And now, I draw the line on this blog

In its 4.5-year existence, this blog has featured 658 posts. A couple of dozen still sit there, as drafts, ideas started but not completed, probably some rants begun and then fizzled away. A grand total of 280 of those posts have been about parenting, but 310...almost half...have been about autism. Ever since our oldest boy received his diagnosis at age 3, a diagnosis I had long anticipated, our parenting has, indeed, been knowingly about autism. Before that, it was also about autism, but we didn't know it yet.

The bytes and bits here have chronicled our lives--the ups and downs, the roller coasters--the fears and worries, decisions and realizations big and small. Through it all, we've had help. Support from insightful and caring autistics who have stepped in every time I've asked to let my son know that it gets better. Support from parents with whom I may not always have agreed but whose thoughtful insights have sometimes been revelations.

Writing here has involved catharsis, enlightenment, missteps, and moments of epiphany. It has been one of my deepest pleasures and greatest needs. But my son is now 10 and a half. I've noted recently that I cannot in good conscience continue to write about him while maintaining my sense of what I owe him as an individual and to respect his personhood. My other sons are also getting older, and I am becoming acutely aware of the need to maintain their privacy, as well. I will continue to blog, but not specifically about them or about our lives, and not here. While our lives less ordinary continue, this blog has run its course.

One thing I've always noticed about blogging is that it's not my posts about our personal lives, about our upheavals, that attract people and pile up the comments. It's always the controversies, the things that anger people, the posts that cross some line that divides...those are the ones that get people to read. Frankly, while I write posts like that compulsively when I come across something that raises my ire, I've always found it off-putting that people generally don't seem to care nearly as much about, you know, life and all that as they do about fighting with each other. It's not news to me, but it has left me somewhat cynical.

In my penultimate post, I sketched out the core of what I've learned so far in my years in the autism community, most particularly what autistic people have taught me about listening, about individuality, about voices. All change takes time. As we continue to work for that change, fight for that change--and yes, it takes conflict to make it happen--we probably will all, whether we're writing about it or not, continue our fascination with autism as we remain, turning and turning, in its ever-widening gyre.