Rainbows & Rocks a.k.a. Life with Autism

When you have an autistic child you learn to time your excursions to the opposite of most people. You can say it is wrong that parents of autistic children feel the need to go out to parks and stores when the crowds are low, but I'm a realist and "awareness" just doesn't cut it when you have a child like mine.

So, when Paige was around three we went to the park right after a heavy thunderstorm. Most people had yet to venture forth and we had the place, though soggy, to ourselves. The park had a well manicured garden section, lined with a neatly trimmed rosebush hedge. Paige plopped herself down near a fountain and grabbed a pair of rocks that had caught her eye and started playing with them. It was quiet and peaceful. I looked up to see a full arch rainbow and tried to draw Paige away from her rocks. She could care less that the sky was shining like a Christmas tree. She was focused on the rocks and ignored the rainbow. She wasn't sucked into her world, mind you, she was more than willing to show me her rocks, but the beautiful trick of refracted light gracing the sky went ignored. You get used to that sort of thing as the parent of an autistic child, it's disappointing, but you move on. Only this time I heard a child's voice yelling, "Look Mommy a rainbow! Look Daddy! Look Billy! Look Sally a rainbow!" I turned to see we had been joined by a family and their youngest – around my child's age – was skipping about and shouting for all the world to see the rainbow my kid could care less about.

It was one of those depressing, soul wrenching moments that you have from time-to-time. Why couldn't my kid look at the rainbow and be excited? I could taste my resentment, burning and bitter, climbing up the back of my throat…until I heard the little boy screaming as if he was being tortured. Apparently in his excitement over the rainbow the little fellow had run headlong into the rosebush hedge. As his parents attempted to gently extract him, to a chorus of bloodcurdling screams, I looked down and Paige smiled at me, holding up her rocks.

Anger gone, I realized that life gives you rainbows and life gives you rocks…it's up to you to watch where the hell you are going.