978-1572305441

Teddy 111
volume turned up very loud. I introduced myself politely, but I soon realized
he was suffering from some type of hearing impairment. Susan
told me her mother had died some years ago. She now looked after her
father. They were visited occasionally by a social worker and some
home help, but for the most part Susan did the shopping and cooking
and cleaned up the house on a regular basis. She had no daytime employment,
did not go to any sheltered workshops, but spent her time in
her room poring over calendars and movie magazines. She was quite
happy with her life and wished for little else.
Years ago, when her mother was alive, she got Susan into a routine
of cooking and doing light housework. It had taken a long time, but
again she must have been a forceful person, as eventually she was successful
in teaching her daughter to look after herself and the house.
Once that routine was established, it had a life of its own, and now that
her mother was gone, the routine was all that allowed her to look after
her father and still live at home. Her triumph was that in spite of her
disability she managed to look after her father. One of the benefits of
rigidity is that it makes a routine, once established, so much a part of a
person with autism’s life. She may not have considered looking after her
father such a burden, but I could only wonder at her capacity to make a
life out of these circumstances. It was the capacity for autistic routines
that saved this family. Susan just went about her business quietly and efficiently,
but I was aware of the enormous effort and training that had
gone into the establishment of that routine in the first place. Her
mother must have had that indomitable will I had seen so many times
in other families.
* * *
I tried that day to give Melody and Sean something to hold on to,
something to use as a touchstone as they navigated their future with
Teddy. I hoped the things I had learned from these stories would illustrate
the potential for goodness in people with autism and ASD and the
traces of courage and fortitude found in the most unlikely places. I
wanted to emphasize the common elements I found in those stories of
children who had done well.
Perhaps those elements as well as other lessons learned from more
recent outcome studies could illustrate how the children with ASD arrived
at where they are, from where they were.
One common theme is that focusing on reducing the level of im-