Working my way through the Sunday paper on a rainy morning, I was deeply moved by several personal stories of Utah parents and children living with autism. A national story last week revealed Utah’s rate of kids with various types of autism to be 20 times higher than in the mid-1980s. That is due partly to progress in diagnosing the disorder, but no one can quite explain why the numbers keep climbing.

Even with one child pretty well launched and the other getting closer, I have moments when gratitude for their physical and mental health just cascade over me. Since no research has adequately determined what, exactly, causes autism I found myself wondering as I read The Salt Lake Tribune stories: Why not me, and why not our family? Were my pregnancies somehow better and stronger than so many other women’s? I mean there were a few rare occasions when I sipped a half-glass of wine. I took a daily run right up to the seventh month of both pregnancies–until my bulging belly and aching hip and pelvic joints all but screamed at me to stop. Was any of that healthy? Or did my children and I simply escape some bad cosmic joke?

Nothing about parenting is easy, but you don’t even stop to think about that when trying to navigate through its daily haze. One day you are not a parent. The next day, guess what? You have a kid! Parenting is at once fascinating and joyous; it’s also scary as hell. And it never seems to be done. Two nights ago, just one mile from our home, a whole family was all but wiped out when an apparently drunk 17-year-old boy slammed his Jeep Cherokee into their VW Jetta. The mother, five months pregnant, was killed. So were two of her children, 11 and nine. The father was driving and escaped with a broken rib. Another boy, age 6, is fighting for his life today.

What were the last words or feelings that mother shared with her little family, I wonder. No doubt she was simply being a parent in the hours leading up to her last second on earth. Perhaps she threw a load of wash into the machine, helped the youngest one tie his shoes, braided her little girl’s hair. Just mom stuff — the duties that come with the job and increase as you go along. Nothing big, nothing earth-shattering. It’s all part of the territory of parenting, and you do it with little regard that suddenly, it might end later that night when some stupid, careless kid careens into the family sedan.

It’s odd I would even think of the mundane activities of parenthood, given the profound tragedy of this event and how it will unfold over the next few days, months, years.

It’s unbearably sad.

In reporter Lisa Rosetta’s Trib story about a Provo couple and their 12-year-old son with autism, the father, Joe Parry, said something quite profound. It’s profound in its relation to rearing and loving a child with a disability, but it’s applicable to any parent really, and pretty well describes what should be our main job description. Joe Parry has discovered something about the role of parent, and it certainly isn’t about molding or bending a child to some unrealistic state of perfection.

Joe Parry said he finally had to step back and let his son Will, just be Will.

He said: “I’ve got a pretty amazing person here who is very much alive — the greatest lesson I’ve ever learned.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 11th, 2007 at 10:26 am and is filed under All, Community, Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.