Barely Visible (Mothering a Son Through His Misunderstood Autism)

For any parent who has ever struggled with a child’s difficult or peculiar behavior, this candid and compelling memoir about raising a child on the spectrum offers reassurance that you are not alone—and a path forward is possible.

When your child is diagnosed with autism, a million questions come to the surface and fear sets in. The discovery that they are high functioning comes as a relief—it may enable them to disguise their shortcomings. Or it may create additional problems.

Barely Visible is not a heroic tale of a champion parent. It’s a candid memoir of one mother’s struggle with the gray space between her son appearing one way on the surface, yet being quite different beneath it. Walking that fi ne line between when to say something and when to bite your tongue, hoping your child can handle life on his own, requires tremendous foresight and energy. How do you convince others to “cut your child some slack” when the kid they see looks like every other kid they know? How do you explain away behavior that, at face value, looks like the result of bad parenting? And how do you prevent others from discriminating against your child once you do disclose their disability?

Chronicling a journey spanning twenty-three years, Barely Visible is a mother’s admission of guilt, for choosing to ignore her son’s diagnosis initially; acceptance of defeat, for rarely knowing the right thing to do; and an acknowledgment of love—not only for her son, but also for herself.