I’d like to invite you to imagine, for a minute, that doctors have told you that your child may never walk or talk. He may be institutionalized. He may never relate. He may never be able to tell you he loves you, may never want to. And now imagine that the world presents you with one possibility: proof that some children with his problem can be social, can be creative. He might even walk or talk. But there’s one catch: you’ll have to spend every waking moment of the next few year of your life with him. You’ll have to work like you’ve never worked before
Would you do it?
Such was the problem presented to me and my family in 1997 when we were told that our son showed some of the earliest signs of autism anyone had ever seen. By six months old, Walker could sometimes be found wildly thrashing about with frenzied body movements, other times limp and staring off into space, he seemed more beguiled by the light that flooded in from our windows than interested in his sister, Elizabeth, my husband Cliff or me. We spent years working with him, using a then-controversial technique created by developmental psychiatrist Stanley Greenspan called DIR-- which essentially meant that we had to work with our son creating juicy interactive moments several hours a day. We were exhausted, frazzled, but the results were remarkable. Our son Walker became more animated, empathic, charming, and outgoing than we imagined possible. I wrote a book about our experience called The Boy Who Loved Windows; Opening the Heart and Mind of a Child With Autism (De Capo 2003). Memoirist and O, The Oprah Magazine’s Martha Beck called the book Part Medical detective story, part testament to the power of love, all fascinating and beautifully written. A wonderful read. (For marketing and sales information, please see accompanying materials)
When I began writing The Boy Who Loved Windows six years ago, I found myself sometimes waking up with excitement in the middle of the night to write. I was sitting on one of the biggest stories of the new century and I knew it. The brain was being rethought. Having a baby with autism in a time when science knew how much the brain could learn and change, and when pioneers were just discovering how quickly it might be able to do it was intoxicating. The book wove together reflections, personal drama (lost friendships; marital tensions), ideas and facts about all the new research out there, and speculations about their connections. Maybe one of the most important issues I dramatized was the story of how I learned about the sensitivity of people with autism. Imagine your sensory world scrambled and unregulated, your auditory intake an incessant rock station – or worse, mere static –blasting in your ears. Imagine your kitchen light as bright as a searchlight, boring into your cornea every time you turn it on. Imagine yourself in clothes so irritating that they seem lined with metal scraping brushes.
The Boy Who Loved Windows is an invitation into my brain as I try to figure out what is happening to my son, watching his weird, inexplicable behaviors.
