I AM MY SON'S FIRST SIGHTWORD: GROWING A CHILD WITH AUTISM details a mother's unique path through the first thirteen years of her autistic son's life by describing the struggle and heartache, direction and misdirection, endless choices and legal kerfuffles, hard challenges and emotional smackdowns, and the blissful bittersweet triumphs of her boy. Kucia writes about her typically-developing son's scary abrupt descent into Autism after a batch of vaccines and a spiderbite change their family trajectory permanently. She realizes that she must reteach and slow down every aspect of life to help him, to advocate for his educational rights, to recognize food as medicine, to refine reality, and to discover a new definition of what it means to be normal. She educates herself about this varied, confusing, whole-body spectrum disorder, focusing on the particular details of her child's illness, while driving literally and figuratively to the ends of the earth to help her child recover. She celebrates the alternative, the weird, and the different ways her son teaches her as much as she teaches him, and the significance of her own emotional healing as the mother of a disabled child. Working through extensive amounts of intensive intervention, Kucia tells of her son's positive experiences in traditionally-recognized Autism therapies such as Speech Therapy, Occupational Therapy, and ABA. In addition, she finds sweet successes and significant improvements utilizing non-traditional methods toward treating his Autism, such as Surfing, Farming, Digital Animation, Slowfood Cooking, Gluten-free Diet, and Gut Remediation. The Autism that landed on her family provides a series of lessons in life expectations, tests the fluidity of self and soul toward emergency situations, and requires innovative ways to respond to tragedy with hope, dignity, and grace. She explores the anger she feels toward the circumstances of her child's disability, understands that it is human to be angry, and that healing the mother is as important as healing the child. She uses sass-infused prose and musings of fierce mama love to detail the happenings of an Autism life. Kucia underscores the importance of never giving up as a critical element in her boy's healing, stresses the gravity of appropriate remediation and intervention, and acknowledges this huge challenge of Autism as a warning sign that demands immediate attention. She explores the power and challenge of words and perception, and the importance of appropriate diet and gut remediation. She finds cartoon animation as a way to access the inner workings of her boy, and delivers farming as a supportive option in his future employment honoring the slow predictable cycles of plant life. She strongly advocates for starting where Thaddeus is socially, academically, and emotionally, from his interests, from his passion, as a way to support his development. She learns to make all behavior functional, including hers, and indulges the reader in self-deprecating humor about her anxiety and emotional distress by sharing little scraps of poetry to highlight the current situation so many Autism families face, softening the excruciating details and intense emotions into ethereal haikus, faux-sonnets, and rhyming couplets. Kucia explains her quirky inner thought processes, and the reasoning behind remediation choices she makes for her boy, peppering the narrative with bawdy language, sometimes strong uncomfortable images and raw emotions, painting endless uncensored word pictures of the journey an Autism parent experiences. She celebrates her son's tribe of teachers, doctors, therapists, programs, providers, and friends in thoughtful, poignant, and funny ways with the intention of educating and demonstrating the levels of intensity necessary in Autism treatment. Kucia provides hope, direction, and humor as she invites readers into new ways of seeing Autism, a national health epidemic.
About the Author: Kristin Kucia is a writer and an educator in southern California. You can contact her at kristinkucia@gmail.com