A letter to Carol Sarler, re your article ?Why can?t we face the truth? Having an autistic child wrecks your life?. Article Here
As the mother of a child with ASD, I?m used to people sending ?helpful? articles that make me want to stab my eyes out with a rusty nail. The ?Welcome to Holland? poem, for example, attacks my deeply cynical and unsentimental soul like the norovirus and each time I receive a copy, I find myself screaming, ?but I want to go to Holland! Screw Italy and send me to the place with ganja?.
However, while the other articles and poems I?ve received have ranged from mildly nauseating to defcon HURL, I?ve never had one sent that both patronised, offended and annoyed as deeply as your article for the Daily Mail, and while I?ve had words with the person who sent it to me about sullying my mailbox with such crap, I feel inspired to write this as well.
Let?s start with your use of the words ?brave? and ?plucky? to describe the mother and grandmother caring for the child you are referring to. Those words would be appropriate in 1930?s school story about daring Phyllis and her exploits on the hockey field, but in the context of caring for a child with autism they are both patronising and show an incredible lack of understanding.
Those words suggest that in some way caring for an autistic child is so terrible, so hard and so beyond the norm that love isn?t enough and you must go to battle bravely each day. Anyone who is caring for a child with special needs knows that they are not brave or plucky, they are just caring for and loving their child like any other parent would and yes, perhaps the challenges are different, but it?s not a war, it?s just how life is.
The ?brave and plucky? bollocks, while the verbal equivalent of a stomach bug, was just annoying rather than offensive, but you bravely (see what I did there) carried on and hit on your next piece de resistance. Questioning whether such children should get to have a life in the first place. How did you know that apart from being called ?plucky? there is nothing more a parent of a child with ASD loves more than having someone suggest that their child may be so dreadful, so awful and so scary that they may make people consider abortion ?
Now I can deal with pity, misunderstanding, accusations of bad parenting, sleepless nights and well meaning, but ultimately uneducated friends putting their foot in it, but questioning his right to live takes a special kind of entitled ignorance.
Yes, all of the parents of children with Autism that I know (and I suspect I know more than you do) wish that their child didn?t have the condition and many grieve that they are not ?NT? however not one of them, at all, ever has said that they wish that their child had never been born because of the impact on their lives, and as someone much wiser than me once said ?A life filled with love is a life worth living.?
You say at the end of your article that you will never ask your friend if she wishes her child had never been born. I think you should show her your article as she deserves the choice about whether to keep a relationship with someone who uses her child to suggest screening for, and terminating babies with autism. I suspect she may have a different view to yours.
As for the Daily Mail who published your article. Well I expect nothing less from such a hate filled fetid jam rag of a newspaper,.
Yours,
BarfAndHeave
Unplucky Mother of an Autistic Child.