Home from carpool, I pull the wet, clean clothes from our washer and toss them, with a shake, into the dryer.  I can hear Riley in the kitchen, her voice bright and morning-new, counting to Christmas.  “Just 18 more,” she says, with enthusiasm, but I push the button on the machine and lose the rest […]

We gather as family around the table to celebrate Josh’s birthday—Camille and Ray and Kevin and me with our kids, all following the hostess in the Japanese restaurant like ducks in a line, and I count the blessing.  In my heart, every meal is a eucharist. And when He had taken some bread and given thanks, He broke it […]

Gently, I lay a hand on Adam’s back, feeling the knobs of his spine, hard and round beneath my fingers.  Silently he watches as, with the other hand, I press a sticky note down on the desk in front of him. At the top, today’s date, scrawled quickly.  When matters; it anchors the whole thing. […]

In the hallway at our neurologist’s office, as Riley and I breeze along behind the medical assistant on the way to an exam room, I realize again how much my daughter has grown up. It’s a flaw of ours as parents, that while we encourage and facilitate growth in our children, we lack proficiency in […]

From upstairs, I hear Riley saying her goodbyes to the members of her online class one by one, and every time the sentence full, as if acknowledgement simply must not be halfway done. In our home, where Autism rises like a wall, interrupting and limiting relationships, we exchange words as valuable currency; we fight for […]

Mid-morning, and my friend and I wander to the table, navigating around stacks of books and piles of tools, cardboard boxes, the basket of beach towels that belongs in the linen closet. The innards of several rooms sit on my living room floor, as though we turned the walls inside out and shook loose the […]

In the middle of the morning, I step back from the window, from that view of heavy clouds and leaves dripping rain like a cleansing grief, and feeling my own vulnerability, I wander down the hall to my husband. I walk in the room and he turns and I step into his arms without saying […]

In the morning, while the coffee drips and darkens and I pour rich cream into the bottom of a mug, Riley stands on a chair, riffling the contents of a cabinet in search of a flower vase. Yesterday, she walked in after school with armfuls of Valentine’s Day love–flowers and balloons and chocolates, fresh with […]

“It’s Monday!” Riley says, with the day still so new that the morning light looks soft and tentative and the chill outside clouds the windows. My favorite backyard tree looks bony and bare, empty-handed and reaching like me, but Riley glows like a sun-drenched bloom, pink-cheeked from sleep, bright with anticipation. I look up at […]

I sit down at the table next to Adam, and he smiles, silently tender. Love, that’s the recognition I see softening his features. It flickers, this light that shatters darkness: You love me, and I adore you, and here we are, together. You wonder maybe how Adam’s heart could be so plain to me, but […]