The Autism Society Event and Education Recordings Archive

In families where mother and daughter are on the spectrum - it can be the blind leading the blind. Just as often, though, we instinctively "get" one another in important ways the rest of the world never does. But must. We learn to speak to one another in our own languages -- through special interests, song lyrics, fandoms, stories that are not our own but are adopted into our own dialogue. It is an intense connection that flares brighter and cuts deeper. Like everything about the spectrum, it's life, but with the volume turned up. 

As mothers, we want to save our daughters from the ugliness we've experienced in life. Artist Gayle Fitzpatrick and author Jennifer O'Toole both have fiery, intense girls who veer from joy to dark moments in instants. Both mothers, like so very many, have experienced abuse, loneliness, and all the other confusions that autism will bring -- without role models or guidebooks or understanding or therapy....contending with a world that doesn't see the clinical depression, self-harm, social exclusion, therapists and struggled-through playdates, marital stress and eating disorders behind the front door. All this, while striving to be the solid points upon whom their daughters could rely.

And the daughters -- Brigid Rankowski, mid-20's, and Maura O'Toole, just 14, but very much on the international stage since childhood -- well, they too, deserve to be heard...because sure, listening to someone (even your mother) does not mean that you accept her version of truth. But try telling that to an overly-impulsive daughter struggling with mind-blindness and social anxiety (or to her equally autistic mother).

In this panel -- the first EVER of its kind -- two sets of mothers and daughters will open their hearts and diaries, sharing their very-public joys and equally private entanglements so that families, therapists, counselors, teachers can learn:

• the communication strategies we've invented that fill in the distance autism injects
• the necessity of frank, unapologetic talks about sex, dating, marriage and everything in-between
• how to bear the terrible storms of your own depression and that of someone you love
• how to use special interests to say everything you can't otherwise
• how almost everything is figure-out-able....and most of all....

...what we teach each other -- over and over in beautiful, completely typical and entirely atypical ways:

• "Comparison is the thief of joy. You will come to know more. You will come to be more. And still. Always - always - whenever right now happens to be, you already are enough."

Learning Objectives: