I took my son to a pain clinic and every parent there was autistic

Two years into Z’s head injury we went to a pain clinic. The program was for families with a teenager in chronic pain, and people flew in from all over the country. Z was the only musician who couldn’t play music anymore. But there was an all-state field hockey player who hadn’t played in years but still went to every practice. There was a girl who’d been a ballerina her whole life and then suddenly couldn’t dance: she’d grown half a foot, and now her body was built for basketball. Her proprioception was off and now movement felt like violence. About an hour in, I understood two things. First, everything they were telling us to do was what doctors had been telling me to do for Z for two years — and I hadn’t been doing it, because the things are boring and I didn’t trust them and I wanted there to be something else. Second, every parent in that room was autistic. The whole program was a parent intervention. The kids were only there because no parent would come to a thing called What…