The words you read above were written three years ago. Today I can say that we discovered that the mutual support and acceptance of the faith community was and is of great importance, the union, the optimism and the mutual hope feeds the spirit and the soul. They were and still are an amazing source of strength.
I don’t know what would have happened if we were alone, isolated, with no support. We thought we were in a tunnel of the unknown flooded by emotions.
Faith became our anchor, our strength, our compass with a defined objective that leads us to defend our child’s rights with all our might, to improve his quality of life and our family’s as a whole. Our little boy with autism and our faith, without intent, became our north, our compass of steel, to sail in this open sea called life.
Maria Theresa Abinader is a parent, member of the New Jersey Council on Developmental Disabilities, cultural advocate and broker, and founder of a Spanish website on autism: www.manitasporautismo.com.
“Faith became our anchor, our strength, our compass with a defined objective that leads us to defend our child’s rights with all our might, to improve his quality of life and our family’s as a whole.”
Anonymous Although the teachers are not trained in autism, one of the reasons our son with Asperger syndrome has been able to participate in Sunday school with some success is because two of the three teachers are family friends. They know our son well and know to find me if he is having an “autism moment.” One day when our son was upset, the teacher came down to find me in the Sanctuary. Of course, I could hear him well before they found me so I left the Sanctuary to see what was going on. My son was upset because someone had “laughed at him.” He was loud and wanted to get “revenge.” You can imagine the scene. A mom and 9-year-old boy are in the hallways of church and he is steaming mad and has no clue what he is saying, how he is saying it or where he is saying it. I was quietly talking to him and felt confident that he would settle down quickly. However, someone from church came by and decided to intervene. Rather than speak to me, he spoke to my son and reprimanded him for shouting “in God’s house.” I know the man was well-intended, but he was not helpful. It may have been helpful to ask me if everything was okay, but to bypass me and address the child without any idea of what was going on can really escalate an “autism moment.” On top of trying to settle my son, I then had to direct my attention to this man and try and get him to move on without making the matter worse.
The difficulty with autism is that many times people do not know that the child has it. This man didn’t read the situation as a mom talking to a child with a disability. All he saw was a young boy being disrespectful in church.
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A Journey Into Community
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