The Invisible Weight of Autism Caregiving About four or five years ago, I was on the phone with Krishna’s psychiatrist. I remember I was walking around the garden while I spoke to her because the house
When “enough” becomes an impossible question—and how to ask what is needed now Am I doing enough? It is such a familiar question in autism parenting that we can almost skip past the word doing and
It was a dark and stormy night! Krishna was about two years old. He was thrilled by the storm and his father was holding him in front of the bedroom window. The trees danced madly in
“Did he get down at all today?” It was about 7 in the evening. My husband had just gotten back home from work. I had been pacing up and down our terrace for hours with Krishna
Invisible cognitive load. Chronic vigilance. Decision fatigue. Uncertainty. All wonderful, accurate terms. What do they mean? I shoot upright in an instant. From deep sleep. Zero to 100 kmph in a nanosecond. For a moment I
“Krishna is on the autism spectrum,” the doctor said. The words hit me like a freight train. Once I got over the shock, I assumed that a year or two of therapy would “set him right.”
We were washing poop sheets for the nth time that night. It was around two in the morning. Exhausted, my husband looked at me. His gaze softened for a moment. “At least I get to go
The Futures We Imagine When I was seven years old, my father and I would wake at five-thirty in the morning and walk to Nehru Park in Delhi’s Chanakyapuri. The city would still be stretching itself
When Krishna began speech therapy, he had excellent expressive language and poor communication. At the end of one year, he was nonverbal. And I love telling this to people and watching their expressions: Is she for
Why Parents search for answers beneath the spectrum There is a particular kind of archaeology that begins after an autism diagnosis. Parents become historians of tiny forgotten moments. We begin excavating old pregnancies, old prescriptions, old