I Left My Daughter Behind
May 8, 2008 by Drake
At least, that’s how I feel. I may not have literally left her, but I might as well have for how guilty I feel.
After a conversation with her the other day, she said some things that were really big eye-openers to me.
Can I come to my brothers therapy one day?
Will I get to help teach my brother in homeschool?
It was then that I started getting suspicious about what she might really be saying, and we started talking a bit more about that. Well, apparently I was right, I had been being blind. I’d left her behind in some of the more complex and rough aspects of her brothers autism, in an attempt to shield her from that stress, and what I ended up doing was making her feel left out.
It only occurred to me then that maybe her way of coping with her brothers autism is that she wants to actively help him improve. I hinted at this a bit, and she looked at me like I was the biggest idiot ever and came out with…
OF COURSE I want to help my brother get better, he’s my best friend and my only brother!
I nearly cried. *sigh*
In any event, I’ve decided to encourage my daughter to take a more active role in helping however she thinks she can or wants to. I hope that she’ll start feeling less apart, and more like one of the ‘crew’ as she starts having more freedom to join in some of the even more difficult aspects of raising autism.
