Autism is a Mountain Range.

I alluded to this analogy in the blog post last week where I reviewed The Thinking Mom's Revolution and I promised I would write more about it.

We live in Colorado Springs, so the analogy is fitting.  If you go to climb the hill in front of you, when you get to the top and take a breath, while you probably will see a downward slope, there's another hill even higher at the bottom of that slope.

So Autism is like that.  You work really hard, you try diets and therapies and treatments and you make progress.  And you think, "Oh, now we're moving". And you get excited.  And you realize you can take a breath because your child isn't strung quite so tight any more.  You don't have to keep an eye on him 1000% of the time at home anymore... you can actually be in the other room.    But then something happens and you're back to eagle eyed supervision.  And each step is really hard, and you have to try something else.  You're on the next mountain.

Its tremendously important to have a way to cross the mountain range where its narrow.  So many of us end up turned the wrong way, and fight our way up and down mountains not realizing we're not crossing the range, we're going up and down it. 

The good news is... There is a way across!     We know people who've done it.    And we know how they got there.  We have the Trail which bisects the range, a compass and we've learned to read the colored strings left along the way marking the Trail.    'Course, we wasted a lot of time investigating colored strings that led us nowhere. And got lost several times on our way to find the actual trail...