It felt cloudy at times under our autism umbrella

Thinking back on the last year, I have been reflecting on how hard it was to fill out so many development boxes with no, how I felt defeated as a Mother and lingered in feelings that I somehow had failed my firstborn, beautiful baby boy. That under this new autism umbrella, we would be lost in the heavy rain of the neurotypical world’s expectations.

I was ashamed of all the things I didn’t know. Missing all the tools, I would later gain that we’re not given to me early on. I did not understand that our son was trying to communicate how his system processed input from the outside world in his way. I didn’t understand we needed to step away from the tips from parenting magazines, other parents’ advice and that the parenting books wouldn’t apply to us.

What I have learned is our autism umbrella protects us from the ordinary expectations of an outside world. We sit side by side under our umbrella and watch the rainfall around us. We splash our feet in the puddles with each learned skill, with loud and quiet celebration, we snuggle into our close world of watching, we write our own guide.

We have collected supporters under our autism umbrella of therapists, teachers, special needs parent friends, a family who have opened their hearts to learning as much as they can. We learned from others’ vocal stories and their experiences. We highlighted our successes with our own words as we hear the rain in the background.

We often close our autism umbrella and face the outside world. We have learned to shake off the rain, the standard expectations, and wrap ourselves in layers of extraordinary.

It has felt cloudy at times with loud thunderstorms of checklists, the lighting of swift lost skills, and flooding of overflowing emotions.

We not only use our umbrella as a shelter from the rain but a shield from the side glances and misunderstood looks.

At the start of this journey, I felt I was walking alone in heavy wet clothes carrying these expectations. I didn’t realize that we were given a shared autism umbrella to take, that we could hold our head high, we could smile as we played and splashed in the rain.

The cloud of feelings comes and goes, it will always be there. The rain of neurotypical expectations will pour down at times. This year has taught me even if you have to look for someone to hold your umbrella or rescue you from a flood of emotions it’s ok because the good thing about the weather is it has a guarantee that it will change if you give it time.