Recently I've been communicating with Jayde (it feels strange to write her name on here after nearly four years of not writing it) in text messages. During the last meeting at her school, when my husband and I sat down with the resource staff, Jayde's teacher and support teacher, the principal and the occupational therapist, it was suggested to us after we stressed the difficulty we have in encouraging Jayde to open up to us, or just talk to us about how she feels, that I set her up with a text messaging app on her tablet and encourage her to text me.
When Jayde writes, especially about anything bothering her, or something that makes her happy, or anything that is emotionally upsetting, it unlocks a part of her brain she doesn't share verbally.
After weeks of begging her to put a Christmas list together and giving up all hope that my child, now 8, will ever understand what Christmas is all about, if you know anything about Autism, you can imagine how speechless I was when I spotted this book on the wall outside her classroom tonight while we waited for her Christmas concert to start.
I opened it up.
And then I opened it up some more.
I stood there for a few moments just taking it all in, struggling real hard to keep it together. My heart felt like it was going to burst.
It was the first page that got me.
The first line, referring to a My Little Pony character, reads: "I really, really want a glittering wing nightmare moon. I think I deserve this because I try so hard at school for math".
Deserve.
Try so hard.
The words blurred on the page and I realized she understood.
Recovering quickly, I cracked a few jokes to my husband who was with me, about the soft theme dinosaur cover, and how she repeated it. I referenced the movie A Christmas Story, and Ralphie, with his specific description of the model of BB gun he wanted for Christmas, often repeated numerous times throughout the film.
But man, it's the "try so hard". It hit me right in the feels. Right... There.
