The comments are ego-building, flattering, and...

I feel like such a fraud.

The weird thing is, I might have written such a letter to someone in a similar situation before I had kids.

I didn't set out to have autistic kids. If someone had told me all I would have gone through with them, it would have scared me to death. I would have reconsidered having kids at all.

Which would have been such a mistake...

You never know what you can do until you have to.

You never know what you can do...until a gun is held to your head.

All of these adjustments for autism happened very, very gradually. We had time to get used to it.

You can get used to almost anything, even though you think you can't. That's why I wonder if tests for, say, Down's syndrome and other conditions---prenatal tests---might be a mistake.

It's one thing to be prepared. But how many people will knowingly accept disaster, and try to make the best of it?

Again...you never know what you can do until you don't have any chance or choice. Sometimes choice...becomes an excuse for ....cowardice isn't quite the right word, but it's close. For taking the easy route.

For losing the joy you might have had---for fear of being...inconvenienced.

Right now Eric is laughing, and coloring in a RUGRATS paint-with-water coloring book. He's been in a good mood all day. We got him a small talking toy phone, and he's been playing with that.

It takes so little to make him happy...and he's such a joy when he is happy. He will come and cuddle with you, and lay his head on your shoulder.

I'm so glad there's not a prenatal test for autism....yet. If there had been, would we have panicked, when told the diagnosis? Would Eric have never been?

It would have been our loss. Our eternal loss.

These are the saddest words of all: he (or she) might have been...

Such prenatal tests gives us knowledge, but knowledge isn't wisdom. Wisdom knows enough to weigh the pros and cons, and can't be panicked into a rash decision.

Someday parents will only want perfect children, and with genetic manipulation, will get them. When that happens, something will be robbed from the human experience.

It's not our strengths or our perfections that make us intersting---it's our imperfections. Should we strive to cure all handicaps? Certainly. No one should be left in torment, physical or mental. Yet that's very different from saying---if we can't cure the handicap, we dare not bring the child into the world.

Yet many people think that, these days. Is denying a child existence being...kind?

It's not easy...but then, worthwhile things seldom are.

Eric is such a mixture of a small child and a teenager....

Maybe he'll never tell me he loves me, but I'm awfully glad he's here, I want him to someday live in a group home, perhaps hold down a routine job, but that's for him, for his independence. We'll never turn him out without such a place for him...

We love him, and always will. Taking care of him is its own reward...

For that no one needs to hold a gun...to my head.