Too Big For Words: Autism, Fear, Faith
November 2, 2006 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
A sick child; “the perfect wonder of her baby …. undone, somehow”: This is, writes Janet Grillo, mother of an eleven-year-old autistic son, “what every new mother fears” in today’s Huffington Post. Grillo, who is on the board of Cure Autism Now, writes of how her then two-year-old son drifted away:
As if by helium, he lifted away from us, from our family, from our world and inwards towards a remote and private one. The doctors called it Autism. I did not know what to call it. I still don’t. It is too big for words to organize.
And in the face of this “too big” entity, and in the face of her fear, Grillo writes about how she turned to faith and here her article veers away from it was about at the outset, “what every new mother fears.” Grillo’s train of thought and her language break down here as she writes of how faith, fear, and love all became intertwined for her as she sought to help her son.
Faith is what taught me that what I want is not necessarily what is need, that love is not what I prefer but what it required, that rising to the challenge of what is required enlarges the heart and fills it with more love than I ever knew was possible. That love is the fuel of faith, that by loving my son as he was in our struggle to restore what was not, faith found me. Faith found me through the urgency of living. Fear had to wait.
I mean it as a compliment that Grillo’s writing “breaks down” in this final paragraph of her article, which when I first read it, seemed to be saying, quite directly, that a sickness, a disease, like autism is “what every mother fears.” Grillo is striving to articulate what it can feel like to be an autism mother, trying to do the best for her child, and never sure (it seems) if she has. Though I would say that, it is not “autism” that is “too big for words to organize” for me (nor is it something to be cured). Rather is it my love—my husband Jim’s and my love for Charlie that is too big for any words, and the faith and hope that our life with him always inspires.
Go here to read What is it Every New Mother Fears?.
Kristina:
My name is Dan Feshbach and I am the father of a 13 teenage boy with autism.
After spending many frustrating years watching my son fall further and further behind in his language and struggle to communicate with family and friends, I decided to leverage my background as a software entrepreneur to find a way to help him. So in 2000 I teamed up with a psychology professor at University of CA at Santa Cruz to create a learning language software company called Animated Speech. (www.animatedspeech.com).
The research based software products we have developed all have one goal: to help autistic children improve their communication and more fully engage with the world around them.
Please help us accomplish this goal by placing the following copy and link on your website:
Enhance your child’s speech therapy with fun, engaging software.
Based on research in education, linguistics, and psychology, Timo software products have been proven extremely effective for autistic children in both schools and family settings. To learn more please visit us at: http://www.animatedspeech.com/micro/main.html
Of course, we would like to reciprocate by placing a link on our website that leads to yours. Simply reply to this email with the url you’d like us to feature. If you are interested I can send you product samples as well.
Thank you for including our link on your website. By doing so, you are providing a valuable option for parents, family and educators and therapists who are looking for way to help a child in their life who has autism.
-Dan
More About Our Language Learning Software:
Based on the combined expertise of speech therapists, special educators, and academics, Team Up with Timo products are a series of three researched-based language intervention programs, each tailored to a different learning challenge:
Team Up With Timo: Vocabulary —Designed to help children in K-4th grade learn new words and concepts. Focuses on identification, speech reading and spelling skills.
Team Up With Timo: Stories — Teaches narrative language skills and story comprehension through storytelling and skilled based games.
Team Up With Timo: Lesson Creator — Makes it easy to create personalized, engaging and effective multimedia vocabulary lessons. Can be customized with 3,5000 Mayer Johnson picture symbols or any digital image.
The secret to the success of the Team Up with Timo products is the animated character Timo, who interacts with a child throughout the lesson and provides a supportive, fun, and a motivating environment. Children rely on both auditory and visual cues to learn new language, so the talking Timo character is extremely effective in helping children with autism develop their vocabulary, listening comprehension, language, and story sequencing and retelling skills. To learn more, visit http://www.animatedspeech.com