In a family, autism always brings us back to this title from Émile Ajar’s novel: The life ahead.
We keep asking ourselves the same question: what will be the life of my autistic daughter or son? What is the life ahead of her or him? How will they go about realizing their potential? Who will give them a place? How to continue to learn, have a routine, live a personal life outside the home? To have friends, colleagues, hobbies, passions, dreams … love.
Life in front of you, we talk about it all the time, we, neurotypical parents. It is reflected in all kinds of mundane manifestations. Our mortgages, RRSPs, TFSAs, job changes, kids, grandchildren, degrees, house maintenance, and all the things we need to plan or hope for.
But when you live with autism, even without an intellectual disability, access to employment and integration into social life are really complex. Projecting oneself in time, in the life in front of oneself, is almost impossible, we enter an administrative maze that makes social workers dizzy, and finding a pivotal speaker who can tell us what is available and how to access it is then a matter of concern. of the feat.
Impact of the pandemic
The people who work in this environment are wonderful, I tip my hat to them, they are of boundless empathy and compassion and I am always in awe of their desire to find solutions. Teachers, educators, educators, occupational therapists, speech therapists, social workers, I salute you!
But, as the Quebec Federation of Autism rightly points out, the pandemic in which we are immersed has put the autism action plan on hold and everything that would ensue from it, with the consequence of a radical drop in possible services. It will be really important to restart the action plan in concert with the economy.
In addition, rapid vaccination is important and urgent for this population with specific needs. Explaining and enforcing distancing has not been an easy task in recent months and they are therefore unfortunately vectors of transmission that are ignored.
Autism and confinement
Often people ask me to describe how someone with autism lives. I try to explain to them what I could observe with concrete things, like the discrimination of sounds, for example: in a noisy environment, you have a conversation, your brain eliminates ambient noise and focuses on the conversation, but try to focus on everything you hear at the same time …. Not easy. Or, how concepts like irony or innuendo can be complicated for them.
Recently, it is the confinement that we all experience that has become my most convincing example. We all now know what it’s like to live at a distance, without social relations, under house arrest, wondering what life will be like in front of you … well, that’s a bit like autism too.
Have a good autism month.
-Charles Lafortune
Father of Mathis, 19, autistic
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