Saturday, September 29, 2018

Thinking About Running

This week was tough in a lot of ways.

As a mom of a kid who elopes it always hits me hard when I see that child with autism has disappeared, even when they're on the other side of the country. 

I always find myself half holding my breath, checking my phone for updates, praying for good news, knowing that as the hours slip into days, the chances of the outcome being good becomes less and less likely. 


It is always very, very much in the front of my mind, during these times, how close we came to being exactly in one of those tragic situations.

I am always excruciatingly aware that it very nearly was us, despite everything we had and have done to try to keep her safe from her seemingly inexhaustible drive to run.

And after this week I just needed to talk about it.

And I had a little extra inspiration.


I know that in the past I haven't been the best at dealing with hate comments.

I feel like I've actually improved my handling of them, because after a decade I've finally gotten to the point where, for the most part, they don't upset me anymore.

I basically have a one strike policy, where I delete and hide from the channel any person who leaves a hate comment, largely because I want my comment section to be free from that sort of thing.  There aren't really any second chances over there because I don't really have time for that.

And I knew when I made a couple of the videos about eloping that there was a fair chance that they were going to attract those sorts of comments because people just don't get it sometimes.

I've actually been pleasantly surprised by how amazing 99% of the people I've been interacting with through my videos are.

I expected Youtube to be a little bit of a rougher place (and the blog prepared me for it better than I expected).

However I did get a few comments and they actually inspired this video. Because one of the main points of my vlog is to help educate people about misconceptions about autism. And there were so many glaring misconceptions that I decided to take the awesome opportunity that the commenter was offering me and put it to good use.

Now here's hoping that Tessie is part of that 52% of kids with autism that don't elope... I'm hoping that the odds really are in my favor on that one.




2 comments:

  1. People who aren't in your position do not understand. Period. I simply do not care what explanation they have for hateful comments, if they aren't in the position of caring for an ASD child that elopes they don't get it. My daughter was an eloper - not as severe as Maggie but she certainly did it many times. It is astounding how very very quickly a child on the spectrum simply runs - not a wandering off but an instant bolting. In the time it takes to sneeze they can be many yards down the road.

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    1. So true. I think the thing that surprised me the most was how many people in comment sections (which I should totally stay out of) on new sights who said they had kids on the spectrum who eloped who also didn't get it. I generally expect people without kids on the spectrum to not get it... but there was a lot of "my child elopes and I would never..." out there too, and I think that shocked me the most.

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I love comments and I read every single comment that comes in (and I try to respond when the little ones aren't distracting me to the point that it's impossible!). Please show kindness to each other and our family in the comment box. After all, we're all real people on the other side of the screen!