Shutdown for Autism

I had never come across Autism until I met Lady W. I spent a while working for her family in 2007, and fell in love with the Jigsaw Fiend, her autistic firstborn. Since then, I’ve gone on to have two children, both of whom are a scream, as Lady W’s were. The Pocket Dictator is almost the same age now that Jigsaw fiend was when I first met him, and so different. She babbles away incessantly, ordering us around and asserting her independence all the time. She’s also potty training with the usual one-step-forwards-two-steps-back approach that every parent (though not the sainted She Who Must Not Be Mentioned) says “is to be expected”. It really brings home the difference that having an Autistic child can make to your life.

Lady W now lives with her expanded brood in the depths of the West Country and spends her days kitesurfing, child-wrangling and chairing Making Waves for Autism. When she’s not doing all that (and she has twice the number of dogs that we do, so I’m tempted to start calling her Mad Lady W) she and her husband are training to kitesurf across greenland next year. I told you she was mad. She’s certainly mad about her kids, her Jigsaw Fiend and Autism, to want to do a thing like that. But she can, and is, and is using all the Social Media outlets to raise funds for the challenge and to campaign and make people more aware of the impact that Autism has.

Because Social Communication is one of the greatest challenges faced by those with autism, and those looking after them, I have signed up to Communication Shutdown. I can surely last one day without blogging, Tweeting or Facebooking, because I have a daughter who will laugh when I laugh at something funny, give me a hug when I am sad, tell me what’s wrong when she wakes at 3am crying, and throw her arms around my legs (usually whilst I am doing something with sharp knives or boiling liquids) and tell me she loves me. And when I kiss her at night and tell her how much I love her, she understands what I am telling her.

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