The ‘Life with an Autistic Son’ e-book has received some more great reviews this week, most notably this one below from the amazon.com site:
Life With An Autistic Son by B’s Dad is a true masterpiece of authenticity. If you are looking for a book that shares in depth gut wrenching emotions about living in the same house with an autistic child, this is the book you need to read. B’s dad inspires, yet also makes it real the good and the bad of the roller coaster life of parenting an autistic child. What makes this book special is that as you read it, you are watching the transformation in a father’s thinking of how he reacts to his son with autism.
B’s dad does not claim to be an expert so you are not pressured in anyway to understand big jargon analysis that many books on autism seem to convey. This story is personal to the core. For example, Life With An Autistic Son is written in short story fashion due to the fact much of what you are reading was presented in a blog. As a follower of that blog, I was introduced to B quite awhile ago. The genesis of this book is a father coming to grips in his own way with the unthinkable life with an autistic child. B’s Dad is a teacher so he has wonderful skills in writing in my opinion, and he is also sensitive to the nature of issues that arise in the teaching field when it comes to children with autism.
The question arises about how folks in the author’s life interpret if autism is truly a disability. It surprises you to find out that some people do not view autism as a disability. Another point of interest was the author’s expressions concerning the diagnosis of his son:
“…it seems obvious that we were dealing with autism. At the time we resisted the assumption, in the hope that it was simply a brief developmental delay… we seemed constantly to focus on what my son couldn’t do, as opposed to what he could.”
As a mother of a 20 year old autistic son, I can remember the day like it was yesterday when I was told that there was no hope for our disabled son. This was in 1994 at a huge University Hospital I will not name. In reality as a parent, I found hope where hope could be found as B’s dad did. You look at the good of what your child can accomplish and not focus constantly on the negatives. It is the best way to survive as the book conveys. It does not mean you do not work on trying to find new and creative ways to assist your child to be successful in something he can not do like a normal person. As parents like B’s dad, we learn to find accommodations and adjust accordingly.
One of my favorite little chapters (as this book is broken down into very small chapters for easy reading etc) is titled Flying In The Sky. This title came from B trying to understand where his pet dog had went to after dying. It was poignant in that B really had no sadness to speak of even though you know the boy loved his dog. It is as if the wired brain of an autistic child just does not process sadness or death like we “normal” human beings do. It seems like a good thing to me to be honest with you. B is free at least from the one thing that bothers the rest of us and that is the death of a loved one. His mind does not think about it the same as we would. It does not mean B is not sad, but he just lets it go and moves on with his life. I would just like to tell B that I really like that about him. It is OK to be different and I like that too.
If you want to be inspired, pick up this book today for an informational and liberating view of a life touched by autism— thanks to B’s dad.
The e-book is available here (Amazon UK) and here (Amazon US).
Life with an Autistic Son 