Day One

The Day Of Our Appointment, Nothing Was Okay

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All small children are weathermen. They may not know much but they know good and bad, scary and safe, and when they’re checking the weather of their world the sky they look into is their parent’s face. If you’re the parent, no matter what kind of tornado is coming, it’s your job to act like everything is okay.

The day of our appointment, nothing was okay, but I was pretending like it was. We took a bus there, my son sitting beside me, and an aging hippie sat in front of us. He turned around, studied my four year old for a minute, and this ponytailed man told me he had a gift: he could see auras. He said my son’s aura was amazing — blues and purples, which were very good, and that my son was going to be an extraordinary person. Then he looked at a spot just over my head and his smile disappeared and he shuddered, and said nothing, and turned back around in his seat.

Apparently whatever color my aura was, it was bad. That didn’t surprise me. We were on our way to get my son tested for autism, a possible diagnosis which had gone undetected by the dozen or so doctors who had pronounced my son perfectly healthy but spoiled. Several of these medical professionals had advised hitting him, advice I had not taken.

The certainty he had autism had come, not from a doctor, but from a preschool director. She had told me…