A few days ago I noticed something, I don't really know if it's new or if I just hadn't seen it before. I was dropping off the kids at school just like every other day, they got out of the car, Sam bounced up the steps and Jenna dropped the books she was carrying. While she bent down to pick them up (it would have been easier if she had taken off her gloves first) Sam stopped at the door and waited. He didn't say anything just waited at the door until she got there, he opened the door for her and went in after her. He's done that every day since (she doddles), never tells her to hurry up, just waits patiently for her to go in first. Holding the door every time, like a perfect gentleman.
It made me smile.
Some of you may be saying "Oh, that's nice but, why is she telling us that story?" Well, when we started on this journey with Sam almost seven years ago this was something we were scared we would never see, one of many things we worried about. Would he have the ability to put others first, to have compassion, empathy and a host of other emotions. That's why when it happened again this morning...
It made me smile, again...
I read something today, another blog by a parent of a child with autism. I so wish I could write like he does. It made me cry...a lot. I want to share a little bit of it with you, if that's okay. It reminded me that even as we go forward on this journey we still need to look back, every once in a while.
A few days ago, I was talking to a mom whose son is nearing five. He’s completely non-verbal. He has never uttered a single sound that wasn’t a moan or a shriek or some other shapeless noise. She said the following words, and as I type them I can still feel freezing water creeping through my blood as painfully as when I heard her say them.
“What if he never talks?”
She said it as a rhetorical question, like one you call out to the universe or the deity you are having a shaky relationship with at the moment. You don’t really believe an answer will come, and as with many of the questions we have as parents of an autistic child, no one can really give you one. We walk similar paths, but all of our children are different. There will always be steps we have to take alone. But we can sit with each other as we ask the question and understand much of the fear and despair it is born from without judgment.
For those of us whose children begin to find little foot and hand holds on the mountain of speech they climb, each inch they earn fills us with renewed hope. There came the day my son ran up to me after school and said “Dah-deh”, and I thought I would cry enough to fill every crack and furrow left in the earth by the years of challenges we have often feared were insurmountable.
But when I look back down the path and see the parents of the non-verbal children still searching the smooth, holdless face of this towering rock, tears and sorrow fill my gut. I remember being back there, secretly loathing those who had gone on ahead of us. I am not proud of this, but neither do I want to forget it.
We’re all part of this unfathomable relay of parents trying our best to ferry each other up the mountain in any way we can. But we can’t really climb back down and show others the way up. It doesn’t work like that, just as it couldn’t for us with those who came before us. The path is different for each of us. But I can still call back and give them what’s probably the best advice anyone’s given to me so far - “Just keep going, because that’s the way through.”
Like every parent in the audience (and it was packed) we started holding our breath right about now...phew, she got it. Oh, can't breath yet we still have shepherd #6 to go.... 
