Kim Stagliano - All I Can Handle: Im No Mother Teresa: A Life Raising Three Daughters with Autism

OH, GOD. NOT ANOTHER BOOK ABOUT AUSTIM .

George Bernard Shaw once said, Youth is wasted on the young.

When I agreed to marry Mark, little did I know that Id shifted my life from Plan A to Plan X (as in X-files) without having the slightest clue of how different my life would be compared to what I then considered normal.

Just as well I couldnt see what was coming when I said yes to Mark.

If a light came down from the clouds right now and a voice (imagine James Earl Jones or Morgan Freeman) told you that in twenty years you, a prep school and college graduate, would not own your own home, would have less money in the bank than you did at age twenty-five, would have three children with autism, and would be happier than you ever thought possible, what would you do? Laugh? Cry? Join a start-up religion in Idaho and wait for the mother ship to take you to Alpha Centauri?

Heres the thing. None of us knows what well do or how well react when life lobs lemons at us like hand grenades.

Mark and I are no exception.

Throughout our marital and parenting travails, weve kept a stiff upper lip. And weve collapsed like a cheap tent. Mostly, weve navigated the middle ground of perseverance and clung to one another for dear life. Even when clinging meant drawing blood. Theres been plenty of that. Were both loud, opinionated, Italian-Irish, and Boston born, and we agree that any argument worth having should be at a decibel level just above jackhammer and include words typically reserved for folks on vessels in the open sea.

Our marriage is a mystery to me.And like any good mystery, there were clues and foreshadowing sprinkled about long before the kids and autism came along and the German company fired him by e-mail, and the boat started rocking, then leaking, then listing. I missed most of the clues that telegraphed, This is kind of unusual, Kim. And the ones I took note of, I quickly ignored. I guess thats human nature.

Or youth.

This book is an all right already, I hear you! to my family and friends, colleagues, autism moms and dads, my literary agent, Eric Myers, and some very smart editors, including Jennifer McCartney at Skyhorse, who, like my agent, took a big leap of faith on a mom sitting at her computer in Connecticut. When you finish All I Can Handle , I hope youll have laughed a lot, cried a bit (dont worry, you wont need Prozac to get through the book), and absorbed a visceral feel for what life is like for the tens of thousands of autism families who face the challenges of that diagnosis, now affecting at least one in 110 kids.

My sector of the autism community has taken a real hit in the media recently. Were the crazy folks who are anti-vaccine (so not true), believe in junk science ( buzzzzzzzz wrong answer, thanks for playing), and spend our waking hours molding fashionable hats out of Reynolds Wrap. I look horrible in silverno tinfoil hats for me. Just a lot of questions on why autism rates continue to soar, catapulting entire families into emotional, marital, and financial chaos. The current lifetime cost of raising a child with autism is estimated at $3,200,000 according to a 2006 report from the Harvard School of Public Health.