There’s a strange thing about autistic children even I as an autistic parent had to learn the hard way. Apparently autistic children can be split into two camps: those who can be approached and engaged with like “normal” people, and those whose connection can only be established autonomously. Most people can approach the former, crouch down, say hi, ask what’s your name and start building a bond. The latter is immediately irritated and stressed. And the more you try to build a bond, the more the child shuts down.
These children cannot even be described as anti-social or shy at all. And they often appear to be okay to the untrained eye. But inside, they are in panic. They cannot interpret the social cues that come with active bonding. They see that someone wants something from them because everything they do seems to be waiting for some kind of response. But what?
Even writing this I don’t expect anyone to grasp the depth of it. It even sounds like an overreaction when I read it. But apparently, subjecting a child to repeated instances of traditional childcare bonding can be traumatic. Some mask and play along and as soon as they get home they break down. For others it takes weeks. And the child has no other way to say never again other than repeated hysterical meltdowns.
I didn’t fully realize until the loss of a music therapist, two kindergartens and even family that my autistic son is the latter.
Apparently…
This is the story about how many times a child has to say “Never Again” until the adults get it. Including me…
I am a late-diagnosed autistic father of an autistic four-year-old son. As a child, I was the opposite of him. I went toward strangers. I spoke to everyone. I had no sense of stranger danger. My son is the exact opposite, and that is part of why it took me so long to read him. I had no internal map for what was happening. I had to learn him from the outside, the way someone learns a language they didn’t grow up speaking.
My son doesn’t like to be approached, touched, or engaged with beyond a brief hello or a quiet acknowledgement of his presence unless he is the one who initiates. He’s not shy at all. Not even a little bit. And it’s not a phase either. It is the fundamental condition under which his nervous system can tolerate the presence of an unfamiliar person at all. This of course varies with the intensity, energy and duration of the interaction. But generally speaking, when his conditions are honored, he eventually approaches on his own, and the bond he builds is unusually deep. When that condition is violated, he shuts down. Not only that, but his nervous system takes a serious hit. And the cost is paid for hours or even days afterward, at home, in ways the violator never gets to see.
But there were also people in his life that got it right the first time. Some because they were just effortless humans. People that generally don’t try hard to be at all. And they didn’t try hard to bond. Others were expert practitioners that knew things I didn’t. The intentional way they approached my son was invisible to me. That is until I collected enough data to see the pattern. The “I see what you did there” effect wouldn’t come until years later.
The SPZ Practitioner
The first practitioner experience set a high bar I would rarely see again. She was highly professional, slow, still, and hyper present. She never approached my son. She observed. My son felt right at home. He explored, he touched everything. She let him. And set boundaries when he went too far. He respected them. The whole interaction was light. Unspectacular. If it was a class, the students would probably leave without taking notes. Literally nothing happened. And that was the whole point.
While we were there I info dumped. She listened without even a hint of fatigue. She paused after my monologues, I had a lot to dump. And she not only responded to everything I said, but validated with detail. She would complete my reports with details I didn’t even know were relevant. She told me I was unusually informed, that some moments she felt like she was talking to a colleague. After years of struggle with clinicians, this was exactly the kind of validation I needed. She took me seriously. She was intelligent, observant, empathic and competent, but never once referenced her credentials. Her very presence was the credentials. This would prove to be the exception, not the rule.
She observed both of us. She must have been exhausted after we left. Me info dumping, my son exploring her office, her tracking both of us at once. And you could tell she didn’t miss a thing. My son spoke about her for days. Weeks. He would just spontaneously say, “She’s so nice.” And I immediately knew who he was talking about.
The Music Therapist
The first session at music therapy was the opposite of everything that had just worked. The therapist came in filled with enthusiasm. She immediately started trying to engage with my son. He pushed back hard. I tried to explain that her approach wasn’t landing. She told me how much she’d worked with autistic children. I got this. This was the rule to the exception I mentioned before. Every good experience happened in the absence of credentials. Every bad one with an announcement thereof.
Nothing worked. At some point she was visibly disturbed by the fact that her magic didn’t work on him. To her credit, she humbled herself. The whole session became just me and her talking. I didn’t know what I was dealing with yet, but I felt my son. I explained to her what I was sensing. Not because I fully understood myself, but because I could feel what he was feeling in that moment. I spoke as if I’d seen this before. I hadn’t. She listened, and she changed her approach.
A few visits later I asked my son if I should leave the room. He said yes. That was a good sign. The bond was forming. But something wasn’t right. I wasn’t in the sessions after that, and I didn’t trust her self-reports enough to ask. I knew the answer would be “everything is fine.” That’s just what I was used to from everyone. So I didn’t even try.
But many times when I came back in, my son didn’t feel grounded. He felt like he was coping. He was in a hyperactive mode I’ve seen many times. The mode he goes into when he’s trying to escape a situation or setting. That isn’t how he is. I don’t see it in any other context. When my son feels things is out of his control, he either goes up or he goes down. He gets almost hysterically hyperactive, or he shuts down completely. My guess is that the therapist over-structured the sessions. She led too much. She undermined his autonomy.
My son has an internal clock. He always knows what’s going to happen, at what time, and on what day. He thrives on that predictability. But predictability isn’t the same thing as control. He needs both. Structure from the outside, autonomy from the inside. When the structure starts dictating the inside too, he loses his footing.
His eventual response was to sabotage his sleep the night before therapy. It took me weeks to pattern-match that. He’d had sleeping issues in the past, but I hadn’t connected these to anything specific. But once I realized it was happening every week on the same night, I asked him about the therapy. He said he didn’t want to go anymore. So we paused the sessions at first. I eventually asked him about music therapy and he told me with wide open eyes: I never want to go back there. So I cancelled them altogether.
But this was only the beginning. The hard lessons were yet to come.
The Studio
At some point I was miserable. My son wasn’t in kindergarten. I had him 24/7. My whole life’s purpose was to function for him. All of my hyperfocus activities were incompatible with us. I couldn’t play cello, I couldn’t draw, I couldn’t code. Resentment started to grow. I knew I had to do something for me. So I restarted a hobby I’d dropped years ago when my equipment got stolen: photography.
I started slow, with TFP shoots with people from my neighborhood. Just to see how my son would respond. He loved it. Subjects came in and engaged with me. My son observed. When he’d gathered enough information he approached them on his own terms. He made friends. Had his favorites he would talk about for days after they left. I always told him when I wanted to shoot. Always asked him if it was okay. It was always okay. He always looked forward to the next one and always asked me who was coming. When he heard the name of a favorite he jumped for joy.
These days were not about my son. They were about me. Just me. I’m not an over permissive parent, but I started to raise my son to speak for himself. I struggled with this sleep sabotage and other behavioral expressions that were so extreme, and took so long to decode, that I started teaching him to express his needs verbally. Just so I could hear them now instead of feel them later. He gets to tell me no. He gets to tell me I’m or something is getting on his nerves. He gets to tell me when he doesn’t want to do something. I intentionally give him the feeling that he has the power to shape his environment. And I signal to him that I respect his needs first. Understand them later. But for photography days I told him, these aren’t the days where he gets to shape the environment to his will like he usually does. He doesn’t get to take the subjects into his room and kick me out. He doesn’t get to be the center of attention. He was always okay with that. If I didn’t shoot on a weekend, he’d express his disappointment.
So here he was. Strangers in and out of the house every week. Then twice a week. Depending on the energy, my son would just peek his head out of his room and observe, or walk right up to a person and ask “who are you?”. Sometimes he would come and sit next to the makeup artist while we shot. Talk to the models when we took breaks. And sometimes I had to make boundaries when he tried to command the room. But he never said never again.
The Family
In order to protect the identity of the family in this story I’m going to refer to them as George and Steph. Imagine them as Uncle and Aunt or Grandfather and Grandmother.
Before both George and Steph visited together, George came alone. It worked. He arrived, sat on the couch, and talked to me. My son observed from across the room. At some point he approached, took George’s hand, and pulled him into his room. I was not allowed in. That was the signal. The bond was forming on my son’s terms.
I don’t know exactly when that changed. There was no single moment. When both came together, the room was different. More energy, more attention, more bodies oriented toward him. They followed him when he moved. They touched him. They hovered. I saw how he responded but I didn’t think much of it. I had enough data to explain so I tried. I told them what to do and what not to do. I think they tried at first. But it wasn’t consistent.
What I didn’t see in the room was how much it was costing him. My son was masking. He appeared to be managing. He wasn’t protesting, wasn’t melting down. But he did start migrating to me instead of sending me out of the room. To everyone in the room, including me, he looked fine. I didn’t yet know the difference between my son tolerating a situation and my son being okay in one. That distinction only became visible after they left, when he said, “I’m so glad they’re gone.”
That sentence shocked me. I tried to talk to him about it but he didn’t have the vocabulary to help me understand. I didn’t think it was all that serious but I could tell it was all just a bit too much for him. So I told them that he needed more space. But I didn’t push the matter. I had the instinct but I didn’t yet fully understand, and without that I couldn’t hold the line.
The pattern only became visible later, the same way it had with the music therapist. The next visit was weeks or even months later. But apparently the last visit stuck in his mind deep enough that my son sabotaged his sleep before they came. By this time I had an idea why he did it. So I asked him, he said: “I never want them to come back.” I was immediately dysregulated. Here I had my son that had just verbalized his needs, absolute and undeniable. And family that had travelled hundreds of kilometers and even brought the great-grandmother to meet him for the first time. The pressure was enormous. So I talked to him. Tried to negotiate a way that could somehow salvage the visit. I already knew why he said it, so I asked if one of them could come instead of both. He said yes. That confirmed what I already suspected. It wasn’t personal at all. It was the load, the social pressure, and the lack of autonomy.
I tried to explain this to the family. I wrote it out carefully. I described the pattern, referenced the music therapy, explained PDA and what worked on the shooting days when five adults were in the room and none of them engaged with him and he thrived. I explained that the path to closeness was through distance. That he needed to observe until a person became predictable, and only then would he approach. On his terms.
What came back was not engagement with any of it. George’s response centered on the inconvenience, the travel, the hotels, the effort, and said the great-grandmother would probably never be able to come back. Steph, who I thought I got along with and who definitely loved my son, said she wouldn’t come alone. And George was stuck between the both of us. He said if he came alone, his wife would be angry. I believe that was the actual shape of the problem. It was that the adults around him couldn’t reorganize themselves, even slightly, to meet the conditions his nervous system required. But nobody was calling it for what it was. So I did. Big mistake.
I thought the request was simple. Come one at a time. Do not follow him. Let him lead. These were the same instructions I gave babysitters, kindergarten staff, and therapists. Some followed them and built a bond with him in a single afternoon. The family couldn’t get there. Not because they didn’t love him. Because their love had a shape that couldn’t bend, and his needs required bending. But not only that, I made the mistake of telling them what my son said. And that hurt.
My son doesn’t reject people. He rejects conditions. When the conditions are wrong, he protects himself the only way he can. First with masking, then with sleep sabotage, then with words. By the time he says he doesn’t want to see someone, he has already exhausted every other strategy. That sentence isn’t the beginning of a problem. It is the end of a long chain of signals that were not read.
His family heard that sentence as rejection. They reacted to their own pain. And in reacting to their pain, they stopped seeing him entirely. More accurately, they stopped seeing me.
You see, the reoccurring theme in all of the stories that go badly is that I am the messenger for a child that cannot send the message himself. What nobody can see is that all of this is absolutely overwhelming for me. I’m often just as shocked as they are. And I don’t always do a good job communicating the situation to them while having to hold space for my son here, where they don’t have eyes. But they kill the messenger every time.
Theo
Then there’s Theo. The child who taught me how to bond with my own son on the deepest level.
My son bonds with adults faster than with other children. He can read them better. Their signals are clearer. Children he watches like an animal on guard. This time it was the other way around. Theo is the son of a friend. They came over and Theo immediately started mirroring my son. Everything my son did, Theo did. Everything my son said, Theo said. My son was immediately intrigued. They did this for what felt like forever. It made Theo predictable for my son. And it was the kind of play that preserved his autonomy, because he was actually in control.
After that day I started doing the same. It deepened our bond to a whole new level. It has become part of our day. We parrot each other all day, every day. My son also doesn’t like when I lead play. I still do it because I’m always testing the boundaries of how to engage with him. In those moments he will start looping scripts. He senses the loss of control. I respond by echoing his script back to him. At that point he immediately exits the loop.
This taught me that mirroring is a way to show him you are with him. Not just that he is leading. But that he matters. I don’t always conform to him. Sometimes I let him sit with the discomfort of not being in control. That is just as important. The boundary is safety. Feeling like he isn’t in control of a situation and feeling unsafe are two different things.
The Kindergarten Part 1
My first time taking my son through the process of finding a kindergarten was a devastating experience for me. One that left me questioning my competence as a parent. Everyone I asked beforehand said the same thing: at the first visit, you’ll mostly be left alone with your child. It wasn’t that way.
From the first moment on the integration practitioner was right between me and my son. In all the hours we were there she never left his close proximity but once for a few minutes. She narrated, offered, suggested, got down to his level and stayed there.
I predicted the entire outcome of the visit from the beginning. Based on the environment, her vibes and my son’s cues, I already knew what would happen. I told her that I would name his signs as they emerged. Each time I did, her response was a different version of the same thing. That’s normal. That’s fine. Each phrase took the thing I had just said and softened it into nothing. My predictions updated constantly based on that. And I knew he was going to pop at some point.
The first outburst came over a toy. Seemingly out of nowhere. Everyone in the room turned their heads, she was in shock. I tried to explain that the toy wasn’t the issue. He was manifesting built up tension on the object with the closest proximity. But I didn’t even get half the sentence out before she interrupted me with a yeah yeah and turned her head away. That was the moment I stopped talking. The visit was a runaway train.
I was tracking my son, who was dysregulating in ways she couldn’t read. Tracking her, who was reading me as an overinvolved parent. Tracking myself, trying not to overcontrol, trying to hold the line between being present for him and pulling him out of the room by being too present. There was no quiet corner. No exit. No person I could turn to who would simply hear me.
Like many autistics, my entire life is built on scripts. Every failed situation that moved too fast for my neurology has been studied and analyzed post mortem. With each recurring situation I’ve iterated on scripts that help me handle them firmly, confidently and gracefully until they lead to favorable outcomes. But I had no tools for this, no rehearsed scripts. So I did nothing at all.
As soon as we got outside the front door my son froze, looked up at me, and said, Papa, I’m not okay at all. That sentence doesn’t usually come from him directly. He has a sequence he runs through first. He tries his own strategies, and only when those fail does he reach for me. That day he skipped the whole sequence and signaled to me, he needs me to help him. I told him, I know baby. I’ll take care of you. We went home and did a well practiced cooldown routine.
A few days later they wrote to say they didn’t think we were a good fit. I wrote back to explain the situation from our perspective but they never replied.
For weeks afterward, my son couldn’t even hear the word Kindergarten without protesting. The word itself had become a trigger. We stopped looking. The wound would need to heal before we tried again.
The Babysitter
My son is conventionally beautiful. He awakens, in adults who meet him for the first time, what I have come to recognize as the “OMG how cute” response. He is kid-model material. People react to him before they have read anything about him at all, because his appearance arrives faster than his behavior. This isn’t a small problem. It is one of the central failure modes I have observed across years of first-contact conversations, and it deserves to be named.
The cuteness response isn’t innocent. It activates a script in the adult about how to engage with a beautiful child. The script tells them to lean in, to make sounds, to express delight, to touch, to compliment, to perform their own enchantment back at the child. The script overrides whatever the adult might otherwise have observed. It isn’t that they cannot read the signals at all. It is that the cuteness response has already filled the channel before any reading can happen.
For a high-masking autistic child, this is catastrophic. He registers the adult’s attention as social demand, the proximity as physical demand and the enthusiasm as sensory assault. And because he is cute and visibly sweet, his subtle signals of distress are dismissed. He must be tired. He must be in a phase. The parent must be projecting. He couldn’t possibly be suffering, because he is so lovely.
The cruelty of this is specific. It isn’t that he is unloved. It is that the love is for the surface, and when the surface starts signaling distress, the love doesn’t adjust. It defends itself. The adult who is enchanted has a stake in continuing to be enchanted, and that stake works against the child’s actual nervous system.
I have watched this play out so many times that I now intervene before it can. Babysitters get the speech upfront. Most listen. Some don’t. Those who don’t always burn the bridge in the first contact, and only some get a second chance, and only if they listened on the second try.
I want to tell one story about this, because it is the only kind of story that shows what can change when people can manage to pivot after a first contact goes wrong.
A woman came to babysit who wouldn’t listen to my upfront explanation. She kept doing the cute thing. She kept reaching for him, talking at him, performing delight. I have learned to recognize the moment before he begins to insist we leave. I saw his signals and tried to explain to her over and over again what was happening. She would pull back for a moment. And as soon as she saw his cuteness again she would have an outburst of delight. My son had his hand gripped around my finger. This is the channel through which I read his nervous system state when we are outside. I could feel his tension rising but she wasn’t getting the message. At some point I had to get loud with her. I stopped and told her in the most unambiguous way I knew how, that if she didn’t start pretending he didn’t exist, I would fire her on the spot. That she could just go home from where we stood.
She was startled. Her eyes gazed back at me wide open. From then on there was silence. My son’s grip around my finger relaxed as he got a chance to recover. It took about five more minutes to reach the playground.
When we arrived, I started to explain everything. Quietly, slowly and in great depth. While she sat with what had just happened. My son explored the playground and watched us from a distance. I told her: I am not going to tell you what the moment looks like. But if you respect what I just told you, you will know when it comes. It will be unmistakable.
A few minutes later, we started to walk around and talk with each other about other things. My son suddenly ran into the grass, picked a flower and brought it to her.
She crouched down, took it from him with one hand, and touched her face with the other. She looked at me. Almost as if she wanted to cry. From then on, my son spoke to her. I told her to hold her finger toward him. He doesn’t like it when you grab his hand, but when the bond is formed, he will grab a finger on his own. He did. She looked at me again. I could tell how she was holding back her outburst of delight. Now she gets it.
She told me that she had been so obsessed with his cuteness that she had not seen him at all. But now, she said, she understood. From that day on, she was respectful and intuitive with him. She had become someone he trusted, because she had been willing to stop, sit in the discomfort of silence, and let him approach her on his own terms.
This is one of the few times an adult course corrected. Even if against her will. She was probably just pausing to form an exit plan. All it took was her being uncomfortable for five minutes. Letting her own enchantment be interrupted. To trust that what looks like rejection of her is actually the only condition under which connection becomes possible.
The Kindergarten Part 2
This isn’t the second kindergarten we tried, but it is the second one that went badly. By now I had learned enough to know what my son needed from a first visit. I had learned it the hard way, and I had learned how to explain it clearly. I’d seen enough to be able to pattern match the probability of my son being okay or not. And as soon as I saw enough I didn’t question, I left. One kindergarten I even told within the first 5 minutes we can spare the ceremony, we’re not gonna be a good fit. Not because they did anything wrong, mostly because they didn’t seem to have a tangible integration model. And the ratio of NT to ND children mixed with other factors told me it wasn’t good for my son. If I had to map my pattern matching here for a single one of those rejections, it would be longer than this essay. After all the experience I’d gained, none of that would prepare me for what happened next.
The first visit wasn’t official. Just the first meet. The staff were occupied with other things. Nobody approached my son. He walked into the garden, looked around, and chose a quiet caretaker sitting by herself. He sat down next to her and started talking. She listened, didn’t ask questions, didn’t lean in, didn’t touch him. Within minutes he had built a bridge I had rarely seen him build that fast. I spoke to the director, the concept sounded great and he was tangibly passionate about this place. It was like it was his baby.
Days later we came back for the official visit. This time, my son was approached by the autism specialist that immediately crouched down on his level, loud voice, face close to his. The classic enthusiastic approach. He protested on the spot, wanted to leave and never recovered. From then on he was in coping mode. I immediately intervened. My son was used to this by now. If I didn’t, he would have looped verbally about wanting to leave. If I didn’t heed, he would have looped behaviorally. But when he sees me advocate for him he stays. He doesn’t explore freely anymore like at the SPZ, but he stays. And I let it happen in the hopes we could salvage the situation. Boy was I wrong.
I had explained his profile to her beforehand. I explained it again in the room, multiple times. What he needs: distance, quiet, predictability. What the early signs look like. None of it was respected consistently. And I wasn’t spared of being reminded of her credentials. Of course. When I spoke, she pulled back. Then started a slow approach again. My son still hadn’t recovered from the arrival and she didn’t stop trying to actively bond. But she couldn’t see his distress. What she read as conversation was scripting under social pressure. My son was repeating the same sentences because he could feel something was expected of him but couldn’t figure out what. At some point I moved to the sofa to give him space. He was cornered between two adults. But when I saw him constantly looking over to me I went back and asked her to stop and explained the principle again. At some point she left the room and sent two more back to back with the same approach. I had to start from scratch each time. One of them told me I should probably just let it happen.
What they saw was a child who appeared to be functional. Until he wasn’t. I watched from the couch as my son escalated and started throwing everything the caretaker tried to offer him. I got up and intervened again. She basically told me in so many words that everything was fine until I came over. I had no capacity to explain to her that his throwing toys is not him saying no. It’s him screaming for help. So I picked him up. He wrapped his arms so tightly around my neck. I immediately knew I let this go way too far.
What they didn’t see was the same thing nobody ever sees. At home, he broke down, cramping, screaming and crying, repeating “I never want to go back there.” By evening he had eczema across his face that he hadn’t had since infancy. It was the worst meltdown I had witnessed in three years. Days later his body was still telling the story. He wasn’t going to the bathroom. He startled at ordinary sounds. His nervous system had not come back down.
Their autism specialist called to offer a second visit. I declined and explained what had happened at home. She told me I should have given the team more space, and that building contact with the child was her job. Even after everything I told her, there still wasn’t a single receptor for my message. I ended the call without a single word more.
We are talking about the same child, same kindergarten. The only thing that changed between the first visit and the second was what the adults intended to do. The first time, nobody had a plan for him, and he found his own way in. The second time, everyone had a plan for him, and he never had a chance.
AutiCARE
There’s another story I find interesting and very relevant. Because it shows how effortless it can be to connect with my son.
We have support personnel from AutiCARE visit us once a week to take things off my hands for a few hours. I will call him Kasey.
Kasey’s job is usually to handle household chores. He is what I would call an effortless human. He doesn’t try to fulfill his role. He is just simply who he is. Without performance and without additives. He’s extremely slow. I don’t mean intellectually, I mean his whole vibe is low tempo. This lack of momentum is what my son has always been attracted to. And he was intrigued by him from the first moment on. I intuitively chose a different role for him on that day, and took us all for a walk together.
Kasey became a playmate for my son. He sat down with him once a week and just listened. He didn’t try to add anything at all to the interactions. He clearly didn’t know what. He was just present. What unfolded was a child that dropped his mask bit by bit. A little more each visit. After a few months, Kasey became the only living person who has ever seen my son the way I see him. Without any mask at all. Kasey gets to see all of his stimming, all of his noises, all of his happy scripts and all of his theater. What started as my son setting the tone and doing all the talking is now both of them interacting. Kasey is not a specialist. He let my son initiate and build the whole thing on his own terms.
You see, my son has his own way of communicating. It’s almost like a secret language hidden in there. You have to observe the pattern. Kasey did exactly that. What they have now is more akin to a duet. Which is exactly what we have. All day long.
Most caretakers never get here. Even when they manage first contact. But the moment he initiates, they read it as permission to engage. They start leading play, offering, explaining, contributing and steering. They feel as if they would be doing their job badly if they just simply said nothing at all.
His initiation is not permission to lead. It is permission to follow.
What they’ve achieved by passing that first threshold is making themselves non-threatening to his nervous system. That matters. But it is not the bond they think it is. It is the entrance, not the room. And any time a caretaker starts leading from that entrance, they are painting over a thing that will never be uncovered again. The bond still forms. But it forms at a ceiling the caretaker imposed without knowing it.
Kasey never led. Not because he had a strategy. Because he had nothing to add. And that absence of agenda is what let my son take him all the way in. Past the entrance, past the ceiling, into the room where the mask comes off entirely. After everything that has happened, I’m just happy when they don’t assault his nervous system. So I usually don’t lecture anyone about the fact that if they gave themselves permission to be still without subtracting points from themselves, that’s how they would get where Kasey is.
And Then There’s Me.
So far this has been alternating stories about who got it right, and who got it wrong. So I think it’s only appropriate to be transparent about my own failures.
It took me a long time to pattern match my son’s behavioral and health issues onto his interactions. But even after I had that map, it took me even longer to form the scripts that would sufficiently prepare people to receive him on his terms before the fact. I realize especially after The Kindergarten Part 2, that I wasn’t doing enough. Not making the hard boundaries a condition, and requiring acknowledgment before first contact. This essay is one move to change that.
I have a routine for preparing my nervous system before difficult situations. I plan days ahead. I schedule my sleep with overhead. I supplement magnesium and glycine to give my system room to absorb what’s coming. I do this before meetings with clients, government officials, and sometimes even photoshoots. I never did this once before a kindergarten appointment. I didn’t take care of myself. Getting my son ready early always put him into a mode that takes a lot of energy for me to absorb. My nervous system was never prepared for the days that went badly. Not even a little bit. After that last kindergarten experience, I wasn’t prepared for what happened, and even less prepared for what happened when we got home. We both crashed that day. Hard.
I’ve explained before how my entire life is built on scripts. The exit protocol is a big part of that. But I didn’t develop them for these situations with my son. I assumed way too often it would be fine. Because it mostly is. But when it goes badly with a kindergarten, the price is always high. Each time things went bad with caretakers I would wing it. I’ve collected enough data to know the signs, and to know when to exit before he breaks down. But without rehearsed scripts, my nervous system freezes. Scripts are the secret survival weapon of every successful high masking autistic. And the exit plan is the backbone of healthy boundaries. A thing many autistics struggle with. Not out of pathology, but because the nervous system is shifted into a sympathetic state. Scripts are the safety net, because recalling checklists and sentences is possible where adaptation isn’t. And I failed to build them for my son.
I knew enough after the first solo visits with his family worked and the joint visits didn’t. I had the data. But I let the joint visits continue because I was managing the adults’ feelings alongside my son’s needs, and I chose not to intervene hard enough. That’s different from the nervous system prep and the exit protocol. Those are about preparation. This one is about the moment I had enough information to act and didn’t, because the social cost of acting felt too high. That’s the failure that cuts deepest, and it’s the one I think other parents in my position will recognize. I cannot please everyone. And it’s not my job. Protecting my child is.
All of my previous mistakes compound into the following. Leading to an unpreparedness to hold space for all the well-intentioned people who faced my son and failed.
Some were ensnared by the trap of pride, to the point of arrogance. It made me angry. I took it personally because I was stuck between two forces. But it’s my personal favorite sin. To gain confidence in your abilities that have worked so many times, then meet that one immovable object that puts you in your place. The reflex to call it an edge case, just to realize it’s more common than you knew. Which in turn calls the very experience you pride yourself in into question. That’s a special kind of pain in and of itself. A pain I know too well. Better than I should. Recognizing myself in them would have helped me do the only thing that actually matters: yield a favorable outcome. Even if that meant executing an exit plan. Yield something that works. Pride is easier to navigate than hostility. Overwhelmed by the situation without a scripted fallback, I defaulted to fight. I fought them until the room yielded to me. An act of shadow boxing myself until we both fall down.
Others were driven by maternal forces. Deep and pure. Just to hear my son say he never wants to see them again. I don’t think I was wrong to expect they see past those words and see the child behind them. But I didn’t give them a chance to sit with the pain before I demanded it. They did make mistakes. They didn’t heed my words. They underestimated the weight of it all. But so did I. It took me years to grasp it. Rejection hurts deeply. Even if it comes from a child. Especially when it comes from a child. Now when I look back, I wish I’d sat with their pain a bit longer. Let some grass grow over the situation. Given myself a chance to understand it better before I tried to repair it. Maybe he would still have his family.
In the next chapter, I will take you on a journey through my son’s nervous system and talk about each room through an autistic lens. If you have had a similar experience, please do feel free to share your story.
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