ON THE SPECTRUM AND ON THE ROAD
“It is of course wonderful when children want to play a long time with sand, but I was concerned…”
The line above is from a preschool observation of my oldest daughter, Ariel, a few months before she was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. “So what?” I thought. “She likes sand.” Okay, she likes it a lot. But intense, all-consuming interests were nothing new to me. I’d had them my whole life. Two months later, I received the same diagnosis.
My husband, Matt, and our youngest daughter, Adelia, are neurotypical. Our family of four and our two dogs have spent the last year and a half engaged in my current and dreaming of doing exactly what Sal Paradise did. One of my favorite lines from the book is, “There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.” I love the feeling of spontaneity captured in this line, even though (and perhaps because) it’s so foreign to the way my brain works.
