What I Learned from reading Charlotte Moore’s ‘George and Sam’

Sleep is a problem for many autistic children—or rather, it’s a problem for their parents, since the children don’t seem to care. (p. 218)

This sentence from “Did You Sleep Well, Dear?”, chapter 14 of Charlotte Moore’s George and Sam: Two Boys, One Family, and Autism, contains the essence of the book and of its author/autism mother’s outlook: Moore refers to a not uncommon aspect of life with an autistic child (difficulties going to sleep) in her tone of gentle irony laced with let’s-get-down-to-the-real-story honesty; she makes it clear that life with autism is not exactly easy, while showing acceptance and regard for the different ways of her two autistic sons, George and Sam.

All of these add up to a book that, while first and foremost a memoir, is also in essence a thorough handbook of the full spectrum of “Autismland 101″ topics: genetics (ch. 1, “Does It Run in the Family?”); language and communication difficulties (ch. 3, “Please Replace the Handset and Try Again”); diagnosis (ch. 5 and ch. 6, “Diagnosis” and “Our Path to Diagnosis”); “cure” and “recovery” from autism (ch. 7, “Is There a Cure?”); psychology and psychoanalysis and the history of autism (ch. 9, “Off the Couch”); safety and running away (ch. 10, “Mild Peril”); obsessions and scripting (ch. 11, “Blackberries and Tumble Dryers”); food and eating issues (ch. 12, “Ketchup with Everything”); education and inclusion (ch. 13, “Education, Education, Education”); sleep problems (ch. 14, “Did You Sleep Well, Dear?”); daily life (ch. 14, “What Do They Do All Day?”); holidays (ch. 16, “God and the Tooth Fairy”); acceptance (ch. 18, “Compensations”); growing up and adulthood (ch. 19, “What Next?”).

Moore’s writing in George and Sam strikes a fine balance of relentless honesty about life with autism that is constantly tinged with laugh-till-you-cry tinged humor.

Have I made life in an autistic family sound like hell? That hasn’t been my intention. There are moments of extreme stress, but isn’t that the case in most families?…..

Perhaps this life would be hellish if I riled against it. Hell—my definition, anyway—is a place where you don’t want to be, and from which you can’t get out. When you have autistic children, there is no respite, either for them or for you………. I’ve long settled into a fairly calm acceptance. They [George and Sam] are what they are. That’s all there is to it. (p. 273)

That combination of honesty interwoven with humor, and unwavering love and affection, is what I strive to hang on to in my daily life with my son Charlie, and what I strive to convey when I write about him on Autismland. If I cannot be honest about what he is, where he is, what he is doing and what he can do—if I cannot be honest about autism—then I have found, I am not able to help him as best as I might. What a reader takes away from reading George and Sam is not any specific protocol of “what to do” or even “how best to help my autistic child.” Moore’s book rather teaches a more subtle lesson, a sort of attitude—a mode of thinking, way of being—that makes life with autism no “hell” but—to borrow some terms that writer and autism father Nick Hornby uses in his forward to George and Sam (p. xv, xvii)—a life that resonates with meaning, and is woven of strands of dark and light. Hornby describes George and Sam as “painfully funny” (p. xvii) and the oxymoron in that phrase captures the essence of Moore’s book, and of life in Autismland.

And that’s all there is to it.