In 2017, I took a break from the blog…..well, let’s face it, I stopped all together. The three posts I put up during that time I already pulled back down, they didn’t reflect what I wanted this to be. What I write comes from deep inside, and those posts were ‘informational’. The truth is, after my last heart attack (my 2nd for new readers), life for me started to change. As you may recall from previous posts, around the same time as the heart attack, a ‘widow-maker’ on September 20th of 2014, Dayna had started to resist going to school. Mornings became treacherous, Dayna would scream and fight us all morning. The school district started to send people to our house at 6:30 a.m. every morning, they were there to ‘help’ solve the problem. Instead, the screaming only got louder. IEP meetings with the school system were worthless at best. We were trying to have Dayna moved to a non-public school that would better suit her needs with a later start and a year round program. Instead we were met with a repeated NO, disrespect, and the threat from the county’s lawyer who smugly looked at me when all I was trying to do was protect my daughter and said: “Ask your lawyer what will happen if you don’t send her to school”. A few days later an “anonymous” claim from the school district to Child Protective Services was filed against us with claims of child abuse and neglect. I was in the middle of cardiac rehab, I had left my sales position and returned to be an IT Director with an hour and 45 minute commute each way and had lost significant income. A year later Dayna was attending a new program the county had started in high school, which she seemed to like and did not fight as much as a result. But before the end of the year we found out the county was closing that school and Dayna would have to transition once again. The commute was wearing on me, I tried unsuccessfully to return to sales for a couple of small local companies, and by the spring of 2016 I was back out of a job with debt from my heart attack and Dayna’s legal fees. I was losing our house and it was time to go. Two and a half month’s later we were living outside Raleigh, NC in the town of Fuquay-Varina and within a few months after that I was too worn out to write anymore.

Last week the culmination of many things in my life left me with a week of time to start putting it all down on paper. It also made me realize that putting things down in writing was providing me with an outlet, a therapeutic outlet that I needed. Not everything flooding my mind right now has to do with Dayna’s autism, in fact a majority of what is flooding it is the opposite, but Dayna and autism still take priority over all other things in my life, and always will. Getting it out in the open to show others what autism parents go through helps me, and I hope it helps others in some way.

If you were a reader of my blog before and returned to read this, thank you for coming back! If you are a new reader, start at the beginning when you have a chance to get a full picture of what this is all about. Either way, after what I have been through over the past couple of weeks, I’m glad I have an outlet for part of what stirs in my brain on a daily basis and I appreciate those of you who read it from the bottom of my heart.