Description
The author Kathleen Somers recounts in repetitive detail the behavioral oddities that her son exhibited during his twenty-three years of growth. Deeply attached to her only child, the newly divorced mother sought myriad strategies to try to transmute his neurodivergent behaviors to those exhibited by normal boys. Seeking to build a conventional family which would enfold her son, she describes the two sexual affairs she embraced, but from which her son distanced himself.
While possessing a volume describing Aspergers syndrome, she dismisses this resource as too technical and doesn’t bother to read it. She complains about the boy’s peers, educators, and employers not understanding her son’s bizarre behavior, yet she doesn’t bother to explain to them that his brain perceives the world a bit differently.
In attempting to transform her son into a normal success, the mothers spends a fortune on sports activities, various private colleges, several tutors, a modeling portfolio, and car repairs, but none of these attempts change the autistic challenges of problems with social interaction, anxiety, repetitive routines, food fetishes, and other misunderstood behaviors that he continually displays.
Unfortunately, the mother rails against her inability to remold her son when in reality she should have been working with specialists to find ways to adapt his neural differences in ways to enable functioning within the social milieu.
