fireworks!" So, it was decided, and I declared it my Independence Day. I was not going to let a tyrannical past rule my present; I would not let the past cast a shadow that blotted the fireworks from the skies my children saw.

We didn't have a destination that year, we simply drove around until we saw some fireworks and parked the car by the side of the road to watch them. There is a Schoolhouse Rock song my son liked to listen to that contained a line, "Red, white and blue fireworks like diamonds in the sky..." As he gazed up into the sky, my son echoed it back, gasping, "They look like diamonds in the sky!" He was thrilled to see a smiley face in the sky, and to watch the blaze of fireworks that marked the end of the show.

As I was putting him to bed afterwards, I told him that he could go to sleep and dream about trains (which were his obsession at the time). When he said he didn't know what dreams were, I told him they were pictures in your head while you sleep. He looked thoughtful, and said, "We can go to sleep and see fireworks in the sky, and we can see that face and then lots and lots like diamonds in the sky."

See, I worried about Israeli Girl's birthday ruining the fireworks, when in fact, my son's joy, and the magic he saw in the sky, threw a light on that night that no dark memory could blot out. I wouldn't think of missing fireworks after that year.

Last year my daughter was awake and old enough to appreciate the fireworks for the first time. As she walked outside, she saw the moon, which was quite a new and exciting sight to her, since her bedtime was 7 p.m. She asked if the moon could come with us to see the fireworks, and I promised her it would. During our car ride, she looked out the car window, checking to make sure that the moon was following us to the fireworks display. When we arrived, she was thrilled to see the moon, still there, watching. She sat with her mouth open wide through the whole show and was too excited to fall asleep, even so long after her bedtime, on the way home.

She and her brother have been chattering all day about the fireworks, about sitting outside and eating cookies and having the moon there and seeing lots of them explode at the end of the show and waving our flags and singing love songs to our nation, like "America the Beautiful," which gives me goosebumps (truly) every time I hear it. My life may not always be perfect, and my country may not always be perfect, but both of us are free.

Happy Independence Day. Enjoy the fireworks.

Photo copyright Kat All rights reserved

I have a picture of Movie Boy at an Easter Egg hunt when he is about 3-1/2. It is from a series of pictures at a neighbor’s Easter party. In some of the pictures, there are children in the background with animated smiles. Movie Boy is holding a basket in one hand, and a ball in the other. To the untrained eye, he looks like he is participating. But he’s not really. The picture catches him in mid-step. He is getting ready to put his foot down. But I know, because I can see the rigid arch in his foot, and the furrow in his brow, that what he is going to do, before he plants that foot firmly, is to lightly tap his foot on the ground. He needs to see if he can walk steady on that particular piece of ground. Because even though he has walked on grass many times before, he has not walked on this particular grass on this lawn, and he is unsure of his footing. So, he looks like someone who is slowly making their way across a patch of thin ice, except we are in Hawaii and it is 78 degrees and sunny and he’s wearing shorts and sandals. The ball he holds is a constant for him, a security object. We go nowhere without it. He never bounces it, or throws it, or rolls it. He just holds it. The objects he carries help steady him, I suppose. But they also tie his hands up, and weigh him down a bit. So much for a little boy to keep track of, making sure he has the basket in one hand, and the ball in the other. No wonder he can’t think about what is going on around him. He carries a lot of weight, and at such a young age.

Not many people take notice of his careful steps or the fact that he isn’t engaging with the other children. Or maybe they are just too polite to mention it. He gets a few looks, and the parents shepherd their children around him, giving him a wide berth. I hover constantly, my hand outstretched to gently guide him. None of the other children have the issue with the grass, and so become bored with him and move on to interact with other peers. Even though this lawn is the same as every other lawn in our neighborhood, this lawn is different to him and he is out of sorts trying to find his footing. Today, that means that he is just absorbed in his own world, clinging to his comfort items, making his way one step at a time. On another day, he might have had a melt down. But thankfully not today, with so many people looking on.

And so while the other children run and play and laugh and interact and grab at eggs and fill their baskets, Movie Boy has got a death-grip on his basket, a familiar item he brought from home. He’s added this to his arsenal today -- he needs extra security in this strange place, more than the usual ball will provide.

He uses the basket as another comfort item; the idea that it holds things is distracting to him – I reach down and put an egg in his basket and he seems irritated but he moves on. He doesn’t model my egg-gathering action as I hoped he would. Filling the basket is not on his agenda. This does not motivate him or concern him. The promise of candy inside the eggs means nothing because he still struggles with concepts like cause and effect. When another adult shows him there is candy inside the eggs, he is too distracted by the grass and his footing to eat the candy. Adults want to help, but they, like the children, become bored when he doesn’t respond as expected. He never lights up like the other children do, realizing that if there is candy in this one egg, there must be candy in ALL the eggs. This is not in his thought process today.

So why is he here? And why is he doing this? To this day, I ask myself that question. He is so obviously uncomfortable. Maybe I should have kept him home that day. I can admit now, but probably would have denied then, that a big reason we were there was because I wanted him to experience this tradition. I used to go around including him in these things, hoping that something would “click” and he would just get it. You could say that this was more about me than him. But on the other hand, if you don’t expose a child to activities like this, how can he know whether or not he likes them? So, on that day, he went through the motions because I put him through the motions, but it is clear he is not getting the big picture of candy and Easter eggs and parties. At this point, he is just trying to navigate the smooth close-cropped grass. He endures it because he is 3-1/2, and he has to. At 3-1/2, he does not participate to try to make me happy. This concept has not occurred to him yet either. That will come later.

But I do see a glimmer in his eye. I can see that even though he is uncomfortable, that one day, he might become used to the grass and the strange people and the odd plastic eggs with the candy, and then he might put the basket down and have a hand free to participate.

Today, I can look back and realize that if you were to measure his success in how many eggs he collected that day, you would show a dismal result. But if you measured his success in his mastery of that grass, and the fact that the next year when we attended a similar egg hunt he was much more at ease, then you could call his day a success.

It’s just a matter of perspective, really. When you have a child with autism, you have to walk a fine line between pushing them a little out of their comfort zone so they can learn to move in this big scary world of ours, without pushing on them your ideas of what they should want to do.

That morning, my beautiful little three-year-old boy looked up at me, with his big blue eyes, and without words could not tell me what he needed or what he wanted. He couldn’t say he wanted to go, or that he didn’t want to go. He couldn’t even tell me he was thirsty. But I was in the habit of keeping a full sippy cup around at all times and offered it often. When a need or want can’t be communicated, you have to make your best shot at anticipating the need and hope for the best. What else can you do?

These days, he’s 12 years old. And an old pro at Easter egg hunts, by the way. I wish our challenges these days were as simple as Easter egg hunts and overcoming the fear of unknown yards of grass. Today he is finding his footing not on neighbors' lawns but in the big, sophisticated world of middle school. He doesn’t carry his ball anymore, but he does carry more weight on his shoulders than most 12-year-olds ever will. Those early years, him developing those coping mechanisms and finding his way out of himself, and me learning his non-verbal and now verbal cues, and anticipating his needs when he couldn’t tell me, have gone a long way to help us both get through this phase of life. I have grown a lot since then, too. I have a better concept of what makes him happy, and try very hard not to impose my dreams and experiences on him. I know that seemingly unsuccessful days are sometimes the groundwork we need for successful days later. And I remind myself, that I may have to look at his progress from a different angle to see the success of his path. But that is okay.

I started my day off on Tuesday by reading Lisa Belkin's reflections on what she's learned in the eighteen years of parenting since her son's birth. I thought, "Wow, that was lovely and touching and resonated with me in so many ways, I can't wait to share it. But... There's this one thing she just got so wrong."

A few weeks ago, I read Karen Maezen Miller's Momma Zen and I thought, "Wow, that was lovely and touching and resonated with me in so many ways, I can't wait to share it. But... There's this one thing she just got so wrong."

That wrong I was thinking about were their comments on feeding their children. Karen writes, "Left to their own impulses, children will certainly put food in its proper place." And Lisa echoes, in her own way, "An otherwise healthy child, if food is made available, will not starve to death — so chill."  Of course, what they got "wrong" wasn't really about food.  It was the same thing that all parents get wrong in my book: having a different experience with their kids than I had with mine.  (How dare they!)

Like so many other parents, they have expended their share of parenting energy and stress upon feeding, only to find it was natural for their children to eat when hungry, something that can seem like a remarkable surprise when one is caught up in the heat of battles over food. So, they share their experiences, and offer comfort to the new parent still struggling, and in the process, thousands of parents of typically developing children breathe a sigh of relief and let their shoulders drop away from their ears. It's easy! There are things that children learn naturally. We don't have to teach children to eat or walk or talk. They can figure it out if we just relax and let them.

And in a way this isn't wrong at all.  I witness this miracle every day in my daughter: the naturalness of eating, the naturalness of hunger and an urge for survival that overrides the most stubborn urge for Cheetos or ice cream. When faced with an empty stomach, she eats. She eats what she's comfortable with, and what she's comfortable with is most things. She trusts food. She trusts her body. I didn't have to teach her that. (Which is good, because I'm the one teaching by example about gluttonous consumption of sweets.) But it does seem to be a miracle, just like the fact that she was born with all her limbs and all her organs, with everything in place and working at a balanced norm. It's the kind miracle I've taken for granted at times, but still a miracle.

But I also witness -- daily -- a different kind of child entirely: one for whom those same natural things, like eating and talking, didn't come so easily.  As an infant, and even now, Austen was, by most measures, in excellent physical health.  He has all his limbs and organs, and they're all in perfect working order.  He's always been tall for his age, and an ideal weight for his height.  He sat up and rolled over and walked in perfect sync with his typically developing peers.

Eventually a speech delay that would signal to our pediatrician that all was not typical in the workings of one organ -- his brain -- but even before children are supposed to be able to speak, they are supposed to be able to eat.  Pictures abound of delighted babies digging into their first birthday cakes.  But we don't have one of Austen, who by age one was already refusing new foods.  His relationship with food, his willingness to literally starve himself rather than eat or drink a food that was new or was presented in an unexpected manner, was the first clue we had that his brain worked differently.  And in the end, it was the fact that he was his limited diet and obsessive rigidity around food -- not his delays in speaking or interacting with his peers -- that snapped me out of my denial and convinced me that Austen was autistic.

When Lisa and Karen share their experiences, their words are a relief to thousands of parents.  But to thousands like me, they can feel like an indictment when the words are turned on their head by a pediatrician or a school psychologist or another well meaning mom who clings to the belief that it's so natural for all children to eat that symptoms of eating disorders are seen not as a sign that eating does not come naturally to this particular child, but as a sign that you as a parent are overreacting or doing something wrong to interfere with the child's eating.  So, I share my story (over and over again) to bring relief to a whole different set of parents, the ones who know that eating and walking and talking don't come quite so effortlessly to all children, the ones who know that sometimes they don't come at all.

To those parents still struggling with mealtime, I leave you with something else from Lisa's article: "When your gut tells you they are sick, or something’s wrong, they are and it is."  We may not have had the same experiences feeding our children, but on trusting our own knowledge of our kids, I'm with both Lisa and Karen, start to finish.

I have a secret. I have been grieving over my children since, at times, before they were even born. Now that's not the way it's supposed to be, is it? I'm a mama, and mamas are supposed to be joy and love and acceptance for our whole lives long, from the moment of conception onward. At least, good mamas are. If we have expectations that aren't met, we're supposed to toss them out for all we do have, without a hint of regret; we're not to pack them away gently in the box with the baby clothes, stored in the attic because we can't quite bear to part with them yet.

My lowest moments in parenting -- the ones I want to stuff away in shame and never let my children or the world see -- are the ones where I couldn't accept that my children were themselves rather than my vision of them. They're the times I grieve the loss of what never was, and now go on to grieve the grieving.

My son Austen was only a few weeks old when I held the Worst Mother in History awards ceremony and handed myself the trophy. The qualifying event took place around 2 or 3 a.m. when my son was just a few weeks old. (No one else made it to the ceremony at that hour, but that was ok; I had no competition -- I never do -- since I am always running against myself, beating my previous lows. Those imagined, perfect other moms don't get to run.) Unlike other babies -- the TV babies, the parenting book babies, the babies with good moms who did things right -- my son wouldn't sleep anywhere but in my bed next to my body, which my (ex) pediatrician said was BAD and DANGEROUS.

So, on the night of my first worst moment as a parent, I nursed him for what felt like the two hundredth time and gently placed him in his bassinet for the two hundredth time, only to have him scream like the fuzzy warm blankets were full of blood-burning fire scorpions, the same way he had every single time I'd tried this for the twenty or thirty nights in a row. And that scream broke me. Bone tired and viciously angry, I picked him up roughly, looked him straight in his tiny screaming face and whispered, with venom and hatred in my voice, "You are a bad baby!" Oh. My. God. What was I saying? Was I insane? I was berating a tiny baby for... Being a baby. I broke down crying in exhaustion and shame, took him into the BAD, DANGEROUS bed, and was silently grateful that he was too tiny to see that I had been disappointed in him. Already. At a few weeks old.

When Austen was a year old, we went to a mama and baby music class. Now that's the kind of thing good mamas do, right? There I was, enriching my child's mind already at one. But he was having none of it. A class full of toddlers is never a model of disciplined attention, but even here I could see he was... different. He didn't have any interest in the bright, perky teacher or the other kids or even the musical instruments, which used to make him flinch and frown. He'd wander away from the circle where everyone else was engaged and stand staring out the window. I'd try to coax him back, thinking, "Why can't you be like the others? What am I doing wrong?" I was so traumatized by the feeling of something off, that we didn't sign up for another session.

A year later, when he still wasn't speaking and psychologists and therapists were starting, amidst a battery of tests, to whisper the word "autism," we tried a Gymboree class. "He needs to work on socializing with other children," they said. Again, there were all the other kids, enraptured at story time, while my son crawled through the same tunnel over and over and over again, alone. I'd get in the car, strap him into his car seat and sob quietly over the steering wheel, not wanting him to see that he'd disappointed me again before he'd even reached the age of three. And again, when the session ended, I couldn't bear to go back, but by that time it was clear he needed more than a Gymboree class anyway.

It was around this time that I found out I was pregnant with my daughter Janie. I was a little late and had been feeling a little queasy, so I took a home pregnancy test. My husband and I wanted a second child, eventually, but right then we were completely overwhelmed by Austen's needs. We weren't planning a pregnancy and had been using birth control. I took the test: thinking it would set my mind at ease, but fearing it would not. When that second line came up to indicate I was pregnant I sobbed, big heaving sobs of sorrow, the kind a mama is never supposed to sob when she finds out she's carrying the precious little life she's going to love and cherish. Already, before she was born, Janie disappointed me. Just by being. Being at the wrong time. I didn't feel worthy to be her mother.

I love Austen. He brings a richness and beauty to my life that wouldn't have been there if he had been the child I expected. So I don't want to admit that there was ever even a moment when I didn't love and cherish him exactly as he was, when I wanted something different, when I wanted him without the autism and his sensory issues I hadn't planned or expected. I love Janie. She's brought joy to my life that I couldn't have imagined. So I don't want to admit there was ever even a moment when I didn't want her at all or at least not when she happened to come. I don't want to admit that I had to grieve Austen's autism or grieve Janie's conception before I could arrive at the love and acceptance mamas are supposed to give as naturally as breathing. Yet I did. Shh! Don't tell anyone.

Just before my son Austen was born, Mark and I bought a video camera, so that we could document each special moment of his new life. Of course, the milestones, like Austen, were quirky: giving his earliest smiles to a beloved bottle of hand lotion, refusing to eat his first (or any subsequent) birthday cake, typing words on the computer before he could say them, lining up dozens of Matchbox cars and counting them, writing math problems on his MagnaDoodle. There are hours and hours of videos ranging from delightful to dull, but there is one video, taken back in 2003, that is so painful just to think about that I fear ever watching it.

I was immensely pregnant with my daughter around the time the video was taken. My husband had lost his job and we had no income. I (being immensely pregnant) couldn't start looking for work right then and my husband was having a hard time finding work. We burned through the savings we had set aside for just such an emergency, and started living on credit (which was the beginning of our financial end and created problems that last to this day). My son was two-and-a-half and not yet speaking. We had just completed an emotionally exhausting series of evaluations that would eventually lead to a diagnosis of autism, but at that time, we simply knew that he showed significant enough developmental delays to qualify for early intervention services. And then, in the midst of all this, I discovered my husband was a sex addict and had been unfaithful to me both during and prior to our marriage.

I don't really remember -- don't want to remember -- how I got through that time. I know I stayed up nights crying and didn't get much sleep. I know that Mark got a job not long after his disclosure and that days were long and hard and lonely at home with Austen. (Of course, I think days would have been long and hard and lonely with Mark there too.)

One evening, at the end of another of those draining, painful days, Austen started crying in little fits that would come and go. I couldn't quite tell if he was tired or sick or in pain, and he couldn't tell me. It seemed as if his diaper was uncomfortable, but when I checked it, it was clean and dry. I didn't know what was wrong, if anything. But I knew that he was not happy, and that his unhappiness was wearing away at the gossamer thin strands that were holding my life together. At one point, he began crying in earnest: clinging to my leg, wanting me -- for what seemed like the hundredth time that day -- to pick him up and comfort him. And I couldn't. I was exhausted and frustrated, horribly anguished and hugely pregnant, and I just couldn't pick him up and hold him. So, he pulled on my leg and screamed and screamed as I looked down at him and cried and cried.

I felt that Death was looming near me, that I really would not live through this. So, I picked up our video camera, which was sitting on a shelf within reach, and I aimed it down at Austen's red, wailing face, as he stomped and thrashed, still clinging to my leg. And I said, over and over, between my own sobs, "This is not my life. This is not my life. This is not my life." It wasn't. This was not the way things were supposed to be. I wasn't supposed to have a husband who cheated on me and a marriage that was falling apart. I wasn't supposed to be powerless to help or comfort my child.

So, the tape rolled on the two of us sobbing, one on camera and one off. I thought when I died -- as I surely would -- that video would be the note I left behind in my despair. But I didn't die. I kept breathing. I cried myself out. I eventually put down the camera, scooped up Austen and took him to the pediatrician, who diagnosed him with a hernia and sent us off to the emergency room to see a surgeon. Mark met us there and sat down next to me on one of the hard plastic chairs in the waiting room. I let my head fall onto his shoulder and hid my eyes in his shirt as he held Austen on his lap and we waited.

My friend Mama over at The Elmo Wallpaper wrote a post a while back about the feeling that she is holding her breath waiting for the MMR shot to be over and for everything to be ok. I remember that same feeling. I had seen the scary stories and videos on daytime talk shows about children who were "normal" (whatever that means, right?) and happy one day, and then just disappeared into autism after receiving their MMR vaccine. I remember waiting in the days and weeks after that vaccine, watching my son to make sure he wasn't suddenly showing signs of autism.

Eventually, I breathed a sigh of relief and forgot about it, because there was no change at all after the vaccine. My son was still smiling and loving, like autistic people clearly weren't. My son was not autistic. When professionals started suggesting my son was autistic, I thought, "Well, that can't be right. He's happy. He's loving. He's engaged in the world around him." Autistic people never smile and don't get enjoyment from anything. I've seen the videos! Happy, smiling, engaged baby=normal. Unhappy, tantruming, oblivious baby=autistic.

You are all encouraged to laugh now, both at the irony of me looking for signs of change that would indicate that an autistic child had come down with autism and at my ignorance of what autism really means. It makes me laugh big loud belly laughs every time I think of it.

And it does, I'll admit, leave me wondering about those children who "disappear." My son, like all children, has changed as he has grown, but he's never shifted in an unrecognizable way; he has simply, gradually, become more himself. That means I have had a different experience, and a (what?) friendlier, I suppose you'd say, relationship with autism, than parents who have seen a radical change. Autism has never been an enemy, some interloper who stole away the child I love; it's an inseparable part of the child I love, and it always has been.

I wonder, as I look back through the lens of my own experience, if those children show signs that are hard to detect: perhaps even harder to spot than the things I detected in retrospect. Or if they really were like my daughter, who has led me to exclaim almost constantly from the moment she was born, "Ah, this is what most people's experience with children is like!" In particular, I'm thinking of two articles I read at DrGreene.com: one on lack of early childhood gestures, such as pointing, in children with autism and the other on how children with Asperger's align their heads relative to their bodies as babies. In addition, the eye movements of autistic babies and toddlers show they look at faces differently, and the degree to which they do this can indicate the severity of their disability. We all notice if our children are walking and talking on time, but I know I had to go back and try to reconstruct what age my son first pointed (definitely not before age one) after I read articles like these, and I have to admit I have no idea what he would have done as a baby if I had tilted his body at a 45 degree angle and I don't really know what his eye movements looked like. Are there more subtle signs that we parents pick up on, or don't?

I've never had a worry in the world about my daughter's development, in spite of the fact that she had a mild speech delay of her own. Was I picking up on subtle signs? Or was I just reassured by the lack of all the (retrospectively) obvious ones my son showed? I don't know. But I'm grateful to have two kids who are both wholly themselves and always have been.

"Are you ok, buddy?" I asked.

He frowned at me, eyebrows lowered, held his hand out as if he were pushing me away and grunted, "MMmmhh!" and tried to limp away. Drat, that's right. He doesn't like acknowledging pain or negative emotions.

"Do you want to go home, buddy?" No answer, just a little boy half hopping, half limping away, crying.

I stood there in the cold park, wondering how badly his knee was hurt. It looked like a painful fall; he was crying; he wasn't putting much, if any, weight on it. I wanted to ask him a million more questions. I wanted him to tell me if he could bend the knee, and I wanted him to rate the pain on a scale of 1 to 10, and I wanted him to confirm that it was the knee and not the ankle, which looked like it might have been twisted too. And I wanted to ask him if I could get a look at it.

Then I thought of some of the autistic adults whose blogs I read: folks like Bev and Joel. I thought about how often they have written about how there are times when they can't speak, and I thought about how this was one of those times for my son. His knee still hurts, he can't talk yet, and talking to him will only overwhelm him. It's not an emergency. I can wait.

I stopped walking and stopped talking. I waited. Then I walked slowly up to him and pressed his left ear firmly to my body, covering his right ear with my hand. When he's upset, he likes pressure on his head. I stood there, silently holding his head, wondering if his knee was ok, waiting.

I stood there pressing his head to my body. I waited. His sister flitted past. She removed her jacket even though an icy wind was blowing, took off her gloves and put them in my purse, handed me her hat and ran off. She flitted back, teeth chattering. I helped her back into her winter wear with my spare hand. She flitted off again. I waited. I stood in the near empty park, watching my daughter run around, holding my son's head.

I released a little of the pressure on his head and moved my body away slightly. He clutched my skirt. I renewed the pressure. I waited. My daughter flitted back. "Are you ready to go home?" I asked. "No," they answered together. Ah, the power of speech had returned, at least for that one word. My son tried walking, but he was leaning on me with his feet at odd angles, so I called an end to time at the park, much to my son's clear, if non-verbal, displeasure. Speech finally returned at home, sitting down, after a comforting cup of milk.

I'm happy to report that the knee, while it looks bruised, seems otherwise ok, and he's definitely able to run on it again now. And to all the autistic adults out there who help me see things differently, a big thanks for getting all of us as smoothly as possible through our minor crisis at the park.

Here's the thing about autism, it appears on a spectrum. Every autistic child (heck, every child, lest we forget) is different, and autism presented itself differently in each and every one. The sensational news stories that people have seen on TV linking vaccines to autism show just one of the many ways autism presents itself. The stories generally show pictures and videos of a baby or toddler who is smiling, talking and interacting. Then we are told that days or weeks after receiving the MMR vaccine, this child became completely non-verbal and ceased to interact with others. The child suddenly became autistic and the parents blamed the vaccine. Now who knows, if my child changed dramatically one day, I might blame a vaccine too, but my child (and many, many others like him) didn't.

Before my son was born, he reacted so powerfully to sounds that I used to joke that he was going to be a musician. Whenever we were exposed to loud noises (most often music), I'd be treated to a series of violent, jerky movements as he twitched and thrashed in utero. He was hypersensitive to sound. It was strangely different from my daughter's serene rolling kicks, and her obliviousness to the same external noises that made her brother dance madly inside me.

When my son was born, he cried, constantly. Nothing comforted him except breastfeeding, which I did almost non-stop, day and night, for months. The very first night he was born, I lied to the nurses at the hospital about how much time I spent holding him and nursing him, because when I told the truth they told me he didn't need that much, but if I stopped, he'd cry in these high-pitched piercing wails, like he had flames licking at his body, like needles were piercing his flesh. It didn't help to hold him or sing to him or rock him.

I came to feel like a shell shocked war veteran, cringing and screaming at cars backfiring or news helicopters passing overhead. I felt like I was living with a fire siren wired to a time bomb. He could go off at any time, with those horrible, inhuman screams. I didn't leave the house with him until he was three months old. When my daughter was born, I thought, "Oh, so this is what babies are supposed to be like! This is why people like and get nostalgic for infants." She cried normal baby cries; cries that said, "Hey, Mama, it's time for more milk" not the soul splitting "Mama, please, please help me! Help me! Help me, Mama, please!" that I heard in my son's cries, day and night for nearly all of the first year of his life.

When my son was about six or seven months old, I went to the hair dresser and overheard another woman there talking about her daughter, who was just about my son's age. She talked about how cute it was when her daughter waved bye-bye. "That's funny," I thought, "my son's never done that. Oh, well. Girls are more social than boys. I wonder when he'll start." He didn't start waving until he was nearly a year and a half, and when he did, he would hold his hand with the palm facing his own face, as if he were waving at himself. (It was ridiculously cute.)

Before he was one year old, he stopped eating anything new. He wouldn't even try the birthday cake I made him, and his tastes remain timelessly stuck back there at the beginning of toddlerhood, even today.

When he was two years old, he wasn't speaking yet, not really. He would repeat back things that were said to him or parrot things he heard from books, but he wasn't forming independent sentences. And he couldn't articulate most sounds, so what he was saying was comprehensible only to us and only because we knew he was repeating something he had heard. However, he could read and type words on the computer and count to a thousand. I remember the first time he counted out loud, sitting on the floor one day, lining up Matchbox cars and saying, "uh, ka, uh, ba, ka..." (counting aloud "one, two, three, four, five..." of course) all the way up into the thirties, the total number of Matchbox cars we had back then. I was so incredibly proud of how smart he was; I videotaped him doing it.

Of course, I didn't think he was autistic back then. I thought autism meant that he couldn't be loving (which he is), that he wouldn't smile or interact (which he does), that he would bang his head or harm himself (which he doesn't). At the time, I thought he had a speech delay and was, like me, a shy, picky eater who was sensitive to sounds. Over time, I came to realize and accept that the particular collection of quirks I saw in my son did go by the name of autism. Looking back, the signs were there all along, he's been different from my daughter, different from the other babies I've known, different from the peers I see him with, from the time I felt his first movements, from the day he was born, from long before a vaccine entered his system. My son is autistic, and he was born that way.

As time went on, they seemed to be able to hold things in their mind longer. The bottle of red pepper flakes would disappear behind my back and they'd continue to look for it and start to wail. But then I'd hold out a spoon and watch their little brain shift gears: "Ooo, look! Something shiny!" Of course, eventually that didn't work either; the new object I was offering up had to be more attractive than the forbidden object, which is difficult, because there is essentially nothing that is more attractive than a forbidden object. That was when the wailing began in earnest.

Fortunately, most children quickly get bored with wailing for what they can't have and settle for something else. My son is not one of those children. He perseverates. He continues on, unwavering, even in the face of both repeated disappointment and distracting rewards.

I know a mom who, when she is in doubt, uses what she calls "The Cookie Test" to determine how genuinely determined and distressed a child is. For example, a child falls off a bicycle and starts screaming in pain and fear. Does the child actually need to go to the emergency room or is it more shock than pain that is causing the uproar? She will offer the child a cookie. If the child calms down and accepts the cookie, all is probably well. If the child continues wailing even in the face of a special treat, further monitoring is warranted. A child who is perseverating (or seriously injured) will fail the Cookie Test.

A week ago, my son wanted "squares." He could not communicate what he wanted more clearly than that, so we played 10,000 questions to try to figure out what "squares" meant. Was it a checker board? Tetris? Blokus? Tangrams? No, no, no and NO! I was stumped. I told him we'd have to do something else, but all attempts at distraction failed. I offered my own version of the Cookie Test: video game time. No, he wanted "squares." I offered the Chocolate Cake With Ice Cream Test: a brand new game. Nope, "squares." So, I let him scream, and ask me over and over for "squares" while I told him over and over I couldn't figure it out. And I waited with him for one of us to have a breakthrough.

When he finally screamed himself out after an hour and a half, he was able to tell me that "squares" was "a new game" he had invented: "And it's on a green game board. And the board has 600 squares and 22 sides and 500 pieces. And the pieces are blue and red and you have to put them down diagonal and get 6 in a row to win." Then he told me we'd play it tomorrow and took me up on that video game time. Whew! What happened to the days when I could wave a spoon at him and get him to change tracks?

It saddens me that he gets so painfully frustrated, that he can't let go, that we can't have our cookie and move on. But I love that he is brilliant, that he is persisting and trying and creating and sharing. And after all, who am I to talk? Haven't I been known to perseverate myself at times? Haven't most of us who have moved beyond the stage of being distracted by shiny spoons?

1) What unexpected emotions have come from being married to someone of a different race and raising mixed-race children?

When my husband and I became engaged, neither his family nor mine were happy about it. My father said it exactly that way, "I'm not happy about this." He and my mother seemed disappointed that, with all the wide world of white boys available to me, I had to choose someone black. It's not that they disliked Mark in particular or black people in general. They were born and came of age in the era of segregation, they witnessed the ugly struggle for civil rights, they saw how white people talked about and treated black people and how black people hated back.

The way they saw it, I was safe, I was lucky. I was born with lily white skin, blond hair and blue eyes, like a little Aryan princess. I could marry a nice white man and have nice white children, and as part of the majority, the dominant race and culture, no one would ever discriminate against me or my children. By marrying a black man, I was as good as changing races, declaring that I wanted to be black, and who would willingly accept the curse of discrimination and hatred that went with that? White people would hate me for marrying someone black, black people would hate me for marrying someone black. No one would ever sell me a house. I'd never get a good table at a restaurant. My kids would be freaks and outcasts, never accepted by either race. Or we might even end up in physical danger, with angry mobs throwing bricks through the window of the only hovel that would rent to an interracial couple.

Their fear became my fear, but I was willing to brave whatever came because I love Mark so truly and so deeply. I knew my life would be so much richer for having him in it, that it would be worth every loss I could conceive.

The surprising part has been that it hasn't mattered much at all. I can think of odd looks we've gotten from time to time, but I can't think of any outright discrimination at all, none, in the 17 years since we became friends and lovers. Maybe there has been some, but if I haven't noticed it, it certainly hasn't been up to my parents' dire predictions. We own a home. We don't have a problem in stores or restaurants. People are friendly to us. Our kids play with other kids.

I've been surprised by how comfortable and normal I feel. I've been surprised by how good and kind most of the world's population actually is. I've been surprised that my view of the world was so distorted by a small minority of crazy, hateful people. For the most part, I've been surprised by the good emotions: how happy I am, how safe I feel, how much I love my neighbors.

The one surprisingly negative emotion has come from the use of the word "black" to describe people of mixed race. It completely pisses me off to hear: "Barack Obama could be the first black president of the US... Halle Berry is the first black woman to win an Oscar..." Did you see Halle Berry's mother sitting there weeping and clapping at the Academy Award ceremony? Um, white as I am. And Barack Obama's mother? White girl from Kansas. If you were to test my kids' DNA, I guarantee you that, given their descent from slaves, they would be more white than black. Yet, just like in slave times when one drop of black blood meant you were black, they are black, totally divorced in a single word from all that I contributed to their being.

I once got into a fight with (no surprise) someone in our school district due to a state law that says black children can not be given tests for the purpose of placing them in special ed classes. This law is meant to keep districts from, as they did in the immediate wake of desegregation, re-segregating black children by giving biased tests and having them placed in special ed. As my son, Mark and I walked into a room where my son was to participate in a test to measure his language delays, the psychologist took one look at the three of us and said, "Oh, I can't give him this test, he's black." And I replied, very irritated, "Um, he's also white." After assuring her that we wouldn't sue her if she gave the test, but would if she didn't, (have to love the American legal system) she reluctantly consented, although she still clearly thought she was participating in something illegal.

In some ways, people are (beautifully and miraculously) much more ready to look at us in a new way than I thought they would be. In other ways, people are holding on to old concepts about race with surprising (and irritating) tenacity.