A letter to an Autist son

Your arrival was one of the happiest moments of my life, having you was one of my greatest yearnings. I can perfectly remember that love explosion (unique and different) I felt the first time I touched you, that same love grows with you every single day. When I feel my heart can’t grow anymore, you show me the opposite from a smile. Yes, because even when there is a whole list of things that supposedly you can’t do, nor you will ever do, sooner or later you tear down any scheme with your huge capabilities, throwing by land the sayings of those who don’t know you, who don’t love you, but who instead, just study and analyze your difference like something negative, like a problem.

I want you to know, that I accept you the way you are, I love you the way you are, I do not want to change you nor “normalize you”, I want your particularity in my life, it doesn’t matter what those people with many titles and degrees but not much humanity and opening to diversity says.

No matter how many times they repeat words such as: incapacity, limitation, disease, problem, and many others that mean people with Asperger Syndrome are sick and everyone else is not, I blindly believe in your magic. Rest assured, that I will do the impossible for your happiness, not for you to fit into a specific parameter, because I love you being distinct, everyone is different, I am and I will always be, so we are a nice blend, you are maybe the happy product of two “weirdos”, and I am happy for that, I wouldn’t ever change you.

I confess that, at the beginning I was afraid for you (people use to be cruel), but very especial people tend you their hands

By the way, I got to tell you it was not too long ago, the signs were not evident and we weren’t alarm, on the contrary, we still celebrate many of them.

I adore, for example, your sincerity, for me it is a fundamental virtue. We thought it was a thing related to your shyness, because we were shy as kids too. But today, looking back in the past, I see what must have been evident, but I always see it from love, it is your story and I am glad to be part of it. I think you’ll write it someday, and you’ll do it the best way possible, my little writer, my poet, my scientist, my great reader, my best gift over anything, no matter what.

The only thing I want now, as one of the most important missions of my life, is to make of this world a kinder place for you and for all of those who have been excluded because of their difference. I promise I will not put a grain, but a big bag of sand, to make it happen.

Every time someone tells you can’t, ask yourself who is that person to know what only God can.

Every time someone tells you about incapacity, think that the only incapacity is on heart, in the feelings of people, those are the only incapacities with no remedy, future or hope.

Every time someone tells that you are bad, understand that they fear everything which is not identical, a copycat of known, maybe because this remembers them what they could have been if they wouldn’t fit so well in the pattern of what is normal and socially accepted. Maybe your behavior remembers them, when they were kids, someone punished them for yelling what they believed, for being annoyed with the noise in a party, for staring the details of a flower, or running away when that pinching cheeks aunt came home.

We all did, and still do, all of that things, but only few are frowned, labeled, medicated, segregated and humiliated for it.

Yes, world is unfair, but above all, we are part of the change.

The more I read about Asperger Syndrome, I tend to believe that maybe I have it without knowing it, if so, maybe you inherited it from me? Or not? Does it really matter? Thanks God you are different! I am also, maybe even more, for good or not, we are a different kind of parents, with defects and virtues, with our rights and wrongs, but I want you to know, that you are what we needed and expected, we don’t need you to change nor adapt to a pattern, even less if its designed for those mischievous at heart.

Live, be happy above everything, and the world will know how far you will walk, the capacity that your big heart has and where you’ll legacy be.

Love you, mommy, dad (and your brother too)