the small journey of John Big John

ASD Resources

john@johnbigjohn.com (john roedel) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:42:07 GMT

Per request:

Here is a quick list of Autism-related resources that served as fantastic support for our family. Keep in mind that all kids who are in the spectrum are different and have different things that will or will not work for them. This is just the things that have really worked for us. The most important thing I learned through the process of exploring some of these options was to have an open mind when it came to items that could help our son. Once I got my Godzilla-like ego out of the way and realized that I did not in fact know everything about Autism it made it easier to be willing to try new things.

Not every new therapy or practice we have ever tried has worked, but I am glad we have been opened minded through the years.

Here is the list of things that have been really important for us:

STRIDE LEARNING CENTER - A developmental pre-school here in Cheyenne. They were one of the first people to grab us by the hand and help us get services for our then 2-year old. He spent 4 very important years with the staff members of STRIDE and I cannot think of one negative experience. Not sure where we would have ended up as a family without this incredible place. For more info on STRIDE click....HERE!!!

SUPPLEMENTS AND VITAMINS - For the past six year we have given our Noah a lot of various dietary supplements and vitamins. I was skeptical at first of what their effectiveness would end up being. Years later, I can tell you without hesitation that they worked. We use a doctor formulated plan of various different things ranging from mass doses of vitamin C to enzymes to fish oil. I am firmly convinced that the combination we use has helped Noah with behaviors, mental focus, and weight gain...all of which were desperate needed at the time.

HIPPOTHERAPY - Who would have thought horseback riding would have been so formative in my son's journey through the corn maze of Autism?? It has been an incredible experience which has helped to strengthen his muscles, focus, and gives him a serious boost in confidence. Operating a wild animal is not in the Roedel Family playbook...so I am proud and amazed by him!

EFT - Emotional Freedom Technique. It is a form of needle-less acupuncture. Again, this was something that I went into exploring with a high level of disbelief. I can tell you with all honesty that it was something that not only helped our Noah out, but was something that aided my wife and I during the years when our stress, guilt, and panic levels were all at toxic levels. It is a practice that I still use everyday to help maintain my sanity. I would try to explain it more here, but I am a poor spokesperson for it. Here is more info from the person I learned EFT from...Click Here!!!

ADAMS CAMP- For those of you who follow my blog you know how much Adams Camp has meant to the life of our family. In case you are new to my site or in case you forgot about the miracle of Adams Camp here is a link to read what I have written in the past about this camp for children living with special needs: Adams Camp!!!!

Helen Sumner - An angel in Noah's life. P.A.S.S

GLUTEN FREE DIET - I was so grouchy to employ the gluten-free diet at first. I did not want my son to be denied his gluten...even though I had no idea what in the hell gluten was. Years later, again, I can say without pause that this has been one of the best things that happened to our son. In our case, he had to go on the diet because his tummy was not breaking down the wheat that he consumed so it just sat there and poisoned him...so it was not much of a choice at the beginning. I would like to think that we would have come to the gluten-free diet eventually anyways because once he started it we saw a dramatic change in cognitive focus and emotional control.

I am certain that there are other therapies and practices we have employed to help keep our family afloat. I will post more from time to time...

ASD parents, what have you found to be most helpful in your work with your own child?

I need a scriptwriter

john@johnbigjohn.com (john roedel) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 23:52:10 GMT

Characters in movies and on TV have it made. They get to be interesting, witty, dramatic, wise, and compelling all the time. (Unless, of course, they are in a Seth Rogen movie, or they star in a sitcom with Ashton Kutcher). Every word these characters utter has meaning and is laced with importance and meaning. Whereas when I speak it sounds like I was raised by animals in the Appalachian Mountains.

When having a conversation with me this is what it usually looks like:

Person: Hey John, how are you?

John: Me good. There be wind-ness outside on this today. Is there not?

Person: Uh, yes. It is very windy isn't it. That is Wyoming for ya!

John: Wind make me angry!

Person: Oh -

John: ANGRY!!!!

Person: ....

John: I see cloud yesterday that look like my best friend Mr. Badger. See it, as well?

Person: I'm sorry. I don't think I know a Mr. Badger.

John: He furry and bitey. Very very bitey. He bite John.

Person: Oh my...um...I forgot I had to get to the store to get-

John: In face!!!

Person: Take it easy...

John: Face itch now. Face itch.

Person: Dear God...goodbye!

John: Me itch!!!!

This is a very typical interaction with me. I am horrible at holding a conversation with other humans. I just can't do it. When confronted with having to speak to someone I lose my social filter as well as the use of proper english. I just let the neurotic monkey in my brain start chattering away.

What I need is a script writer like all my favorite fictional characters have. With a pro crafting my dialog I would be much more respected by my peers. With somebody penning my words here is what it couLD look like:

Person: Hi John, how are you?

John: Well hello there my good friend. I am very well at this moment. However, I must testify that this wicked wind is eroding my good will!

Person: Wow. How well said! It is very windy outside, isn't it?

John: It is as if the good Lord is punishing us with this tempest. Though, at least I should add that at least this howling wind proves that God does in fact still care about us enough to give us this penance. I pray that I never lose the hope that once the eye of the storm is upon us I will revel in the peace and calm that lies within.

Person: John, what you have just said is the most eloquent thing I have ever heard. You are apparently very smart, and might I add that you extremely healthy and macho. May I offer you whatever money I have in my wallet?

I will never be able to speak like that because my brain is too dusty and it gets too jumbled when I start talking to people. I have not used my organic computer enough these days. I am becoming mentally mushy. This is a situation that I am working on.

I started taking Ginseng recently to try and combat my cognitive sloth. This is a dietary supplement that is alleged to help with mental clarity. Although, after a week of steady use I have to admit that I am becoming very skeptical of it's claims. So far the only thing that Ginseng has helped me with is inducing dreams of spiders, talking motorcycles, and a reoccurring vision of what I would look like with a nipple on my forehead. (dream analysts get cracking on that!)

As I am becoming more and more socially incompetent over time I am finding myself enjoying the process of writing more and more. At least here on the page I have complete control over what I may end up saying....most of the time.

Me itch!!

Lessons From Flora

john@johnbigjohn.com (john roedel) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 06:53:20 GMT

Sometimes when I sit down in front of my laptop to begin working on a blog entry I am already apprehensive. I fear that I am going to come off sounding like I have either just gotten done eating a pan of "special" brownies or I have recently suffered a significant brain injury before writing.

This is definitely one of those times. I already know how this sounds...but I just have to write about flowers.

Yep, flowers.

I have been thinking a lot about flowers lately. I am convinced they are a fantastic example of how I want to live my life. So they have been the subject of my thoughts over the past few days.

Humor me. I want you to close your eyes and for just a moment picture a flower in the movie theater in your skull.

I mean it. Really think about a flower.You can choose any kind of flower you want. Hell, even make one up. Just make sure that you give your flower a little detail.

What does it look like? What color is it? How does it sit in the ground? How many petals? What does it smell like?

Right now, for me, there is nothing that quite compares to the beauty of a flower.

I recognize that I am entering the age bracket where some men my age go ape-shit crazy and start to lose touch with reality. Perhaps I am going nuts, after all how many dudes will dedicate a night to writing about flowers? Not many I am sure of it. At least with my version of my md-life crisis I haven't cashed in my children's college fund, got some face ink, and started collecting old Rodney Dangerfield memorabilia...yet.

That said, I believe flowers to be a perfect example of how to look at life. Before you unsubscribe to my blog please let me explain:

Flowers are amazing teachers.

They rest in the Earth in a bed of bright colors to help remind us of the power of creation and of life. They are able to grow in the most fertile of soil in well cultivated gardens and they can grow in rocks and in dry and unforgiving cracked dirt.


Flowers teach us that life and creation will always find a way. They are an example that creation is not something that happened in the past. Creation is happening all around us. Our world is a work in progress. Creation isn't just for the Old Testament folks.

Creation is happening all the time! It's all around us!

Flowers demonstrate their gratitude for life by stretching toward the sun. A flower will bend and contort themselves in a desperate attempt to be bathed in the light. While basking in the warmth of the sun they express their thankfulness by blossoming in a bright and colorful explosion.

The flowers dance in gratitude under the glow of our sun. They celebrate the life they have been given by blooming. Flowers teach us to say "thank you" for being alive.

It has occurred to me that flowers are joyful servants of the human race. They offer themselves up to our shears so that they may be placed in a cold vase in some office building. Flowers offer their essence in hopes that maybe someone will take notice how beautiful they are and take in their scent. A scent that can steal the person who is smelling it away from where they are and back in time to their grandfathers garden years ago.   Flowers have the ability to transport us away from the present and bring us into our memory with just one smell.

Flowers know what they are. They are a gift...and they give of themselves selflessly.

As it slowly wilts the flower final lesson is the most powerful. It's last item to teach me is that this physical life is very delicate and temporary.  Just like us, a flowers life is bookended by the same two events: Creation and Death.

They scratch and claw to break through the surface of the Earth, then they dance with the sun for a bit, soon after they they drop their petals and fade away. In essence we do the same thing. We come to be, we experience life, and then we surrender so that we return to where we came from.

A flower lives without being afraid of the end. It does not fear the changing of the season that is to come....it is firmly rooted in the present.

I can learn a lot from a flower.

A flower teaches me to be aware of the gift of life and how beautifully God created the universe.

A flower teaches me to be grateful. To give thanks for my life. No matter what type of soil I am planted in. Just keep dancing under the sun....

A flower teaches me to give of myself. To be selfless. I have to be willing to be of service.

A flower teaches me to be mindful of how temporary life is and not to fear the end of it. To instead, relish each moment. A flower does not live in the mistakes of the past, nor does it fret about the future. It is in the present. I need to work on this one the most.

Flowers exist effortlessly whereas I struggle and rage against all the ways the world has wronged me.

They are simple. They are creative. They are grateful. They are servants. They embrace the now.

I pray that someday I will be more like they are.

I have been thinking a lot about flowers.

This Ozymandian Life - Recorded: 10/22/11

john@johnbigjohn.com (john roedel) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 16:25:40 GMT

I have been a member of Ozymandian Theater since 2005. We are a sketch comedy and improv company that performs 5-6 times a year here in Cheyenne, Wyoming. All of the sketch comedy that we use is original. As far as we know we are the only group in the great state of Wyoming doing something like this.

Our sketch shows typically look something like this:

or this:

However, on October 22nd 2011 we did something a little different. A couple of our members are HUGE "This American Life" listeners and they thought it would be a challenge to try and pull off a completely improvised version of the program in front of an audience. Five minutes before the show started we got the topic "I'm going to give you a knuckle sandwich" from the crowd and crafted a 60 minute radio show around it.

As in "This American Life" our show bounced between serious and funny. We covered such topics as High School bullying, interpersonal conflicts, and sibling rivalries. Rest assured that there were some laughs to be had, but we were successful in keeping a good balance.

Ozymandian Theater got some much needed help from The Cheyenne East High Improv Club. They did a great job in supporting us!

Here is a breakdown of the show:

Rick Simineo served as the host/Ira Glass impersonator.

Segment 1 "The Secret Door" - Sarah Yosten

Segment 2 "Tough Times at Crawford High" - Mark Horan

Segment 3 "Road Trip Gone Bad" - Karla Dieters

Segment 4 "Million Dollar Johnny" - John Roedel

The show ended up clocking in right around 55 minutes. When you have some time I urge you to take a listen:

For more info on Ozymandian Theater visit: OZY!!!

2012 Resolutions - The Year Of The Pompadour

john@johnbigjohn.com (john roedel) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 21:58:16 GMT

For those of you who have been reading my blog entries in order to fulfill your court-ordered community service, you may remember from past blogs that I am not a big fan of making New Years Resolutions.   I have blogged (like in this example: The New New Year) before about my aversion to take part in the practice of making a beginning of the year pledge to better myself.   Making a New Years resolution is something that is typically as appealing to me as being forced to sit down and read a script from Glee. (NOTE FOR GLEE WRITERS: Old episodes of "Leave it to Beaver" have more realistic dialog than the people in your Glee-niverse have. Please either quit having musical numbers that I want to hear so I can quit watching or actually go to a high school and listen to how young people talk.)

I don't want to bore you again with the detailed reasons why I have been so against making resolutions every year. Here is the synopsis:

Making a New Years Resolution is completely counter to the whole goalless way of living I have carved out for myself. I don't like making expectations for myself or for anything for that matter. At first glance that sounds like a very zen-like way of living but truth be told my lack of setting up expectations has much more to do with apathy and fear than it does Budda.

I don't want to set resolutions/goals because I don't want to fail at them. To me, failing at something is a far worse of a crime than inactivity. You have heard the old adage "If first you don't succeed try, try again." Well, that phrase is not for me. My motto is "If first you don't succeed than drink some scotch and go to sleep in the broth of your own failure". I would agree that my saying is not as catchy.

I am not alone in staying away from making resolutions. A lot of other people don't do it either. Some people don't make resolutions because they believe they are already doing great and they don't really need to make any changes. Rest assured that is not my motivation. I have the self-awareness to realize that I am a hot 37-year old mess. I should have been making resolutions years ago. It has been estimated that I am 130,000 resolutions away from becoming considered a well adjusted adult.

Other folks don't make resolutions because they feel they are victimized by the world. That the cards are so stacked against them that no matter what changes they were to make it would not matter. That is not me either. The universe has not conspired against me. I do not believe that any of my issues that need to be resolved are the result of anyone else but myself. I have made my own bed. All of my problems are self-inflicted. I am both the supplier and consumer of my own troubles. The only thing I am a victim of is the fact that I was born in the same time as Ryan Gosling who stole some of my Hollywood magic and sex appeal.

In the years gone by as the ball drops in Time Square and as Kathy Griffith sexually harasses Anderson Cooper on CNN I have joined the ranks of the few that refuse to make a resolution of any kind. I hate making promises to myself that I know I won't keep.

The question begs to be asked. "Why won't I keep them?" The answer is simple:

Fear. It is all about the fear.

I am afraid to make changes because I may fail and go back to who I was. It is easier to stay who I am without yo-yo'ing back and forth.

I am afraid to take chances. Afraid to reform opinions. Afraid to meet new people. Afraid to take on new challenges. Afraid to set professional goals. Afraid of it all...because failure is not something I handle very well. I am a poor sport.

However, as I begin to gray and wrinkle I am becoming increasingly tired of my fear. WIth that in mind I am going to break my rule of not making resolutions. This year I resolve to be less afraid. I resolve to quit letting my fear of failure make choices for me. I resolve to allow myself to fail so miserably and gloriously that it will cause women to shriek and children to pass out.  I resolve to put myself in positions of such great risk of failure that I could possible end up as a You-Tube punch line.

2012 is the year where I will try to manage my fear. If I am able to corral some of my own debilitating neuroses I believe that I will be able to actually meet some goals (Yikes!!) I am going to set got myself. If I can get over myself a little bit here is a list of goals I would like to accomplish in the upcoming year:

#1 Smile More - Quit being a grump-assed grump grump.  Risk smiling at people.  They may need it. Who knows...maybe they will smile back.

#2 Run The Bolder Boulder - J-ROE vs. a 10 K. That has comedy written all over it.

#3 Grow an awesome pompador - Don't worry about looking like a Bollywood actor and grow it tall and proud. Who knows maybe I will be able to finally be tall enough to get on a roller coaster.

#4 To go to more concerts - I love to go to concerts and it has been a practice that I have let slip over the years. They are therapeutic for me. I need more therapy.

#5 Be less of a "I told you so parent" - I am asking my kids to take me way too seriously. They need guidance, they don't need my power trips.

#6 To write something daily - My three blog readers are going to be so lucky!!!

#7 Read everything that David Sedaris has ever written - I stopped because he breaks my heart because he is so much better than me. He is brilliant and it makes me feel like I am writing on a bathroom wall. I am going to get over my jealousy and surround myself with his books.

#8 Quit apologizing for who I am - You don't like me? Or you think I am a nutjob. That is fine. Just quit expecting me to say how sorry I am for annoying you....to your face. I probably will still apologize to you in my mind. Baby steps. Johnny needs to quit trying to make everyone like him. Johnny also needs to stop talking about himself in the third person.

#9 Return to Stand Up Comedy- Here is the big one. I tried Stand Up years ago and I failed so miserably that it sent me into a decade long funk of punishment and sleeplessness. It is a memory that haunts me like a McRib. I have to face that dragon again so I can get over how badly I sucked at Stand Up Comedy back in 1995. Lets face it. I am a man of limited ability. The skills I have (albeit average) are talking in front of people and making fun of myself. I am sure I have the ability to have an average routine that makes people soggy with booze chuckle. I must redeem myself.

#10 Wear more plaid - Yep. Get ready.

#11 Become a grill master - Low and slow. Must remember low and slow.

#12 Visit the ocean - I always miss the ocean when I am away from it. I have to push myself to allow my family to travel more.

#13 Write a short story that earns me at least $15.00 - If that is too much to ask for I would take at least a letter of rejection that at least does not make me feel like drinking Windex. If that is too much to ask for I would at least want the letter to make me feel like I drank the ammonia-free Windex.

#14 Make my wife laugh at least once a day - It is the least I can do for what she has to deal with. I would be willing to do just about anything to induce laughter. However, chest-waxing is off limits. If writing or comedy does not pan out for me the only other option I have at income is in my ample amounts of grizzly chest fur.

#15 To allow myself to take on new opportunities - I often pass up on chances to do something pretty cool because I don't trust myself to be able to do it. Who knows? Maybe these are things that I really can't do. At least I should try...and if I fail it will make for a good blog entry.

These are just a few of the things that I can accomplish in 2012 if I just resolve to be a little less fearful that I usually am. Notice how I did not say anything about snakes, clowns, wasps, or falling space debris. Those are fears that are healthy and I will never try to overcome.

Happy New Year people. A year from now I will check in with you to let you know how I did. I have a feeling that maybe I will be making a resolution to never make a resolution again. That may just be the fear talking though....

Guess I'm Doing Fine

john@johnbigjohn.com (john roedel) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 03:47:18 GMT

After six hard weeks of battling for her life my dear mother passed away on November 23rd with her family by her side. I have been absent from doing any writing (or anything else really) over the past month and a half as I spent most of my waking hours with my mom as she made her peace with our world and drifted into the loving arms of God. During those six weeks I was able to witness endless moments of struggle, miracles, setbacks, and graces. I saw my mom slowly slip through the veil that separate us from the divine.

The experience of the past six weeks have forever marked me.

She is gone and I suddenly feel as if I am on an alien planet. I now inhabit a world where I no longer have any living parents.I am a 37 year old orphan. It took me about ten minutes to actually type the previous sentence out. Everything feels different.

My family sometime during the ealy 80's.

I am terrified to write anything tonight. I am not exactly sure what will spill out of my head right now. I have been told by a few people that it would be good to blog about how I feel at the moment. The problem is I am not really trusting my feelings these days. My emotions are all over the map.

When people ask me how I am doing I am having a very difficult time playing the social game where I answer that question with the standard "Doing fine, how about you?" script that we have use. These days when a well-intended person asks me "How I'm doing/holding up/getting along/etc I can only answer with:

"Who the hell knows"

I have no idea how I am doing. I am exhausted. I am sad. I am suspended in memories of the past six weeks that keep me lost in my mind for hours at a time. There is a heavy cloud of loss hanging over me. I lost a heavenly body that I became so dependant on to help me navigate my way through this life.

Admittedly these feelings that are rushing over me are extremely selfish. I am being selfish. My mom is in a much better place where her suffering has melted away into eternal peace and rest. I very much believe her to be with her God, her beloved husband, and in the company of all of her old friends that passed on years ago. My mom is at rest..whereas I am left in the murky waters of my own selfish grief.

Grieving is a very tricky thing. It is a process that require us to invite various emotions into our heart at the same time. To grieve means that we have to split ourselves in half. Part of us should be devastated where the other half should be joyful. I am being asked to celebrate my moms life while at the same being allowed to be heartbroken that she is gone. I am haunted by the last six weeks that my mom endured while I am inspired by her own courage and the love of the people who supported our family during this time. I would crazy to not question the plan God had in store for my mom while at the same time find myself grateful for all of the divine graces that surrounded me during her last few days.

I am torn in half between sadness for me and happiness for my mom.

How am I doing?

I guess I'm doing fine.

GUESS I'M DOING FINE

By Beck

There's a blue bird at my window
I can't hear the songs he sings
All the jewels in heaven
They don't look the same to me

I just wade the tides that turned
Till I learn to leave the past behind

It's only lies that I'm living
It's only tears that I'm crying
It's only you that I'm losing
Guess I'm doing fine

All the battlements are empty
And the moon is laying low
Yellow roses in the graveyard
Have no time to watch them grow

Now I bade a friend farewell
I can do whatever pleases me

It's only lies that I'm living
It's only tears that I'm crying
It's only you that I'm losing
Guess I'm doing fine

Press my face up to the window
To see how warm it is inside
See the things that I've been missing
Missing all this time

It's only lies that I'm living
It's only tears that I'm crying
It's only you that I'm losing
Guess I'm doing fine (x2)

Shock and Autism (2009 re-post)

john@johnbigjohn.com (john roedel) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 17:18:57 GMT

I am getting in the unhealthy habit of reposting old blogs.

Maybe I am running out of things to say, which is a development that my friends and family would all gather around and celebrate over. Maybe it is because I am spending a lot of time writing for school. Maybe it is because that I am just super-lazy and writing a new blog entry today would require me to skip my post-lunch nap.

The reason I have selected this entry is because I have finally bit the bullet and put myself out there. I have sent out close to 7 million (give or take 6.999 million) query letters to various literary agents in hopes that I can get some of my writing published. I have had offers from some folks in the past but never felt comfortable with what was being proposed...so now i am putting myself out there.

One of the literary agencies contacted me this morning to have me submit something I have written that was a favorite of mine. I chose "Shock and Autism". This was something I wrote almost three years ago and after re-reading it today it serves as a reminder to how different my life looks today than I had ever planned on it being. It is an entry that paints with large brushstrokes the theme of the book I want to write: "If a schlep-o like me can be a parent to a child living with ASD...than anyone can!"

I am re-editing this entry and sprucing it up a bit, but before I do I thought I would submit it again to you all in it's raw format. I never ever go back and read anything of mine, because I frankly find myself incredibly boring... but maybe this is one you have missed and maybe it will be of some use to you or someone you know.

Here you go...from 2009:

SHOCK AND AUTISM

I just drank the most delicious sip of Carmel Macchiato ever! It was foamy caramel goodness that gave my sensitive taste buds a warm long hug. No, not an awkwardly long "Crazy Uncle Bert" hug....but a nice comforting one. It was a brief moment of raw yumminess and I am already sad that it has passed me by. Anyway....

I should really be working on something else right now. I have an extremely important deadline for a writing project that I am working on that is coming up very soon. (by very soon I mean like 48 hours) I am working on a writing fellowship that has come down to one last task....and it is a rather large one! I have spent sometime this morning trying to work on it, but I keep getting mentally sidetracked. Which I know for me is not a rare occurrence, I have the capacity to be sidetracked by the sound of the lady at the table next to me over-chew her bagel. I am easily distracted...blame my ADHD or the fact that I am the founder and prezzie of The Self Sabotage club.

So instead of remaining focused on the important task that is in front of me I need to post something here about something that is banging around my skull cave. I think in order to well on my fellowship work I need to purge my head...so here it goes. This will be a bit of a more somber blog entry. If you are among those who hate these particular type of entry please scroll all the way down to the end for a more juvenile entry.

I am not who I was a few years ago. I am a bit different.

However, there is still a lot about me that remains the same.

I am still the guy who will walk face first into a sliding glass door in Las Vegas.

I am still the dude who has no problem humiliating myself and my ancestors on a stage doing whatever it takes to try and make people laugh. You know the reason I am starting to disbelieve that ghosts actually exist is because I think by now I would have one of my dead relatives come visit me and tell me that I need to "quit disrobing on stage if I want to be admitted into the Roedel Afterlife Country Club".

I remain the man who can spend the day listening to the same cd over and over while sitting under a tree in Lions Park.

I am still the guy who is thinks that the best way to die is by Crab Leg overdose.

I am the Roedel that will make up his own catch phrases in hopes that one will catch on. Some of you might remember some of my greatest hits like "Feel The Sting".

For those people who have to endure me on a daily basis I am confident that there is much of me that remains true to the John Roedel system that I spent many years crafting. I understand though that underneath all my finely crafted neurosis something has fundamentally mutated.

I am changed.

I have been changed by the bombs that fell.

Of course everyone changes as they "grow up" and start playing adult. We take on new responsibilities and we start embracing more serious ventures. While I must admit I have attempted to grow up a bit I don't in any way shape or form believe that I have truly entered my serious adulthood phase yet.

Change began nine years ago when my wife became preggers. I can still vividly recall the wave of emotion that swept over me as I heard the news. At first I was overcome with a vibration of happiness for us, I knew my wife was born to be a mother and I had no doubt that this child was going to be raised in a loving home. I won't lie though...that was not the only emotion I felt that particular August afternoon. My 700 pound hairy ego raised his head from the pit of my bowels (eek...sorry for the imagery there) to start causing trouble. As I laid down in the grass in front of Hartman Hall to let the news set it I had a running dialog with my ego that sounded like this:

STUPID FAT EGO (SFE): Hey, John. Congrats on the Baby stuff I guess.

JOHN: Thanks Stupid Fat Ego. It is pretty awesome.

SFE: Awesome? Hmmm.

JOHN: Hmmm?

SFE: Oh. Nothing...it's just that I wonder how you adjust to how much your life is gonna change.

JOHN: It won't change that much.

SFE: Yeah right. Didn't you watch "Three Men and a Baby." and the follow up "Three men and a little lady"? Those three dudes life was altered forever...and that was with three of them!! And by the way you ain't no Ted Danson.

JOHN: Well of course things will change a little. I will grant you that....

SFE: It will be interesting to see how you handle all that. After all you are pretty self-centered.

JOHN: No I am not. I just put myself first most of the time.

SFE: Uh huh. Good luck with all that. I will be here waiting for your midlife crisis. When are we going to Vegas again?

JOHN: I don't like you. (pause) How about next month?

Ok. So in hindsight it appears that I may suffer from some sort of psychological disorder that allows me to have running conversations with myself. It also appears that part of my problem with adjusting to being a parent was the fact that the only real experience I had with children was watching "Three Men and a Baby".

I made a deal with myself that I was not going to let my ego get in the way of being a daddy. I was going to not subscribe to the notion that I had weakness that I could not get over. I was going to be the best dad ever...or at least as good of a dad as I could possibly be. Despite my "quirky" ways and situations I get roped into I have always had a plan for how my life was going to go. I had benchmarks and vocational deadlines set. I knew by what age I was going to own a home, have a six figure job, and take my first European cruise. I made plans to attempt to pretend like I had some sort of control over my life. I extended this planning to my new parenting adventure that was now laid out in front of me.

Before I became a "Daddy to the O" I had a vision of what that was going to look like. I had plans of how our family would operate. I knew that I would look to my wife to handle a lot of the heavy lifting when it came for caring for a newborn. After all I had a hard enough time figuring out how laundry got done, so caring for a baby seemed as intimidating as retaking Algebra.

Long before our little baby was born my wife and I planned everything out. We found out the sex of the baby ,(boy!) and we named him (Noah!) long before he took his first out of womb breath.In my mind I had even started long term planning. I had even started looking at pre-schools for the years ahead, and started counting down the days before we could take our little Noah to experience Disney World.

While Noah was cooking in his prenatal wonderland I put myself though various situations in my head of future parental dilemmas that would eventually come my way. I thought about how I would handle my son being bullied, or what I would do if he was the bully. I considered the idea of sleep away summer camps when he became teenager, and how much money I would give him to go out on his Senior Prom. Nobody could accuse me of not being forward thinking!!! I wanted to be prepared for everything.

After Noah was born the plans for his life became activated. Our families road map was delicately laid out in front of us! He was going to have the perfect life! Well his life was on course to be what I considered to be perfect.....fate had another definition of what the word perfect meant. It was a lot different than mine....

Eight years later as I type this I can tell you that there is no plan. There is only today and a loose outline for the future. I operate in the present more fully than ever...and that is exactly how I have changed!

My era of "Future Expectations" ended for me and my wife like so many other families in a plain white doctors office six years ago. The planning ended with one word "Autism". The future went from certain and carefully planned to hidden in one moment. It was a moment we had prepared ourselves for a few months prior as we knew something was terribly wrong with our little boy. Although in our hearts we had both probably known what the specialists were going to say we cognitively denied it before we got the diagnosis.

That diagnosis was like a bomb that landed in our front yard. Everything shattered. The foundation we had built was forever charred and destroyed. Despite our careful planning we had not ever considered that we would be having to rebuild our idea of family in such a radically different way. As we drove home that afternoon my wife and I could not say anything to each other that provided any relief. We were truly in a state of shock.

As the reality of what obstacles Noah was going to face began to surface the bombs continued to level my plans.

Would he be able to ever live independently?

BOOM!

Would he ever have friends?

BOOM!

Would he ever speak?

BOOM!

Will he ever know that his parents love him?

BOOM!

Can Noah experience all the joys and sadness that life offers?

BOOM!

Will he ever leave his world and join ours?

BOOM!!!

These are bombs that a family somewhere is dealing with every 20 minutes!!!!! That is really an amazing statistic isn't it? Three times an hour there is a mommy and daddy somewhere having to redefine what it means to be a parent.

It is because of these bombs and thousands like it that my wife and I immediately readjusted our expectations of what life was going to look like. Instead of planning for getting into the best pre-school we started working on trying to get Noah to try and communicate with us and a very basic level. Instead of spending money on getting a new family car we put the funds toward specialists. Instead of possible leaving Wyoming and seeing what life looked like outside our state we dug our roots into Cheyenne to give Noah some consistent care. Rather than planning for what life was going to look like three years down the road we focused more on surviving each day. The moment we were living in became the only thing that mattered. To think about the future on whatever expectations we had was too heartbreaking to do.

I remember when the US invaded Iraq in 2003. It was right during our darkest hours of our battle with Autism. We were living with the idea then that Noah may not ever be able to show us the boy who was trapped inside the Autism cocoon. Hope was at a premium in my heart.....

I was working at our families Drug Store and we had all gathered around a really old TV set to watch the aerial assault of Baghdad. The explosions were breathtaking and unlike anything I had ever seen. I remember thinking how much it was like watching a movie! I feel terrible for feeling so callous about that scene now. Regardless of whatever position people have on the war it goes without saying that with each one of those explosions a life would be forever changed. That under the glow of brilliant explosion a life would changed one way or another.

That moment on the TV has forever been called "Shock and Awe".

Each person who was affected by the bombing had a life plan that for either good or bad has forever been changed. Maybe their life is much better after that moment, maybe their life is not, and maybe their life ended right there on camera. In that moment people lost there control of their own life plan. They had to readjust...they had to change plans.

My life was changed by the bombs of autism. I am hoping for the better....

Everybody has life changing moments in their own life. I am not arguing that parents of special need children corner the market on this. It is just from this experience that I have had my own pole shift.

I am not the same person I was before autism came. While the foundation of how I had been living was leveled a new more solid one was been built.

I am a guy who no longer puts expectations on anything. I no longer label experiences as "good" or "bad". If I continued to do that then I would label Noah's life as "bad". Autism is part of what defines him, and I refuse to give any negative connotation to that. He is who he is. He is an amazing, funny, already-smarter than his father, artistic, little boy who has an innocence that allows him a reservoir of love that I cannot even comprehend. I no longer "expect" him to be anybody but himself. While I used to try and fight the autism out of him, I now embrace it for who he is.

I am a guy who enjoys the present more. I have become more aware on how important the now is. I cannot control what will happen five minutes from the present! I cannot stop future bombs from coming from nowhere...the only thing I can do is give thanks for the moment I am in. I make it a commitment to love the present more than ever before. I no longer wish for things to be different. I don't demand anymore that the universe provide me with more money, or a nicer house. (even though it would be nice...come on Powerball!) Without this new mode of thinking that sip of my Carmel Mochiatto would have just been another sip. It would not have become a transcendent voyage to tasty-town!

I am a guy who practices empathy more often. I try to judge people less because I hate it when people judge me or my family. I put myself in other folks shows a lot more...because I want other people to walk in mine a bit. Everyone has their own bombs falling on them. Everyone deserves compassion. Even a dude with a 700 pound stupid ego.

I am a cat who no longer measures success by the things I used to. I won't be a great dad by how many trips to Disneyworld I take my crew to. I will be a great dad when I master the art of letting my children be who they are destined to be. I am just here to keep them from lighting themselves on fire or killing the dog. I will leave some of the planning for who they are to be to them. After all they are their own expert!

I am a person who is no longer interested eating Scallops. Not that I think that has anything to do with autism...just thought you should know. This is a major development because I used to love Scallops like my dog likes "macking" lady dogs. Anyway...

I am a person who is much more humble and less apt to live at the whims of my monster-not-yet-dormant Ego that barks daily. I don't really care about being thought of highly by anyone but a select few people. I used to live under the craving of trying to make everyone like me.

I am no longer concerned with growing up and trying to impale myself on the spear of being a serious adult. I used to toil over why I was not acting like other 30-somethings. The post Autism Bomb reconstruction has taught me that we are who were are. I happen to be a guy who would rather spend my time making my children laugh, at a movie, or performing comedy. Autism has reminded me that in order for me to be happy with who I am...I need to BE WHO I AM.

April is Autism Awareness Month. It is a month that is spent providing advocacy for the scores of children who are living with Autism. The numbers of children and families who affected by autism is reshaping an entire generation of children. I have four speaking engagements during the month where I will be speaking about our families unique autism experience. I am hoping to convey the message that if someone like me can withstand the "Shock and Autism" then ANYONE can! I will talk about some of the perspectives we have learned as well as some of the methods of therapy we used. I will keep people up to date of the times and locations of these talks. If nothing else come and watch me try and mix laughter and autism together...it could get really interesting...or extremely weird. My main point will be that we should never surrender hope and to wake up to the good things in our life right now! This song is a could example of waking up to hope:

Please say an extra prayer tonight for parents of special needs children. They are in the process of rethinking everything. They are in the process of rebuilding their idea of family. The are in the process of becoming different people. They are standing under falling bombs that are going to reshape their lives. Our family has been extremely lucky to have the type of results with our autism journey. We have had the "exact" right people come into our lives when we needed it to be a miracle worker in our sons life. Noah is slowly climbing his way out of the well of autism and we are so grateful. His life has been a tapestry of miracles and we have been lucky to be a witness in it's creation! Please keep a sprititual candle lit for the children who are severely impacted by autism. Pray for their family, teachers, and siblings.

And do yourself a favor. Enjoy the "right now" a little. Don't spend your time worrying about things that are minutes/days/years away.

Much better. Now I can get to work.....if only I was not so distracted now by the creepy coffee house painting of the dude playing the violin that is in front of me. Seriously it looks like a poster for "Nostradamus The Musical"!

But that is a topic for another blog....

FOR THOSE WHO HATE SERIOUS BLOG ENTRIES THIS IS FOR YOU:

"My two year old accidentally caught a part of "Empire Strikes Back" that his older bro's were watching. He is now semi-repeating a line from the movie. He saw the scene where Luke says "You killed my father!" and then Vader responds with "Luke, I am your father!"
He woke me up this morning chanting over and over the following:

"I KILL MY FATHER! I KILL MY FATHER!"

I blame his mother.......

Yes....And....

john@johnbigjohn.com (john roedel) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 17:32:59 GMT

I was every grade school teachers worst nightmare. As a child I had the ability to reach into the heart (Temple of Doom Style!) of any teacher and rip out their joy of educating young people. I took my education as seriously as the world took the music of Don Johnson back in the 80's.   I cannot imagine a student who was worse than me. While my peers spent their time of formation to learn the 50 states or how to conquer long division, I passed my time doing things like writing poetry about my teacher's freakishly long and likely-mutated nose hair.

I had no use or talent for sitting behind a desk all day and being asked to be a responsible student, because I was not ever designed to be. My desk looked like I was living in it.  Through the course of the year it became jammed full of every paper, art project, lunch item, rock, or sick bird I had ever come in contact. By October of each school year I could expect a visit from The CDC to come and take sample readings from around my desk to ensure that I had not accidentally created some new bioweapon inside it's moldy center.  I was the original hoarder. There was always room for one more D+ test paper or half-eaten egg salad sandwich inside.

The only time I ever enjoyed school was when we had to get up and give some sort of presentation.  That is about the only time I ever came to life inside the classroom. I loved doing "show and tell" or talking about what my family did last summer, or giving a book report. I especially loved the book reports! To be able to stand in front of my classmates and to wow them with the lives of these fictional characters and to lead them through the twists and turns of a story was an activity that was right in my wheel-house. The only problem I had with doing book report was actually having to read a book. I hated reading. There were too many words, the pages were too dry, the characters never did anything that I wanted them to, and the endings of all the stories seemed way too predictable to me.

By the time I was in fourth grade I finally had reached my tolerance for having to read these books. So, I devised a brilliant plan....

I started giving book reports for books that did not exist. They were just stories that I came up with in front of everyone in the classroom. I would not really know what the story was about until I started speaking. It was a plan that worked incredibly well for the first couple months of fourth grade. I would always "forget" the book at home so I was not required to show any proof of the books actual existence and then I would spin a story so compelling that I have doubt that my reports led my classmates and teacher on an emotional rollercoaster of thrills and drama that would apex with an ending that would leave my audience kneeling on the floor begging for more of my analysis.

My first few non-book reports detailed the lives of Pirates who fought vampires, a dog that became a helicopter rescue helicopter pilot, and a little girl who discovered an entrance to a cave that led her back to the old west. These stories were epic yarns that were exactly the kind of book I would have read had I actually ever had any desire to read. It was exciting and scary to do this, and I found myself becoming more and more confident and daring with my fictional book reports.

Eventually my lies caught up with me. I am not sure what exactly caused the discovery of my dishonesty. In hindsight I believe the titles of my non-existent manuscripts were the weak link in my system. The name of the story I never read would always be the last thing I would think of and I think that was the reason I got pinched by Mrs. Griffin. The story I got busted on was a story about a monkey who befriended a dinosaur. I believe at the last minute (which was probably when I was already standing in front of everyone) I decided that the name of the book was "Monkey and Dinosaur are best friends and like to have fun while running from giant world-ending asteroids" Perhaps the title was too long to be believable because right when I got done talking about how Monkey and Dinosaur survived extinction by going forward in time like Scott Balkula did in "Quantum Leap" my teacher asked me if that was a real book.

Oh crap.

She was on to me. I was left with only a couple choices about how I could handle this developing situation. I could admit that I had not actually read a book this week, but that disclosure would put into question the other half-dozen reports I had already given in front of her this year, so I could not do that. The only other option was to feign outrage...

"A real book??" I gasped with an outrage that made it sound like I have never been so insulted in my whole 10 years of living. I decided that in order to get the point across that I was so offended by her question that I asked it aloud again while looking at her as if she had just spurted out a purple unicorn horn from her forehead.

"A real book?"

"Yes, John. A real book." Mrs Griffin shot back. She was cool and calm and had the piercing eyes of a district attorney who smelled blood in the courtroom.

Oh crap.

I had to change tatics. I had to act like she was confusing me. Sometimes that works...

"I don't understand?" I asked with a softer expression on my face. I tried to make it look like she had suddenly started speaking ancient Hebrew and each word out of her mouth caused me further confusion.

I could feel her eyes bore through my skull.  I saw a slight smile curl on the left side of her lips as she finally decided that I was being as honest as congress. It was the "ah-ha" moment all adults relish in when they finally have the goods on a child.

"What was the name of the author again, John?"

"Huh?" was my only response. Maybe I could act like my ear drums had ruptured.

"What was the name of the author of the book you just gave a report about?" she asked again while looking down at her notebook. She had been taking notes????

Triple crap.

I had made up a name but now for the life of me I could not remember who it was now.

"Um...." I stammered. I could feel all the blood rushing to my head.  I kept wondering if this is what Mob-Bosses felt like while being grilled by the police. I could hear the whispers of my classmates as they began to realize that I had been fabricating my entire story.

Mrs. Griffin wasn't done...not by a long shot. For the next ten minutes I was interrogated by her in front of the class. I was asked to give the report again and explain why my story seemed so different the second time I told it. I was asked to explain how I had now included an UFO abduction scene that I had not talked about previously.

I was totally busted. I had to admit that I had not actually read a book, and then I was forced to confess that none of my book reports where truthful either.

It was brutal and I eventually had to make up for all my made up book reports by giving new ones over the next couple weeks. My parents were notified of my malfeasance and I had to spend all my extra time getting caught up on all the reading that I had not done, but I had claimed I had.

Although my plan had blown up in my face in such a public manner, I do not in any way regret that it happened.

Doing those made-up book reports were my first experiences with improv....and I love doing improv.

I love being able to get up on stage and to make choices with a character that spurns a story to come out of nowhere. I love being able to stand in front of an audience. without knowing exactly was is going to happen and what adventures are about to take place in front of them. Improv is scary and exciting and it is different every time I take part in it.

One of the most important things I have ever learned from improv is the phrase "Yes...And.." It is the way we allow what is happening on stage around us and then to add our input into what is going to happen next.   "Yes...And.." is a way of accepting the reality of the scene and then helping discover the next truth that needs to be revealed.

For example:

If during an improv performance I find myself playing a waiter and the other person on stage comes over to me as tells me that they are my boss and that I am fired I have to say (in so many words) "Yes...and..." I could say "ok I am fired, but now I am going to admit that over the past five years I have been eating all of your breadsticks or I could say "You may be able to fire me...but you can't stop my dancing!!"

During improv we cannot deny something that somebody else says to us on stage. That scene with me as the waiter would be tricky if I responded to them by saying "You are not my boss, you are a mime". Doing that would be denying the reality that my stage partner has formed and to cause a tug of war in front of the audience who would be confused about what actually is real.

"Yes..And..." is just a nifty way of saying "Ok that is real, but let me add to that reality now". The "And" is how we shape the future of the improv scene. It is the practice of demonstrating that each of the improv players have some control of what is going to happen next. Sometimes on stage when I improvising I do my best work when I don't get stuck in my head. I don't over-think it. I make a choice about what to do with my character next and just go for it. When I don't do that and I start worrying about the outcome of my character's choice I just stand their frozen not doing anything that matters.

Improv, for me, has been one of my best teachers. I wished they had it when I was in gradeschool.

I got to thinking about "Yes...And" the other night during an event where I got to spent some time with some other parents who were raising children who are living with a special need. One lady in particular came up to me and we got to talking for about ten minutes. She was talking about how the best thing that happened in her life as a parent came when she stopped denying the reality of her families life. She said that she used to act like everything was going beautifully, when in fact it was not. She had to say "Yes" there is a problem..."And" here is what I am going to do about it.

It seems like sometimes we bury problems in the chaos of our lives. I did that with Noah for the first 18 months of his life. There were daily signs that there was something going on behind his eyes...but I refused to accept it as reality. I did not say "Yes" to what was happening in our home.

A lot of parents who are walking the same journey my wife and I have over the past 11 years get stuck in emotional places. I know I have. We get stuck in the moment where the doctors tell us that something is wrong with our sweet baby. We get stuck in the hurt and grief that we feel when our child seems to fall further and further down the rabbit hold. We get stuck in the hopelessness we feel as we kneel before their crib weeping out of pure powerlessness to fix our children. We can refuse to move on from our heartbreak. We can refuse to make a choice about what we will do next because we are scared of making things worse.

"And" gives us our control back.

We have to say "and" when it comes to the obstacles in our life. Sure something terrible might have happened to us, or sure maybe we have made mistakes in our lives...but we can get stuck there. We have to say "Yes" this is my reality..."And" this is what the hell I am going to do about it.

"Yes, my son has Autism, And I am going love him with my whole being, AND I am going to show him how amazing this world can be, And, I am going to advocate for him whenever anyone treats him like he is broken.

Yes we all have problems and issues in our life, and we are all going to learn from those moments and become better people for it, and someday we will all be okay.

Yes maybe someday I will actually enjoy reading.....and until that day I will continue making up my own stories by doing improv.

The look I had on my face in as I tried to explain myself to Mrs. Griffin in 4th grade.

Why Do We Kiss? (A 2008 Adams Camp Re-Post)

john@johnbigjohn.com (john roedel) — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 16:07:40 GMT

I never ever like the practice of reposting blogs. However, I am going to do that today because it feels appropriate since my wifey and I are heading down to Denver tonight and taking part in an Adams Camp fundraiser. I wanted to repost one of my favorite Adams Camp blogs that I posted over three years ago.

Our familiy had our life first transformed by this amazing place over eight years ago!

For more info on Adams Camp visit: Adams Camp!!!!

Here is the repost from June 2008:

There are perfect moments every day. I pray that I look for them more….

I am typing this feeling better than I have in a very long time. I am sitting on the porch of our cabin with only the moon lighting the woods in front of me. I am a little freaked out that Bigfoot might come bounding out of the dark and play the popular monster game called “Make The Little Man Wear His Lungs Like A Hat”. Other then that fear I am as peaceful as my soul has been since before Scott Baio was a reality star.

In many ways I worry way to much. I am not just a “glass half empty guy“. I am a “glass half empty, and the other half is filled with anthrax” kind of guy. I jump to the worst case scenario quicker then Sean Hannity goes through hair gel. I make mountain ranges out of Mole hills….

THE CHECK ENGINE LIGHT MEANS THE CAR IS ABOUT TO EXPLODE LIKE THE DEATH STAR.

THE PERSON WHO IS COUGHING BEHIND ME AT THE MOVIES HAS A MUTANT STRAIN OF GORILLA POX THAT HAS ALREADY ATTACHED ITSELF TO MY LYMPH NODES.

WHENEVER I DRIVE UP TO THE ATM TO GET MONEY OUT I BEGIN TO WONDER IF SOMEONE HAS BROKEN INTO MY ACCOUNT AND WITHDRAWN ALL THE LIMITED MONIES I HAVE.

WHEN A TEACHER CALLS OUR HOME I IMMEDIALTLY ASSUME ONE OF MY CHILDREN HAS STARTED A HARD CORE GRADE SCHOOL GANG WHO HAS TAKEN OVER THE SCHOOL.

WHEN I GO TO BED AT NIGHT I WONDER IF HOW MANY SPIDERS WILL TREAT MY SLUMBERED BODY LIKE DISNEYLAND.

I live my life with too many unfounded worries. The calmness of my experience this week has reminded me that there are enough real things to concern myself with that I don’t need to make up stuff to worry about. In fact the one thing I worry about now…is…will I go back to worry so much when I get back home.

I hope not. Because that would ruin the lesson I learned on Wednesday. I learned a new lesson on why we kiss people. Let me explain:

One of the constant and real worries I have had is that my autistic son will never experience life to it’s fullest. Sure he might have a quality of life that my wife and I can provide for him until the day our souls call it a day. But will he know joy? Will he feel accomplishment? Will he experience the painful lessons of failure? Will he love? Simply put…will he live?

This year has been an incredible leap forward for him. Thanks to so many people who help him all over the country he has started to be able to reveal the amazing child who is trapped down in the autism well. Our family has had so much support from selfless people who have prayed, counseled, tested, tapped, and loved out son that I will never be able to fully ever say enough “thank you’s” for. However, most of his growth this year has been cognitive…his reading, math, and comprehension skills have shot way past any goal we could have ever had for him. The one place it seems where autism still has it’s icy hold on his has been socially.

I always worry about how lonely he must feel. Autistic children in many ways live in their own little world. Human contact for most of us is essential and natural, for autistic people social contact is sometimes as foreign as Tim Allen in a movie that is watch able.

Last year for Noah he was in first grade I began to notice the other children forming friendships and bonds with one another. They had sleepovers, birthday parties, and play dates. Noah had very few invitations for these….and I felt crushed by this. It was not that the other kids were mean to him in anyway, in fact every indication is that he is extremely well liked by his peers. The problem is that the other children just have not been able to really connect with him. I know for me some of my closets friends were the ones I met in early grade school, and I desperately worry that he will not ever make life long friends.

I don’t want him to be alone. I want him to connect with others. To share his feelings, to empathize, to have his heart broken, to be invited to the sleepover.

I guess I want him to be a kid. I worry he will never be able to have a childhood he will remember as a good one. Hell…I worry that he will never have any memories worth a salt.

Which made me feel very very guilty. A couple years ago I would have killed for having this set of problems. A couple years ago he could not really speak, or function independently at all. Now he has progressed so far that now I worry about these abstract concepts. I feel guilty because I should not be so ungrateful for what he has already gained….I am a greedy daddy.

So this was the attitude I brought to camp. We wanted the many wonderful people who work with him to focus on helping him break through the social bubble he has formed around himself. They have done amazing work, and I have already in just a couple days have seen results!

In fact just last night I saw for the first time my brave little boy pull himself out of the well long enough to share a moment with a child his age. It was a moment that I will forever be thankful that I got to be a part of, and it is a moment that reminded me that I need to stop worrying about.

Last night we had a sing-a-long bonfire. It was a chance for many of the younger autistic kids and their families to gather round a camp fire and sing some classic camping songs. It was a blast! No, really if you ever have a chance to be surrounded by ten autistic children all under nine years old in a sing a long then be a part of it! Each of the children had such an energy and innocence about them that it just made you feel happy to be singing next to them. They were all so thrilled to be belting out “She’ll be coming round the mountain” that it was infectious! There were even a couple little boys who are absolutely non-verbal who obviously could not sing…but dance they did. It was a celebration of life. Nobody cared who anyone was, what they looked like, what disabilities they had, or if they could even speak. It was just parents, special children, and typical siblings connecting in song and dance.

Toward the end of the night most of the kids became fascinated with a little stream that flowed next to the fire. Inevitably the children began to fashion boats out of leaves and sticks to see how they floated down the stream. Noah was walking the river bank by himself with a stick. I could tell that he wanted to toss it in himself but was unsure where to do it. Then this little girl in pink came next to him and whispered something to him, and immediately he chucked it into the water. At once both of then laughed together, and for the next forty minutes became inseparable.

“Wow..he found a friend!” I thought. I was not sure if I had ever been prouder of him.

They spent the rest of the night walking up and down the bank together, talking. I kept my distance because I figured the little girl was autistic too and I did not want to break the groove they were in with a nosy daddy. So I just watched for a while. I watched as they sat down on the dirt pile that hovered over the stream and how each took turns throwing rocks into the current. Even though the sun was fading behind the trees I could tell that they were still talking, but had no idea what they were talking about. Finally my curiosity took a hold and I walked over. Noah looked at me and proudly said to his new friend

“This is my daddy”. She looked at me quickly and gave me a slight wave, to which I said “You guys ok?”

Neither of them said anything but exchanged glances as if they were speaking telepathically with each other. “We’re fine” Noah said and with that the two of them got up and walked over to a six foot tree branch. Each picked up and end and carried it to the flowing water. “

Will it float?” Noah asked her.

“Let’s not be chicken. Lets find out!” the little girl in pink shouted.

With as much effort as they could the two autistic children hoisted the thick heavy branch into the air and into the water. The branch floated down the river, and the two of them danced triumphantly!

I left the two of them to celebrate and I went back to sit by the bon fire. I kept a close eye on them, and watched as they interacted with one another. It felt so incredible to watch my little guy that I have in my heart be so worried about show me that perhaps my fears were kind of unfounded.

He had found his Winnie Cooper….and I have never been prouder of him.

A little while later it was time for the party to end. I thought this might be a potential problem for Noah as I was sure that he would not want to go. When I told them it was time to go they gave each other a quick hug and then she ran off to find her dad who was in a field down below walking with her little brother.

“What a great night Noah!” I said to him proudly while grabbing his hand.

“Mmm.” He said. I could tell his mind was racing. I could tell this because when he is over thinking something he chews on his bottom lip.

“What was her name?”

“Shauna. She is my best friend” Noah responded. Those words felt really nice in my ears. I have never heard him so excited about someone else.

“What did she say to get you to throw your stick in the water when you met her?” I pressed.

“She told me not to be chicken” He smiled.

“How old is she” I asked as we started walking toward the car.

“Dad” Noah said as let go of my hand. “I have to do something”

And with that he turned around and ran down toward the field were little Shauna was. I am semi-proud of myself because my normal overprotective reaction to this would be to tell him to wait for me. I did not tell him to stop. I just watched…and I knew what he was going to do.

She was standing next to her mom and dad and when she saw Noah she left them to run to him. I saw him saw something to her in her ear. She smiled at him, and then I saw something I will never forget.

He gave her a kiss.

Sorry Hollywood you have nothing on this kiss. Even the smooches from Little Mermaid, Spiderman, or Friends were not nearly as romantic then this one!

It is frozen in my mind from here on out…

Once his time-stopping first kiss ended he turned around and came sprinting back toward me. Shauna turned to her parents and ran excitedly into their arms. I caught the smiles on the faces of the parents…they were just as proud for her as I was for Noah. This was not pride because I think eight year olds should be “smooching” it was pride because Noah had allowed himself to feel something.

When he came back to me I gave him a bear hug. I asked him if he had asked her for permission to kiss her. Noah said “I told her I was going to kiss her…and that I was not a chicken”. He was smiling from ear to ear and breathing heavily now.

I asked him one last question. I asked him “Why did you kiss her?”

“Because dad. I always want to remember her”. He looked at me square in the eyes as he said this with complete seriousness.

With that response the needless part of me that worries for him was smashed into pieces. One way or another he is going to be just fine. He will find a way out of this maze…and when he does the world better look out.

I won’t be chicken either anymore Noah. I will not parent out of fear anymore. I am glad you found your Winnie.

He is going to have a life filled with wonder and joy. He may have lost some early battles…but he is destined to win the war. How do I know? Because he is the wisest person in the world right now:

Why do we kiss?

We kiss to remember the person we are kissing.

What a perfect night….and how peaceful I feel. Thank God.

On Faith, Autism, and Me.

john@johnbigjohn.com (john roedel) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 17:43:27 GMT

Warning: This is not your typical Johnny Roe blog. If you tuned in to read about my fear of deer, my problems with clowns, or how I believe I will be the new Jude Law, than you will be sad. This is one of my few serious blog entries. If that is not for you, please come back next time when I will blog about my yeti-like chest hair or something like that.

Otherwise, if you stick around remember....I did warn you.

__________________________________________________________________________

I believe in God and hopefully he still believes in me. I am asking of him the exact thing I am asking everyone else in my life to do...

Just wait for me a little longer to figure things out.

The John Roedel Anthem by Alexi Murdoch.

__________________________________________________________________________

When I was younger I saw him everywhere I went.  Some people find God in stained glass windows or in the quiet whispers of nature. I used to find my creator in other people.  Spending time with other folks was how I spent time with God. They did not even need to share the same faith as I did to make me feel like I was being a witness to the divine.  There was a time in my life where the shear differences in each of us served to me as proof of a grand designer.  The fact that each of us were so unique showed to me that God created us all with extreme care to ensure our individuality.

I longed for community and connection to other people. Despite my severe introverted I knew that I had to force myself to be around other people because I was convinced that God lived in each of them.  In my mind I believed that if I could not find my maker thriving in each person I met than I was wasting my time sitting in a pew only sending my prayers to an invisible veil.  I felt that God would rather me look for me in his other people than solely focus my spiritual life on things that were unseen. That is not to say that I did not believe in those things that are beyond my physical eyesight.  The issue is that I am perhaps not of deep enough faith or understanding to be able to find God in things that I cannot see with my own eyes.  The abstract and me don't get along very well. I am a guy who needs to feel the wounds with my own hands in order to believe. That is not something that I am bragging about in any manner. I wish that it wasn't that way for me....but it is.

In order to find God in the world I needed to find him in other people. This was something that was a breeze for me able to do.  In my early days having faith in God was really really easy.

I could watch people live The Gospel. I could see their generosity. I could see their empathy towards each other. I could see them be the hands of God here on Earth. That was all the proof I needed that The Lord was present in my life. The hope was that perhaps through the witness of other people I could someday make the way I lived my life become evidence to someone else in the divine. If I could find God in other people....surely someday...somehow...someone could find him in me. It was this idea that vaulted me headfirst into ministry and the vocation of serving other people in my younger days. I was going to be the face of God for others.

Was that youthful naivete? Had you asked me a year ago I would have answered with a resounding "yes". It seems that my faith has melted away quite a bit from the foundation I used to have. Over the last of my life I went from being a person who could find God in everyone I met to becoming a dude who now needed a microscope and a forensic evidence kit to find any evidence of him in other people. It seems like as I began to enter higher age brackets my heart has hardened. I can blame the news or the times when other people have let me down as an excuse to why this has happened. That would be easy to do...but it is really nobody's fault but my own.

I just don't see him as regularly as I used to in humanity. It is not because he is not there anymore, it is just because I fail to look for him there as much. The problem is I have a hard time trusting other people. I have seen too much to not be jaded. I have seen people use the name of God as a blunt weapon to get want they want. People (me included) have our own agenda's and often times we like to achieve those agenda's by acting as if we have come on the behalf of God. I have seen the failings of men and women and in myself so over the years that I can't trust as much in the idea that I can affirm my faith by looking for God in other folks.

My optimism in humankind morphed into a pessimism. Instead of looking for evidence of the divine in other people I concentrated on our shortcomings. I started to believe that we were prone to cruelty over compassion. That we favored selfishness over service.  I believed that we were more likely to lash out in anger than we were to forgive.  That we manipulate and abuse each other like it was a hobby. I started to believe in the worst of ourselves because I found those things in myself.

Having faith was no longer easy for me.

How could I find God in other people when I could not find him in me? And...if I could not see him in other people how in the heck was I going to see him at all? As I mentioned I have the spirituality of a headless grasshopper so I had a hard time finding his presence in my life through things that I could not see with my own eyes.

Obviously what happened next was I stopped seeing him. I could not longer relate to him in any way. I isolated myself from my God whom I used to have a solid relationship with. If I could not find him in the physical manifestation of other people or in myself I was probably not going to be able to find him at all.

I have a very hard time with the abstract....

So does, as it turns out, my autistic son Noah. SInce day one, the existence of an invisible God in our world has been one that has not made any sense to him. My other two children believe because they can simply trust in the idea that they were created by a divine being. They can take that leap of faith because in their hearts it kind of makes sense to believe in such a wild claim that they were formed by a creator. Noah is not so easily convinced. If he cannot see it, he has a very difficult time in understanding it.

For example when we take a big family trip to Disneyland my other two children go crazy the couple weeks before we leave. Noah does not join them in that. He is happy that we are going but he does not get hyper-excited until we start to board the plane. Boarding the plane makes the whole vacation a lot more real than me telling him that we are going. He needs to see the airliner to know that we are actually going somewhere...my word that we are going or the electronic tickets on the computer screen are not enough evidence. He needs to see to believe.

That is how the idea of God is to him. His mind does not operate in a way that allows him to give his heart to an unseen creator. He has to see God physically manifested in the world to allow himself to start to believe in his existence. Sound familiar?

To his credit my son has really tried very hard to open himself up to the concept of having faith. He goes to mass with his family and he says his prayers at night. However, through most of those experiences I can tell that he is just voting "present" to the moment. He is not really committed to it because he still has not bridged the gap between his head and his heart. This was something that really bothered me...until recently I noticed that I was doing the same damn thing as he was. Like Noah, I can't find locate God very easily these days either. It can be a struggle for both of us.

The advantage that Noah has over me is the fact that his heart has only the ability to be unconditionally loving. Love is not a choice for him. It is not an optional setting for his heart. If he knows you, he loves you. Even if you bully him at school he will love you the next day. His capacity to let people make mistakes and still love them is amazing. There is nobody he will not care for. Noah does not love other people because he is following some moral code or because he is afraid of breaking the laws of a church. He loves because that is the only thing he knows how to do.

If did not know any better he is the proof that I am so looking for in humanity in God's existence. Whether he knows it or not Noah is the hand of God in our world today. He is evidence of God being present in my life. Why did it take me having to be smashed in the face with a metaphysical baseball bat to realize that while I was looking to the outside world for God to reveal himself I was ignoring the lesson that was living right under my own roof.

God exists, I know he does. It is just that I have a hard time seeing him through the fog of this world. It is hard to find him through the wars, the self-inflicted poverty, through the warlords, through the violence, through the terrible acts done in the name of God, through the "better them than me" mentality, and through my own self-absorbtion. I am still waiting for the fog to lift. I have to get over the fact that faith is not meant to be easy. That perhaps while I sit in my Dark Night Of The Soul I need to remember that God is still there on the other side of this wall of fog waiting for me to figure it out.

Perhaps he is waiting for me to figure out how much Noah and I really need each other.  Maybe...maybe just maybe Noah is here to remind me that at the end of the day we are all called to love each other without condition.  And through that unconditional love I will see the real face of God in my life...thus affirming my paper-thin faith.  And maybe...just maybe I am here to help Noah look in the mirror to see the gift of who he is and show him that his own reflection is the physical proof of God that his brain so desperately needs.  It seems to me that his faith journey and mine are tied together.  When I start to doubt in the goodness of people I don't have to look any further than him to be reminded how good we can be. When he starts to doubt in the existence of God he does not have to look any further than the reflection in the mirror and the love his family has for him to be all the proof he needs.

Hopefully this will be the gateway for both of us on our faith journey. We need to believe in both the seen and the unseen. We both need to have faith like a child. I pray that finding God present in our lives will become a much more simple venture than it has been.

God, grant both of us the ability to have the faith of a child. Help me find you in the world and in myself. Then maybe other people can find you in me again.

"My Happy Place" and "His Secret World"

john@johnbigjohn.com (john roedel) — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 17:43:46 GMT

Here is a phrase that I probably say 3000 times a week:

"I am going to my happy place"

It is something I say when I want to escape what is happening to me in the present and go on a mental holiday. I utter that phrase as I close my eyes and go to a land of make believe that is a shelter from all the crap that ends up in my emotional inbox.

When I proclaim that I leaving Earth and going to my happy place I am simply informing my brain that I have taken all that I can handle and it is time for me to go to the panic room in my soul.

I visit my happy place all the time. I go pass through this wormhole whenever I want to escape a moment that is causing me grief. I go there all the time. It is my defensive reaction to stress. I go to my "happy place" when a my dentist tells me that I need another root canal. I go there when I am confronted by an angry person in a parking lot who wants to talk to me about my woeful parking job. I go there when I lock the keys in my car at the gas pump.

Here is an example of how that works:

When the plumber begins to tell me that they need to replace my septic tank and how much that is going to cost I stop him mid sentence with my intention to leave. I simply announce "Excuse me sir, I am going to my happy place now. Good-day to you!" With that, I mentally check out and I am whisked away to a land of rolling green hills and talking bunnies who have anoited me as their leader. While I am still standing there physically in front of the confused plumber who is probably concerned that I have just had a stroke, I have spiritually teleported to my secret world where the plumbers bad news cannot reach me.

Does this change the fact that the cost of my plumbing repairs is going to be an expensive as sending a class of pre-schoolers to the moon? No. When I return from my "happy place" I will still have to confront the fact that my family was now going to have to become street performers to pay his bill. It is a temporary place of respite that helps protect me from the onset of the stress. I am fully aware that my admission of this makes me sound insane. I, however, would caution you to think about your life before you cast judgement.

We all have places in our mind we vacation to when things become too complicated or painful in our lives. During those times when the all the stresses of the world weigh on our hearts we can easily slip to the world behind our eyes and go somewhere else.

We call it daydreaming.

It those daydreams we are able to construct an imagined reality that for as long as our lids are shut we can live in. We imagine a better house, a nice vacation, financial security, better relationships, whatever. Granted, you may a firmer grasp on reality than I do and don't go to your "happy place" in mid-conversation with the police officer who pulled you over for speeding. (which take it from me is not a good idea. doing a brief, self-guided meditation in front of a cop where only force him to administer a breathalyzer to you. he does not care about your "happy place"...he only cares about why you were going 45 in a 30)

There is a secret world that we all go to from time to time. It is our safe place. It is a place that when we visit for a few moments can help us have hope for the future. When we daydream we "check out" and are gone for a few moments.

What happens though, if we never come back from our secret world? What happens if we just live in our daydream and don't reconnect to the world around us? What happens if we decide our temporary visa to our "happy place" isn't enough and we apply for permanent citizenship?

What would happen if we never wanted to come out of our secret world?

If that were to happen it would almost be like we were stuck within our own minds and those people on the outside who keep trying to communicate with us would only serve as annoyances. Those would keep trying to shout us back into their reality. They would become frustrated because we are stuck in our own world and not in theirs.

They just wouldn't get it.

They would think we were lost and they needed to help us be found. What they would fail to understand was that we were totally happy here. It was nice that they cared, but really we didn't want to join them in their reality. Their reality is filled with worries, anger, problems, confusing relationships, and obstacles that would require hard work to overcome.

How tempting would it be to stay safely inside our "Secret World"?

Why in the heck would we want to deal with all that when we could stay safely inside our house of make believe? It is so much safer to stay in our "happy place" and leave the real world to the rest of the suckers.

Sometimes I wonder if this is how my autistic son viewed us "outsiders" for many of his years with us. Noah was certainly happy living in his own world where we spent most of his time. There were times when he would visit us in the "real world" and give us a moment of actual attention, but he would quickly slip back through the teleporter back into Noahville when he needed to. For so many years he was so content with playing with his small lego pieces or fiddling his fingers (who in his mind would become action figures that were hell-bent on defeating bad guys) that the rest of us who were trying to get his attention became background music.

Noah had developed his own language and his own way of play that was so different from anything I had ever seen that I always had a hard time understanding what was happening in his "secret world". I spent so much time trying to steal him from there. Trying to get him to come over the fence to where we lived. Every time I tried it I could tell it was a severe irritation to him.

When trying to break apart his own world I would try to get him to interact with the world around him in a manner that I consider appropriate. In my eyes it was not appropriate to flap his hands or fidget with his fingers all the time. In his world those were actions that were considered extremely typical of it's residents. So of course, with my constant need to control, I would keep riding him to quit those behaviors without trying to understand.

As he grew older I kept trying to tell him how he should play with his toys. I wanted him to play with them in a "normal" way - whatever in the hell that means. I did not like how he would wave them in front of his eyes or have them fly around the house in a manner that seemed without purpose. I would always challenge him on the motivation for his particular toy as if they were actors in a play.

"Why is Spider-Man twisting around like that?" I would ask Noah as he would contort Peter Parker's alter-ego around at the dinner table.

"Because that is how is how he gets to his base." Noah would respond with a tone that indicated to me that he thought I was an absolute doof.

"Why doesn't he use his webs to get there?" would be my next logical question. Apparently I thought that if I could get my autistic son to answer this question I was going to get him to play with the toy in a manner that I saw fit.

"Because he doesn't want to. He wants to do this." Noah said with his eyes focused on the red and black superhero who was frantically being twisted around.

"But...Spiderman uses his webs to travel" I insisted. This is what any "Father of the year" candidate would do, right?

"No he doesn't"

"Oh yes, he does. Spiderman swings on his webs around the city." I said without the self-awareness that I was having an argument with my then 7-year old about how a fictional comic book character moves about New York.

"No."

"Yes, he does." at this point I was getting ticked off that Noah was not participating in my reality and stuck inside his own where Spidey gets from place to place by breakdancing. This was an offense that I needed to correct.

Apparently Noah had enough of me as well.

"Dad!" he shouted. "You are ruining my imagination."

Yikes. It was true. I was. I was forcing him to play in my world without spending anytime in his. What would have been a better activity for me is to join him in his play-world and follow the same rules he did. I was not going to get him anywhere by shouting on the outside and telling him how to live. I needed to go where he was. There I could play his way and gently introduce my way and slowly maybe we could maybe make a connection. I could show him that there was maybe another way of playing with spiderman...

Noah spent so much time in his own secret world and it took me years to realize that I needed to spend some time in his place before I could convince him that the "real world" was a place that he needed to visit more often. Looking back my initial approach of trying to talk him to leaving his world behind was a failing effort. Why would he want to come over to our world? Our world has people who did not understand him. Our world has people who yell. Our world has therapists and doctors who tried to stretch him out of his comfort level. Our world had peers that were not like him at all. In his "happy place" he was safe and sound and without anyone who could hurt him.

I wanted him to quickly leave his secret world behind and join us. I would get frustrated and try to get him to "snap out of it". Bad idea. The real solution was through showing him unconditional love and understanding that "our reality" was a place that he would be safe in. We needed to make him feel at home away from the world in his mind.

His "Secret World" was no different than my "Happy Place". It was a just a place where we vanished to when the world becomes too much. We just needed him to spend more time with us than over there. I am happy to say that today he is a permanent citizen here in the "Real World". I hope he is as happy about that as we are...I know that things are rougher over here than it was in the world in his mind.

Yet, from time to time when life becomes hard, complicated, or over-whelming he goes back to his Secret World or for a brief vacation from the stress.

Of course, who doesn't do that?

Here Comes The Flood (part 2 of 3)

john@johnbigjohn.com (john roedel) — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 18:02:35 GMT

For part one of this blog series please clicky click right HERE

*************************************************************************************
August 1st, 1985

It has always been my experience that I am allowed a few moments of reflection right before everything goes to absolute hell. It is like that one final deep drag of an air that a death row inmate must take before their sentence is carried out. It is the last moment of calm. Of normalcy. It is the split second right before everything changes.

As I sat in my parents basement in 1985 listening to our basement windows groan and creak under the weight of the large amounts of rainwater that was pressing up against them. I had been sitting cross-legged in the middle of the room watching the rushing water fill our window wells up like a bucket. For a while it was pretty exciting to watch. Each of the windows looked like murky aquariums. I am pretty sure I spent some time pretending that my basement had transformed into a submarine and we had begun our descent to the floor of the ocean.

The problem was the water never stopped coming and I could soon tell by the look of my parents face that they were growing more and more concerned. It had been raining heavy for three hours and in my short time on Earth I had never seen anything like it. My older brother (who had snuck upstairs to scout) had reported to me that our entire lawn was under a flowing river of water that was laced with tree branches and hail. . My dad began to fashion a plan that would require us to grab as much as we could if the water started coming in through the windows. We would start with the pictures and book and then move onto the electronics. We had been forced to the basement because of the various tornado warnings that had accompanied this monster storm, but if the water came we would have no choice but to return to the main level. We would have to change plans and adapt or we would be swallowed by the water.

In hindsight I know that my father already knew that the windows were not going to hold. They were going to break. He just did not want to worry us yet. He allowed my mother to cling to the hope that perhaps everything was going to be ok. He later told me that he had seen evidence of them cracking long before they ever gave in. That was a fact that he never passed on to us in the moment because he needed us to remain calm.

"Do you think the windows will hold Andy?" my mother asked my dad while she sat on our flower-patterned couch that was indeed a product of the 70's. She was clutching hold of her rosary and staring out into the same window that I had been fixated on. My mom is a wonderful woman, but like all of us she has her breaking points. Being involved in something like this was not a situation she excelled in. Some people are built for crisis. My mother is not....and in all fairness neither am I.   My mom simply wanted a promise that everything was going to be fine. She was not going to get it.

"They should." he replied.  Even at ten years old I found his response pretty unconvincing because as he said it he was organizing his old boxes of papers he had written and stacking up his vast collection of favorite books.   These were not the actions of a man who thought that the windows were going to hold. These were the actions of a man who knew that eventually the house would not be able to keep back the storm.

I was a fairly dim child, so if I noticed that my dad's words were incongruent to his actions, than my mom surly did.   Like me, she is not know for her patience so she questioned him further? His answer of "they should" was not enough information for her, so she pressed further.

"Will they or won't they?" she asked with her knuckles white from squeezing the white beads of the rosasry so hard.

He didn't answer. He just kept trying to prepare for the water by putting all our families treasurers into boxes. I was, at first sure that my dad had not actually heard her question because he was so focused on the task at hand. My mom repeated her question about 10 times without my responding to her, he did not even look up at her.

My father's lack of communication sent my mom into a full on rage. She had enough so she stood up from that damned flowered couch and barked "Andy! What the hell is going to happen?? For Christsakes! Answer me! What are we going to do?? What are we going to do Andy??"

My dad snapped. He shouted while staring down into his box of papers "Damnit! How can I possibly know that? I have no idea!! The windows will either will break or they won't! If they do, we run like hell!" I had never seen my dad talk to any of us like this. Which meant only one thing. Things were bad. Really bad.

He looked up from his box that he was packing and I could see that the look on his face did not match the anger in his voice. He was scared. "I'm sorry." he said in a much softer tone. "I am not sure what is going to happen." My dad walked over to my mom and helped her sit down on the couch. I remember very vividly he stood beside her with his hand resting tenderly on her shoulder as she tried her level best to not cry.

For the next few minutes we just sat there listening to the soundtrack that was the sound of my mothers hushed weeping and the noise of the waters continued assault against the walls and windows of our home. We just sat there waiting for something to happen. Either the windows would give in or they wouldn't. Either we were going to be flooded or we wouldn't be. The only thing we could do is sit and prepare for either outcome.

After a while the sound of creaking from the windows began to give way to a much more sinister one.   It went from sounding like a deep groan to the a very soft and distinct squeaking sound. It sounded like the air was being let out of a balloon. My dad left my moms side and approached the biggest window in our basement and notified us that there was in fact a little water coming in the sides and that he should think about heading up stair. Almost immediately after saying that the soft squeaking sound built into a scream that sounded like it came from the mother of all teapots. The noise was horrible and it was coming from all the windows around us.

"Grab what you can and get out of here!" my dad commanded.

The rest of us stood there watching the flood rejoice that it had finally found it's way into our home. I stood still and watched the first wave of water sweep under my dad's writing desk and lift it up off of the ground.

None of us were ready for what we were seeing....except for my dad who must have recognized our shock and screamed "Move it!!!"

I stood up and took helped my brother begin to carry our families seemingly 400 pound VCR toward the staircase. As I walked the loud high pitched screams from the all the windows ceased almost immediately as if their invisible conductor gave them the order to be silent. I thought that perhaps the water was not going to come afterall.

I was wrong. A second or two after the whistling sound stopped there was a loud crashing sound. It came from our guest bedroom. That window was the first of many to give up it's unwinable fight against the water. It only took a short moment for the water to come rolling out of the bedroom and across the main lobby of the basement. It poured over my bare feet and I remember reeling from it because of how cold it was. The only other thing I remember about the water was how profoundly dirty it was.

I was stuck in the moment. Instead of moving I was frozen in place watching the water begin to engulf my basement. I kept thinking how things were never going to be the same again...and how comfortable I had just been a very moments ago.

"Go! Now!" my dad shouted over the sound of the other basement windows that were now caving in.

We carried what we had in our hands up our staircase as the rushing water came roaring into the basement that I had just a few moments earlier been sitting comfortably in. The sound of the water taking over our home lives vividly in my memory. It was the sound of a train that was passing under my feet. It was terrible. Even today the experience of the water chasing me up the stairs still feels like it happened to somebody else. It was as surreal of an experience as I have ever had or care to ever have again.

By the time we reached the top of the stairs we turned right back around to salvage more items from the basement. It was too late. My dad was already down there and the water was already to his waist and he told us to go back stairs.   It was over. Our basement was lost. We needed to prepare ourselves for what would happen if their was enough water for it to rise up from our basement and into our main level.

I remember my dad started talking about eventually having to find a way to our roof if the water kept rising. We were going to have to tear through the ceiling in order to get up there.

We stood together in our kitchen listening to the water rise underneath us. We spent the night wondering if the rain would ever stop. Wondering what was going to happen if the water continued to move it's way up the stair and into our main level. I was a mix of both terrified and excited about what I had just been through. I was scared because I had never seen anything like that wall of water that swept through our basement.  The wall felt and looked like it was alive and hell bent on finding little children like me to swallow it up in it's cold dark waters. It felt that it was coming to get me. Even as I stood on the floor above the rising water I could hear it lashing against the walls as it struggled to climb the stairs to find me nd carry me away.

The strange thing was that I was almost just as excited as I was scared. I was excited because I had never seen anything like this. This was a moment that happened to people in movies or on TV. It very much felt like I was in the middle of a life or death situation...and that was a feeling that seemed to be mirrored in my parents faces as they discussed what steps we would take if the water did not stop it's climb upward toward us.

Everything felt like it changed when the water came into our house. I had my first taste of how it felt to have your security ripped away and replaced with the real fear of the unknown.

At this point my mom dad not have the courage to ask my father what was going to happen next anymore. He had no idea. With the water rising rapidly below us the only thing that was certain was that we had no way of knowing what was going to happen to us.

How could we know? We were at the mercy of the flood. The only thing we could do was pray, which is what we did. It was all we could do.  As the water began to spurt up of stairs I was started to prepare to swim...

What could we do now? Survive the flood of 1985.

to be continued......

***********************************************************************************************************

Summer 2003

Everything had gone to hell. All the dreams I had for my family and for myself came crashing to the ground with one cold sentence spoken by a pleasant woman in a white doctors coat:

"Their is no doubt that Noah has Autism."

Immediately I was drowning in my own self-misery. I could not move because I did not believe it was happening.  I was sinking to the bottom because I refused to kick up my legs. I was not fighting back because I did not believe in myself..I was dying. I was going to be a passive witness to my own destruction.

Everything felt different. ALl the security I had in my life had been ripped away and replaced with the fear of the unknown.

There was no question anymore. He was autistic. The doc told us that there was no escaping it anymore. There would be no "wishing it away". It was here and we needed to act quickly if we were going to save him.   They said if Noah was going to have a chance we were going to have to step up and be prepared for a lot of hard work.   They said that Noah was going to depend on us for perhaps his whole life to do everything for him. They said that his road was destined to be filled with struggle and a difficulties. They read our future and they gave us some dire predictions.

That was when the water started to rise around me....

After we received Noah's Autism diagnosis in Denver our drive back to Cheyenne was spent in deep uncomfortable silence. My wife and I would break the silence every ten minutes or so with a statement or brief monologue. Jennifer would talk about all the things we would need to change in our life in order to accommodate all the work Noah was going to need. She spoke of the myriad of calls we would have to make when we got home to get our son's treatments and therapies all set up. She was making plans for what was going to happen if the doctors were right in their prognosis for Noah, that he would possibly need a lifetime full of support.

I was not making plans. I was stuck in the moment still. I was frozen in my own selfish little bubble. The only things I offered to the conversation on our drive back home was how bad things were now. Everything was so overwhelming to me. I was wondering how I was going to be able to survive this. Yes, thats right....in the moments directly after my son was labeled with Autism I was enveloped in my own issues, Which of course means that I was acting like one of the biggest self-centered scholbs on the planet. Later that year I received an award from the Self-Centered Schlob Association for being their "Schlob of the year". I had just beaten out David Hasselhoff, Paris Hilton, and a teenanger named "Chip Richybottoms" for the award.

I kept wondering how I was going to hold up. How could I manage to raise a child with special needs when I am who I am. I had never been very comfortable around people who had lived with a disability. Not because I was some monster who felt superior, but rather, because I felt inadequate around them. I was scared of people living with special needs due to the fact that they represented a universal truth that I always tried to ignore....that life was so very fragile.

I kept wondering how was I going to hold back the tide that was coming my way. How was I going to be okay. Me, me, me, me....sigh. I look back and I am embarrassed about how I allowed myself to feel after the diagnosis came. I was so concerned about how this was going to affect me. I was so very worried about how such a weak man like myself was going to survive the years of struggle and hardship that I believed awaited us once we got home.

My wife and I had our suspicions that Noah was going to be autistic for a few months before his actual diagnosis. During that time my wife was planning and preparing.  Jennifer had known this storm was coming and had prepared herself. In the days before his diagnosis she had been planning for what would happened if our worst fears were proven to be our new reality. I was sitting and hoping...which then led me to a period of time where I lied to myself about his condition. I would stare at Noah and his behaviors and explain them away.

"He will be fine..he is not autistic....He will be fine....he is not autistic. He will be fine". That was my mantra. Besides I had once believed the cute Hallmark saying of "God only gives us what we can handle"   Well God knows me, and he knows that I can barely handle making Ramen Noodles so he will know that I would not be able to handle being the daddy of a little boy who had special needs. I can't be trusted to fill a car up with gas so there is no way I could be trusted with the care of a child who needed so much help. I was too flawed and broken of a man to have this put before me.

I suppose that a lot of other parents who have had their child diagnosed with something terrible have allowed themselves moments of self-pity. I am sure that their drive home from the doctor is spent in realization that the life you had planned out for your family was not going to work out.  I imagine, however, that by the time these other parents came home and looked into their child's eyes they snapped out of their melodramatic trance and started moving forward.

That was my problem. I did not snap out of it. Not for a long while...I stayed inside my own world for a long time.

Once we got at home I immediately allowed myself to become taken in by the depression. My son was going to need so much help just to function at a basic level. Noah was going to need a series of miracles to find himself with any kind of self-awareness. I started thinking about all the birthday parties he would never be invited to. I let myself fret over the people who would judge him because of his atypical behaviors. I succumbed to the worry of all the future obstacles we were going to face. I was heartbroken because I believed that there was no way I was going to be the father for the job.

Things like this happened to people in the movies or on TV. It happened to heros. Not to chumps like me. If Noah was ever going to have a chance to find his way through the maze of Autism he needed to have a better father. He deserved better.

The first few months after his diagnosis were the absolute most difficult. We had to implement new strategies at home to help him interact with the world in a different way. Noah hated it and demonstrated that feeling on a minute by minute basis. He was so miserable as we forced him to start speech, occupational, and cognitive therapy. It was so hard on him...

The waters of worry and stress were rising all around me. Here I was a father of a 3 year old with Autism and a 1 year old who I was terrified would end up being autistic as well. My son's treatments were so expensive and I was always under the weight of trying to find the dollars to pay for this months therapy bills. Every day there was a new crisis or new concern that manifested in my sons battle with Autism. Instead of trying to escape the flood of dark thoughts that I was becoming quickly consumed by I just let them rise around me. I was lost and angry. I was hopeless. My survival felt very much in question...

I did not want to help, I did not want to participate because I was still wondering how this happened to us. How the storm of Autism arrived at our house....I was still stuck in the moment between inaction and action.

God only gives us what we can handle? I call bologna on that.

How was my family not going to be destroyed by this? I had no idea. How were we going to be able to survive the seemingly endless stream of worries and problems that flowed over us? I had no clue. We were at the mercy of the flood.

The water was rising up all around us and I was starting to recognize that sooner than later I had to start swimming or sink to the bottom.

Sink or Swim Johnny...sink or swim....

to be continued.....