Surprise! I’m autistic.

A highly edited form of this ran online on Insider.com today. Here it is with a lot more context that they edited out…

When my friend Jenn came out to me, the morning after she came out to her husband (now ex-husband), the reaction in my head was “are you sure?”

I didn’t say that out loud, thank God, because a woman like Jenn, raised in strict conservative Christianity, doesn’t tell her husband that she’s queer and upend their suburban life with four kids unless she. is. sure.

I’ve been thinking about Jenn a lot lately. Because I’m expecting some forms of “are you sure?” from people who have only seen one side of me.

I’m autistic.

And, yes, I am sure, as are my therapist and psychiatrist and others who are in roles in which weighing in diagnostically is appropriate. (Random people on the internet are not among them. I will not debate my autism diagnosis with strangers, because my identity does not require the validation of the online people among us.)

Autistic people are more vulnerable to being abused but we’re also less likely to show traditionally understood signs of child abuse because those signs are based on neurotypical kids. For me, PTSD and autism go hand in hand, and masking tools for each contributed to hiding the other.

I’m a firm believer of autism as a difference in how the brain works, with some attributes being functionally disabling in our world. We all need different supports in different situations at different times. I would be described by some as “high functioning” with “low support needs,” but that minimizes the realities by making it sound like I have Diet Autism, made to taste like the real thing but not quite.

Being autistic without a diagnosis, having ADHD undiagnosed, and living with PTSD unaware? All my life, I’ve felt fundamentally flawed, failing at being a person. I was diagnosed with lifelong complex PTSD in 2016, true from early childhood but not given a name until I was 34. Then came my ADHD diagnosis less than a year ago. And now, in a process that began with my oldest child’s autism diagnosis, I was diagnosed with autism myself in 2022.

(If you’re keeping track, yes, all the white Dingles are autistic. We also all have ADHD, PTSD, and anxiety, and the DSM is basically one of our family albums. As for me and my gene pool, we will be neurodivergent.)

I have a teaching license in autism education birth through grade twelve and an M.A.Ed. in Special Ed, with autism as one of my areas of specialty. I finished that master’s when Robbie was nine months old; later, I diagnosed Robbie with autism when he was two. We didn’t bother having him formally diagnosed until age seven.

Yes, learning that I’m autistic on the cusp of turning 40 was a lot. Still is. More so, though, it makes sense of a lot.

I’ve always seen myself as fundamentally flawed and wrong at being a person. PTSD explained pieces of that but not all of it. ADHD helped give more pieces to the puzzle of who I am. Now, using the lens of autism to reflect on my life experiences is maybe the first time I’ve ever felt like I can actually give myself a break. I’m not flawed and wrong at being a person after all. I merely fail at being a neurotypical person because I’m not neurotypical and was never meant to be. That shift in thinking allows me to make sense of my life as a full person, not broken, not deficient, not lacking.

I’ve been trying to be apples and oranges when I’ve been a blueberry all along.

All my life, I’ve watched people and mirrored them. My big sister was my first. My best friend Hannah and her family were next. Then I can name the kids in elementary school who I used as my models: Kendra, Jocelyn, Devin.

I didn’t like other kids, though. Wait, that’s not right. I liked other kids. I didn’t know how to speak their language of social interactions. I preferred littler kids or adults. Or more often than not, I preferred books more than any sort of people.

You can study all the people in books by staring right at them, whereas I had to try not to be creepy like that when I studied other kids. Book characters don’t care if you copy them. School peers do.

On a darker note, I used news articles about child abuse and textbooks about trauma to figure out the scripts to follow for surviving the hell that was my childhood. I didn’t have people to mirror. I did have Sara Crewe, and I read A Little Princess over and over and over to revisit her, study her, imagine I might have a rescuer who never came.

I met Lee when I was 18, and while he wasn’t a rescuer, he did become the filter I needed for support. He moderated between me and the world. When I couldn’t speak the same social language as others, I translated the world using him.

When he died, I didn’t only lose my husband. I lost the support mechanism for making sense of everything outside of myself.

Then, five months after he died, COVID entered stage left. Talk about mental whiplash. I didn’t have anyone to mirror while our family locked down to stay alive. (When people say “it’s only really dangerous for people with preexisting conditions,” we are the people whose lives are being dismissed.)

In interaction after interaction — particularly in moments of conflict — I was dealing with apples and oranges who didn’t speak blueberry. When Wake County schools abdicated their responsibility to educate disabled kids during the pandemic and gaslit the parents who fought for their kids, I didn’t have Lee to moderate. When I had to work with our home insurance and misogynistic contractors after our HVAC unit got clogged and the failsafe failed and our house flooded, Lee couldn’t translate that world for me. When I didn’t realize until a month and a half into our rental situation that the man renting to us was coming into the house without permission and what seemed like kindness to me at first was sexual advances? I didn’t know, and then I had to move us out with haste to extricate us from that nightmare.

(Please don’t try to offer advice on any of that. It will be more traumatizing than helpful, and events are resolved now.)

Now I finally know that we are speaking different languages. I finally realize that I need someone to help me with translation sometimes. I finally have a name and explanation for why I’ve never been successful at being neurotypical.

I’ll be figuring this out, often out loud. I might decide that my blueberry, apple, orange analogy is a poor one and rewrite it. We’ll see.

I’m here, and I’m autistic. I’m not flawed, broken, or less than others, and I’m sure about that

counting years...

January 1 doesn’t mark the beginning of each new year, not for me. July 19, 2019 ended that year, that era, that lifetime. The next day, July 20, marked the new year and new life before us, one in which our children had no father and I found myself cloaked with a new word: widow.

Every year now, July 19 is my December 31 and July 20 is January 1. 

The ending of another year we survived without him. The beginning of another year we’ll have to.

His beach trip bag is stuffed in the back of our closet, unpacked. A small laundry bag of dirty clothes rest next to it, and I still can’t wash them or move them or throw them out. Some of his t-shirts are still on shelves, a few still smelling like him. 

Some things have changed forever. Some never will. His dog quivers with joy whenever a men enters our home. She laid at the door for months after he died, waiting for him to come home. A part of her still waits, I think. Our children share the same laugh, same curiosity about how the world works, and so many of the same idiosyncrasies, mirrored from their dad. I know I can be loved, deeply, unreservedly. I didn’t know that before him.

I’m beginning to forget his touch on my skin, and I grieve anew at that loss. Not his hugs, those I can still summon, but the everyday glancing blows between the bodies of two lovers who know each other inside and out.

He didn’t know how loved he was. He wanted to love people perfectly, and he was not gentle with his imperfectly human soul when he thought he had failed. I wish I could have known how much more affirmation he needed, because I never lacked for the exquisite imperfection of his love.

I don’t celebrate new years, not the ones that launch on July 20. But the survival of the previous year, the perseverance of living another 365 days without his breath? This I celebrate and mourn in the dance of both/and.

Every July 19 feels like leaving the ICU, the hospital, my friend Rachel’s van, to climb the stairs to our six beloveds who didn’t know that Daddy was dead. July 20 began the reporters on the lawn and the friends coming to town and the decisions that a wife shouldn’t have to make when we’re only 37. More than that, each new year of his absence starts like a muffled gunshot, tearing my heart to shreds but not making the sound other people would recognize as catastrophic.

No, most people think the catastrophe was in 2019. I miss those early days, the ones when everyone showed up and acknowledged my pain and understood why I might not communicate as effectively or promptly as I once did, why I don’t write apologies in the ashes left by my former life. 

Today, I sound dramatic to some people as I stumble over the words to try to explain, “I’m so sorry I missed that IEP meeting, but my husband died three years ago and I’m never going to get over it. Can we reschedule in hopes that the new date will be full enough of distractions that I can make it there?” 

They don’t understand. They don’t have to. They celebrate the new year in the winter, unaware that my year’s end and beginning come in 95 degree heat or hotter.

They think my life restarted that first July 20th. They don’t know I end in agony as I go to sleep to The West Wing because I need noise to avoid the volume of no breath sounds or snores next to me in my empty bed. They don’t know I begin painstakingly afresh every morning as I wake up on his side of the bed, mine unoccupied, in the room we planned to share for so many more years.

I have no “maybe this year will be better” hopes to express. The new year beginning this month will be terrible and wonderful, and I will celebrate the wonderful… but better would be having him in this year again. 

And better will never arrive.

But I’m finding some degree of hope in this heat, some promise in the faces of six children who were all 12 and younger when he died, four of them now teenagers, one taller than me, others close behind. I don’t know what hope will bring, don’t know what the unknown shadows have in store, but I have candles lit that will lead us somewhere.

Better? Honestly, I don’t know. But hope doesn’t always tell us what the days to come will hold. All I know is that as I stand on the cusp of another year, I know this one will bring more change.

I’ve hated change in the past. I still do, most days. But now I can accept what it brings, which is that today will pass and it might not be this hard forever. Hope is so fickle, but I’m looking forward the days and months and years to come, knowing with pain that they won’t hold Lee’s return but knowing the uncertainty will bring the certainty of changes. I’m no longer angry with my God, who is still certain ground to me even when nothing else is stable.

I am hurting today. And better would be almost anything else, so I await what might come with God and with hope, or something like it.

And for today, that’s enough.

And so it goes…

I’m single again.

I’m the one who ended it, and while I’m not offering the details, I’m hopeful the end of our relationship sparks the beginning of growth in some needed ways for both of us. I will share that this was sudden, so my feelings are all over the place.

And? I still call this success. I learned that I still have the capacity to feel feelings I thought would be dormant forever after Lee’s death. I learned new feelings are possible, ones I’ve never felt before but that emerge in relationship. I learned that I can hold my own wellness as a priority and walk away, albeit painfully, once something becomes unhealthy for me.

This relationship was good for me. Even things that end can have benefits from the era in which they lasted.

I don’t regret involving the kids. They met him a few times, and I’m glad for that. They have witnessed a loving committed relationship and witnessed it ending well.

I did feel a bit strange as I broke the news of the breakup to my babies, but it went well. Strange isn’t bad; it just is. (The stories themselves belong to my children, so I won’t share any more than this. As a mom, I am the keeper of their stories, not the teller of them.)

I don’t hate dating. That said, I don’t see myself pursuing it again any time soon. I love my kids, I love my friends, and I’m beginning to love my life again. Dating? Sure, if it happens.

And my next foray into dating might not be with a dude. I’m questioning and giving myself permission to explore now, and I’m probably bisexual. So this is me, kinda coming out, I guess. Pride Month is good timing after all.

For now, though, I’m single. I’m grieving Lee’s death in a new way, because I would rather be with him than dating anyone.

I don’t hate dating.

I just wish I didn’t have any need for it.

I’d like to still be dating the first man I loved, the one I married, the one who never turned 38. I believe love might be possible again with another partner, but I’m in love with my life as it was and as it is* without a plus one.

*I’ve learned to love my life as it is, present tense, verrrrrrrrry recently, and I’m still learning.

I have some news. [Deep breath. Inhale…]

I’m dating.

(Exhale.)

It is even fair to say this: I have a boyfriend.

He is kind. He is compassionate. He is vulnerable (with me, at least). He is truly the best kind of person.

He is a good human.

(In case you don’t know the significance of this statement, Lee always said “be a good human,” or sometimes to the kids “is that being a good human?” It’s a sort of code by which I live my life and teach my kids to live theirs. “Be a good human” is their version of the WWJD? bracelets of my teenage years.)

Will this relationship be forever like Lee was? I don’t know. And I’m letting myself not know. I’m letting myself have my first first-date and first first-kiss since I was 18, when I first dated and first kissed Lee Dingle. 

If these words feel bittersweet to read, it’s because they are. I had a great love, a beautiful marriage that we expected to last forever. We didn’t know our forever would end so soon, though. Thirty-seven is so very painfully young, and it is cosmically unfair that my first love didn’t turn 38.

Does this trainwreck-to-the-end-of-the-world sort of reality in which we live hold another great love for me? I don’t know. What I do know is that the risk of exploring that possibility is way less scary than the risk of life without a chance at being loved again like I was by Lee.

And what I also know is that I really really really like this guy.

Even if I thought I could predict the exact trajectory of this new relationship, I’d be wrong. I never would have predicted a killer wave would make me a widow and leave my children without a father. I never would have predicted I would be nearing 40 — on June 10 — as a single mom of six amazing children who are beginning to pass me in height.

Speaking of the kids, they know I’m dating. In no particular order, their reactions range from feeling like this is hilarious and exciting to feeling like this is peak awkward; saying “okay, can I get a soda now” to saying “I just want you to be happy, Mom”, and asking if I’m having a baby (she was disappointed upon finding out I am not pregnant) to asking what the difference is between dating and having a boyfriend (and upon hearing that people who are dating might be dating multiple people at once, exclaimed, “I can’t even read two books at a time!”).

They don’t know the guy. They know I’ll let them meet any guy with whom I am deeply serious. We might be nearing that point, so I am working in my mind and with the kids’ psychologist to do that well. We’ll have a family therapy session, the kids and I, to discuss it all before any introductions happen. 

I’m protective of their little souls, and I’m being cautious. Some of my children have had and lost two fathers. One of my younger ones, her sneakers in the dirt next to Lee’s coffin, scuffed and dirty already because we had no dress shoes in her size, asked moments before the burial on that July day in 2019, “so, Mommy, when am I gonna get my third daddy?” 

Oof.

I answered then, “Mommy is focused on loving you and your siblings, not adding anyone new.” And that was true, as I stood next to newly shoveled sediment around a stark hole in which the body of my beloved would rest forever. 

Now? I have more capacity for love than I had on that day. 

Nothing has diminished. I will love Lee forever, as I have since he was 19. I am focused on loving our babies well.

Meanwhile, it’s also true that I am loving this stage of newness and butterflies and rebirth. I’m letting myself feel feelings I thought might remain dormant forever, discovering they’re still alive and well.

Both/and.

Winter hasn’t thawed, but spring is blooming. I could get burned, but that’s better than freezing to a slow state of not dying but certainly not living. I’ve camped out in the dreary places, not ready to face the sun, and I know that offers nothing redemptive. (I could continue with mixed metaphors, but I’ll take a seat now.)

And the risk? Everything is risk, I’ve realized. When a vacation can end in a funeral, and a viral infection can leave my healthiest kid seriously ill with Long COVID, and puberty plus PTSD can lead to a hospital stay on the pediatric psych floor, and the world seems more full of fire-starters than firefighters, nothing is promised. Uncertainty is all we have. I’m choosing the risk of being hurt in relationship over the certainty of being hurt alone.

Here’s to taking the next step, as both continued grief and a comfortable newness walk hand in hand toward whatever this will become.

SNEAK PEEK plus "ugh she's promoting her book"

Want to read the intro and first chapter of LIVING BRAVE? Well, you’re in luck… HERE YOU GO!!!

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I’m a brand new author. July 6, 2021 is the delivery date for LIVING BRAVE, my book baby. I wrote this book in the first year following Lee’s death, and I’m both proud of it and terrified/excited (terricited?) for all of you to have it in your hands!

…or on your e-reader or audio book platform because it releases in those formats as well on July 6…

I’m also feeling the weight of the need for success and sales and whatnot. When I signed the contract for this book, it was going to be supplemental income, back when I wasn’t yet a widow and when my husband was positioned to become president of his engineering firm. And then, he died.

Right now, I have most of our GoFundMe money paying for health insurance and expenses, and that will get the kids to adulthood. For everything else, we live off two sources of income:

1. social security death benefits from Lee, which are limited to only roughly 2.5 people’s benefits given a family max that ignores that we are seven and all of us were supported by his income, and

2. my writing income, which hasn’t been robust beyond this book because of grief and a pandemic and a massive spine surgery and more, all while being a single mom to six children, many of us with lifelong disabilities.

I’m not sharing any of this for pity. I’m sharing it to be transparent, especially because so many of you gave to us following Lee’s death. presence.

We are okay financially. That said, in order to be present for the kids and care for their needs and my own and continue writing, my book needs to take off.

If it doesn’t, I shift to a different job, which will be difficult given my disabilities. Between that and my health and my six kids, that means an indefinite end to my writing and online presence.

Either way, we’ll figure it out. That’s what I do.

But if you value my work as a writer and want to see it continue, here’s what YOU can do:

1. Preorder my book. NOW. Preorders make a huge difference for authors, especially new authors. (And where doesn’t matter — choose whatever place is your favorite for ordering books!)

2. Buy a copy (or ten) for a friend, a neighbor, a family member, your cat, a stray, whoev.

3. Share why you’re psyched about the book with your friends and ask them to preorder too. (If you’re connected to any grief organizations, suggest that they buy several copies to lend or give out.)

4. Contact your local public library and ask them to order copies (or to consider ordering more if they already have some ordered).

Some people have accused me of doing certain things just to sell my book. Um, yes, of course

“She lost me when she added a link to her book in her bio. She’s just trying to sell her book,” they say, dismissing whatever came before the bio. “I don’t believe this tweet. She’s making this up to get people to buy her book.” And so on…

Say what?!?

Selling the product of your work is a normal activity for people across many industries. I poured myself into every word of this book and am extending them into the world with open hands, as an offering of “here, this is the best part of me I can give to a weary world.” do.

Doing any work during the first year of my widow life, a year that overlapped with COVID19 showing up with its own grief (and turning me into a virtual school teacher of all six of my children), was like drawing a blood sample with a machete. I bled my love and pain and story onto each page of this book, and I’m proud of it. I wrote each word in hopes it would be read, so of course I want people to buy my book! It would be ridiculous not to.

I don’t want you to just see my book at the mall. (Remember those places where we went into a dozen stores and all breathed each other’s air? Weird.) I want you to read it, to feel less alone, to learn how to dwell in darkness while still remembering some small light, to offer the next chapter to those who heard the story of Lee’s death on international and national news outlet and wanted to know how we’re holding up.

I wrote this for the new widow and the older widow and the griever of any kind.

I wrote this to tell the truth and give others permission to do so in their own lives.

I wrote this because I struggle with faith but can’t shake Jesus from my soul, and I wrote this to say, “yes, that makes sense” to person still wrestling or who landed on a different outcome on the questions of theodicy that come from tragedy.

I wrote this because words matter and I had some to say that I believe will humanize instead of dehumanize and will make a difference to this world that seems damned at least twice a day.

So, will I promote this book? Hell yes, I will.

Which circles us back to preorders. 

Please. Do it. Click any word in this sentence for a different bookseller’s link. It’s a damn good book, I promise. do.

(But don’t just trust me… go ahead and read the intro and first chapter!)