Free The Spark: A Mother's Story of Nurturing Genius by Kristine Barnett

long, hard, exhausting hours of therapy during the day with a few hours of frivolous kid fun in theevenings. It wasn’t easy. After therapy, there weren’t very many hours left in the day, and I didn’t want to broadcast what we were doing. The received wisdom was unanimous: When children are broken, work supersedes play. The other moms I knew with autistic children would have been appalled if they’d known we were sneaking off, and most of the experts as well. I could hear their shocked reactions in my head: “But what about your hours? Did you get in your hours?”
    I made sure we got in the requisite hours of therapy, of course, but I knew in my gut that Jake also needed the chance to play and to feel dirt between his toes. I was determined to give him both. There were times when it would have been easy not to prioritize Jake’s childhood—to stay an extra hour doing occupational therapy at the gym or spend a little more time at the therapy table. But if it came down to choosing between extra therapy and blowing dandelion fluff at each other in the backyard, we went with the dandelions every time. I truly believe that decision was a contributing factor in enabling Jake to rejoin the world, and it is one that has guided and animated all the decisions, large and small, that Michael and I have made on his behalf in the years since.
    Many kids spend their summers playing at the beach. Jake couldn’t do that without compromising his therapy because the beach was too far away. But we could still build sand castles together in the backyard sandbox, even if we had to do it by moonlight. We had a little brazier in our backyard. It wasn’t a real fire pit, but it was good enough to allow Jake the pleasure of licking melted chocolate and gooey toasted marshmallows off his fingers while the mosquitoes made their own meal of our ankles.
    We made frequent trips out to my grandfather’s land. Grandpa John’s presence was so strong there, it almost felt as though we were visiting him. When I felt frightened and alone, as I often did in those days, I allowed myself to be comforted by his reassurance that Jake would be okay.
    Jake loved those trips. It occurs to me now that he may have tolerated dancing under the stars because he was also getting to do whathe really loved: looking up at the night sky. But he couldn’t tell me that, and I was only trying to cram as much old-fashioned fun as possible into the spare time we had.
    That pasture out in the country was where I found my son again. He still wasn’t speaking or making eye contact, but by the end of the summer, I could sometimes hear him humming along with the jazz I played, and he’d laugh when I’d swing him around under the bright stars. While we were lying on the hood of the car and looking at the stars, he’d turn around to hunt for the Popsicles, handing me the box to open. It might not seem like much, but it was more of a connection than we’d had in a year. Then, right before he was to start special ed preschool, we had another breakthrough.
    Many parents complain that they have a hard time putting their kids to bed. Not us. Unless Jake and I were out having a nighttime adventure, he would put himself to bed promptly at eight o’clock, every night.
    To be honest, this was sometimes a little annoying. In Indiana, summer days are long. Kids run around until nine or ten on weekend nights, sneaking an extra ice cream out of the cooler while the adults talk with their neighbors around the barbecue. Not Jake. If we were at someone’s house, he’d put himself to “bed” on their floor—or, on one memorable Halloween, in the unoccupied bed of our friend Dale’s daughter Allison.
    We didn’t realize exactly how precise his timekeeping was until I tried putting him to bed early one night. We had an out-of-state wedding to drive to the next morning, which meant the whole family would have to be up and out of the house much earlier than usual. Thinking that we’d