However rewarding being the parent of a child with autism may be, it's also exhausting. Indescribably so. There's the hypervigilance required to constantly (and I mean 24/7) keep your child from escaping and wandering into a street or drowning in a nearby pool, burning themselves on anything hot while you're cooking, turning on a faucet and flooding your entire house, and emptying the contents of your refrigerator into the kitchen floor, all in the amount of time it takes you to run to the bathroom, When you combine that with the never ending insomnia that usually accompanies the autism diagnosis day after day and year after year, it can honestly make you feel like you're losing you're mind.
When I meet a parent who raised a child on the moderate to severe end of the spectrum to adulthood, even the fact that they're both alive seems awe-inspiring. I mean it. That the parent actually kept their child from drowning, getting run over, etc... for that many years on almost no sleep gives them almost superhero status in my estimation. :)
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