A lot of the moms of autistic kids I met are so consumed with being their child's advocate that there's no room for anything else - least of all themselves. It's why so many marriages end in divorce, when a child is diagnosed on the spectrum.

When you're a parent you find yourself looking at the unknown that is your child, trying to find a piece of yourself inside her, because sometimes that is what it takes to claim.

Any highway . . . they all take you to the same place, don't they?

I wonder if other mothers feel a tug at their insides, watching their children grow up into the people they themselves wanted so badly to be.

It is so easy to presume that while your own world has ground to an absolute halt, so has everyone else's.

and yet, you never knew wwhat you were capable of until you arrived at that given moment. Life was just a whole string of spots where you continued to surprise yourself.

No matter what Joe Hoffman and Wade Preston say, it's not gender that makes a family; it's love. You don't need a mother and a father; you don't necessarily even need two parents. You just need someone who's got your back.