Sometimes I’ve envied Jill her time at home, away from an office, much as I haven’t liked the job (see “insurance policy”) I had to take 11 years ago. To me she had much of the free time in the marriage, and I conveniently forgot what my mother used to tell me before Alex was born (“When you have a baby you’ll probably want to go to work!” – was that an insult? – just as I conveniently forgot much of what it must have been like for Jill at home alone while I was in some hotel on a business trip.

(In the past six months I have, of course, learned to be out-and-out thankful for having any job.)

Once the boys were old enough, I wanted Jill to return to work for, in equal parts, her own career advancement after Alex’s birth and hospitalization (a job in itself for Jill), and for the spirit of teamwork I’ve come to need in a marriage. I often felt I was carrying the whole load of a special-needs family, though I knew I wasn’t. Sometimes in this kind of parenting, there’s a wide gap between what you feel and what you know.

Jill is moving back into the workworld – amazing enough in this economy – but it was a source of friction. Sometimes less, sometimes more. (“You don’t know the numbers of resumes and letters I’ve sent out,” she’d say.)

Jill and I haven’t come close to adding to the supposedly higher divorce rate among couples parenting a child with autism or other special needs. After the National Autism Association launched a study on the subject a few years ago, in fact, the previous author of this column found no evidence to support the bandied 80-to-85% divorce figure for couples parenting autism. And as Lisa Jo Rudy points out on her about.com Autism page, that a recent study reports that the divorce rate for couples parenting children who have ADHD (which Rudy terms similar to autism) is much lower than the incidence of stress in such families.

Stress we have. Online spots like ACT offer primers on relieving family stress, as does Terri Mauro’s excellent About.com channel on raising special-needs children.

Discussion was dominated by two stories, that of 13-year-old Adam Race, against whose parents a priest filed a restraining order, and of 5-year-old Alex Barton, who was voted out of his kindergarden class by his classmates, at the suggestion of his teacher, Wendy Portillo. These two incidents sparked some very heated and often acrimonious exchanges and remind me of why there’s a need to think about autistic persons and the community, in faith communities and all others.

Also: It was reported that there had been 72 cases of measles so far in the US, the highest number since 2001—-and the number would only go up, while misinformation about vaccines continued.

Sometimes it seems that everything, if not anything, could be said to cause autism (and that everything, and anything, has been offered as a “potential treatment for autism”). New tests to detect signs of autism in younger and younger children and, indeed, in babies were reported.

A New Yorker article on neurodiversity provided a simple answer to the question of where are the autistic adults?

And in May of the year when I started learning more and more about employment and housing for autistic adults, Charlie celebrated his 11th birthday–and am I always glad to be Charlie’s mother.

The notion that divorce is “ever-increasing” is a “great myth” and also “plain wrong,” Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, assistant professors of business and public policy at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, write in an op-ed in the September 29th New York Times. Responding to the release last week of new statistics on divorce and to the New York Times itself reporting that “the latest numbers suggest an uptick in the divorce rate among people married in the most recent 20 years covered in the report, 1975-1994,” Stevenson and Wolfers argue that the divorce rate has been decreasing at a steady rate over the past quarter-century:

[The divorce rate] is now at its lowest level since 1970. While marriage rates are also declining, those marriages that do occur are increasingly more stable. For instance, marriages that began in the 1990s were more likely to celebrate a 10th anniversary than those that started in the 1980s, which, in turn, were also more likely to last than marriages that began back in the 1970s.

They also point out that a count of divorce certificates shows “the divorce rate as having peaked at 22.8 divorces per 1,000 married couples in 1979 and to have fallen by 2005 to 16.7.”

Stevenson and Wolfers speak out strongly about a constantly rising increase in the divorce rate as a myth and this led me to consider the figure of 80% that is regularly cited as the divorce rate in families with an autistic child. While I have often seen the figure of 80-85% referred to, I have not found a good source for this figure. That this is a topic of more than a little concern was apparent from the response to a post I wrote entitled Divorce a common side effect of autism?. The post clearly touched a nerve, as did Shelley Hendrix Reynolds’ recent article on the effects of her divorce on her autistic son .

Further, the National Autism Association (NAA) has launched what it refers to as the “first national program to combat divorce rates in autism community; it hopes to “confirm or update that percentage [of 80%] before referencing it in its program materials.” And, the “toll” that the “stress” of raising an autistic child can take on a marriage has more recently been in the news due to Jenny McCarthy who said during her Oprah appearance on September 18th:

Soon after Evan’s diagnosis, Jenny says the stress of raising a child with autism began to take a toll on her marriage. An autism advocacy organization reports that the divorce rate within the autism community is staggering. According to its research, 80 percent of all marriages end.

“I believe it, because I lived it,” she says. “I felt very alone in my marriage.”

Jenny says her husband dealt with his pain by staying away, even when Evan was in the hospital. “He never sat down and said, ‘What did you find out on Google?’” she says. “There was never that connection of wanting to know and being there.”

When Jenny’s marriage ended, she says she felt sad…and scared. “After the divorce, even though it felt good and the right thing to do, I felt, as I’m sure many mothers with children who have autism feel, ‘Who in the heck is going to love me with my child who has autism?’” she says. “I don’t care how big your boobs are or blonde your hair is—you’re going to feel that way.”

Leaving aside the attributes that McCarthy seems to equate with attracting the opposite sex (though I will note I would not, by the qualifications she mentions, get anywhere, not that I need or wish to; I’m Chinese American on both sides and nary a blonde hair to speak of), she does seem to be pinpoint autism as the reason for her marriage ending, and highlights what seems to be her ex-husband’s lack of interest.

Citing autism as the reason for a marriage failing can be seen as yet another reason for saying why autism is so awful. Taking care of Charlie is a privilege but it is not always easy. Childcare arrangements are a constant juggling act for Jim and me and we tend always to think of Charlie’s needs first, and of each other’s after that. We both agree that it should be this way. Jim and I would much prefer living closer to New York City due to our jobs but Charlie’s education comes first. We left the house that we planned to live in for 30 years in order that Charlie could have the right school placement. (And until this September we were living with my in-laws, which was very, if not too, interesting at times.) Jim and I have made many of our choices based on “what Charlie needs” rather than on what would be best for the two of us and I do hope that, ultimately this will be best for the three of us.

Stevenson and Wolfers suggest some reasons for why the “myth” of “ever-increasing divorce” persists.

Why has the great divorce myth persisted so powerfully? Reporting on our families is a lot like reporting on the economy: statistical tales of woe provide the foundation for reform proposals. The only difference is that conservatives use these data to make the case for greater government intervention in the marriage market, while liberals use them to promote deregulation of marriage.

But a useful family policy should instead be based on facts. The facts are that divorce is down, and today’s marriages are more stable than they have been in decades. Perhaps it is worth stocking up on silver anniversary cards after all.

Maybe it sounds like a cliché, but life with autism has made Jim and Charlie and I, and Jim and I, a tighter unit; a unit, cohesive, symbiotic, and together. We’ll see you in 2020.*

*Jim and I have been married since 1995.

Kurt Thometz is a rare book dealer in New York and the father of 16-year-old Adam, who has autism. Thometz is profiled in the August 11th New York Times (subscription only) about his search for a home for his family of three and for his 400 cartons containing some 10,000 books. Jim Dwyer relates Thometz’s longstanding passion for books with Adam’s beginning to use words himself:

……By the age of 5, Adam had not yet spoken an intelligible word — not Mommy, not Daddy, not milk or no. Mr. Thometz read to him every night for two and a half years. With Adam in the crook of his arm, the weight of the day on him, Mr. Thometz was reading Thomas the Tank Engine for the 200th time.

“Henry the engine,” he read.

“Green,” Adam interrupted.

Yes: the proper name was Henry the Green engine. Mr. Thometz had dropped the word. “He supplied it,” Mr. Thometz said. “It was the first time he had used a word on purpose.” And it was the first rung on the ladder he climbed from his isolation. Today, Adam, 16, entertains friends, plays music, and is thriving.

And now, long after the summer days have given way to dusk, a glow spills from the ground-floor window of the brownstone on 160th Street. Four letters seem to float in the window, cutting a silhouette into the light from the bookshop beyond.

“WORD,” it says.

Adam, it seems, was listening very closely to the words in the books his father read. I was struck by Adam’s speaking up about his father leaving out a color word, “green.” My own son Charlie finds it a challenge to put two and three words together on his own, and combinations of colors and nouns are the easiest (we have just started to teach him “big” vs. “small” for third or fourth time; I can see Charlie concentrating when I say to him “which is the big ball?” but he does not always get this right.)

A statement made about autism and divorce in the New York Times piece made me pause: Adam’s mother is Thometz’s first wife. The reporter writes “Adam, a son from his first marriage, had autism, accompanied by its common side effect, divorced parents.” The story about Adam coming into language late and his “over-fondness” for Thomas are familiar, but I have to wonder about saying that “divorced parents” are a “common side effect” of autism. Back in June the National Autism Association (NAA) announced that it was launching the “first national program to combat divorce rates in autism community” and cited a figure of 80%. I have also seen a figure of 85% regarding the divorce rate among parents of autistic children and am not sure about sources for these numbers.

It is the case that most of the autistic children that I know come from families in which the parents are married. While the NAA notes that “caring for an autistic child often can result in marital hardship and isolation,” among the autism parents whom I know who are divorced, the reasons for ending a marriage are highly varied. Raising an autistic child certainly makes family life different from what one might have imagined, but to say that divorce is a “common side effect” singles out autism, and an autistic child, as a specific marital stressor.

And from the New York Times article, one gets the sense that perhaps those many readings of Thomas the Tank Engine to Adam further instilled a passion for books in Thometz, and a sense of the power of words—something of a side effect I have indeed felt from raising my son Charlie.