 Good evening and welcome everyone. Thank you so much for joining us this evening for this program, Exploring Autism, Two Minds, Two Memoirs. My name is Kendra Sakamoto. I'm one of the librarians here at West Vancouver Memorial Library. Before we get started, I do have a few Zoom items to share. We will be using the closed caption feature for the hearing impaired. This program is automatically transcribed by Zoom. So please understand that it may not be a perfectly accurate transcription. To enable or disable the captions, select the live transcript option on your menu. There will be an opportunity for questions this evening. Throughout the presentation, please type any questions that you may have into the Q&A feature on your menu. You may also use that if you need any technical support. We will not be using the chat or the raise hand features this evening. While I recognize that we are all in different places, I would like to acknowledge that for those of us on the North Shore, we are on the traditional ancestral and unceded territories of the Squamish, Slewa-tooth and Muscleum nations. If you are uncertain as to which ancestral territory you live on, I encourage you to visit who's.land to learn more about the traditional lands on which you reside. I personally am incredibly grateful to be able to live on these beautiful lands that the Coast Salish peoples have been the careful caretakers of since time immemorial. Tonight we are delighted to welcome Claire Finlayson and Teresa Headley. Teresa Headley is an educator, a curriculum designer and an author. She is the mother of three young adults, one of whom, Eric, has autism. Her memoir, What's Not Allowed, A Family Journey with Autism, tells the tale of Eric from womb to adult. While living in Ottawa, Eric and Teresa co-wrote a series of articles for Autism Matters Magazine, for which Teresa consulted with families of children with autism and school boards throughout Ottawa. Prior to marriage, Teresa taught and trained teachers in Asia and Europe. After a 25-year career working as a jewelry designer, Claire Finlayson now writes full-time. She has been writing for as long as she can remember, as an essayist and occasionally a journalist. Her passion is narrative non-fiction and Dispatches from Ray's Planet, A Journey Through Autism, is her first book. Claire served for 10 years on the board of directors of Seashell's Festival of the Written Arts, the last three years as vice president. As a director, Claire introduced many authors at the festival, but this year she appeared as one of the festival's new voices. Welcome, Claire and Teresa. Thank you very much, Kendra, for that lovely introduction. And thank you to West Van Library for hosting us tonight. I am a West Van girl and this is my library. I remember coming here as a young kid and it always felt a little bit like hallowed ground to me. So it is an honor for me to be invited to speak tonight and I'm thrilled to have as my guest, Teresa Hedley, who's going to add her own perspective and experience. Teresa. Thank you very much, Claire, and I sure do appreciate you inviting me to speak alongside you. And thank you as well to the West Vancouver Library for hosting this event and to you, Kendra, for guiding us along this evening. Now, Claire and I thought that you... Oh, actually, I also wanted... Just before I move on, I want to thank you, the audience, for being here. And without you, there's not us. So thank you for being here. We're so glad you have joined us. Good point. Now, to you, audience, we thought we would give you an overview so that you have a rough idea of how the evening will progress. Claire and I have divided the presentation into five parts. The first part is all about the writing progress and the process for each of us about taking our books from word doc to manuscript to memoir. And what does writing feel for us to each of us and how did we do that? Part two is about themes that are common to both of the books. Very interestingly, dispatches from a raised planet and what's not allowed are very different and our journeys are very different. But as we read, we discovered we have a lot in common and there are a lot of common themes. We're going to talk about four of those in part two. Part three, we're going to look at one theme that's particular to each memoir. I will ask Claire a question about dispatches and she will ask me about what's not allowed. Part four, we call say it in five. What are five things as authors that we would like you to know about our books? Claire will present, I will present. That brings us to about 8.15 and question time. Time for you to ask us anything you would like to about writing, about our books, about autism or make any comments on what you've heard this evening. So that is the overview. Before we launch in, I think we should probably talk about how we met. So Claire, how did we meet? Well, I started it. I take credit for that. Another writer in my circle had given me a heads up that there was a book out. I think your book Teresa came out three weeks after mine and he snapped a picture of it in a bookstore right at the cash register there. And he said, hey, Claire, were you aware of this book? Similar topic, memoir. I already had this date with West Vancouver Library queued up and I was thinking I would love to have a partner who could add some new perspective and make it more interesting. So while I was looking for a teammate, I thought, I wonder, but anyway, then I saw your book featured in the BC Federation of Writers Magazine and as it happens, mine had a feature in that same magazine. So now I thought, well, I'm gonna have to reach out to this lady. So I did through Facebook, with which I am not all that familiar to ask you if you consider partnering up and I got a lovely warm reply. So we sent each other copies of our books and as it turns out, we were away to the races and I think we're a pretty good collaboration. Yes, thank you, Claire. And to jump in from my perspective, I received a Facebook request from this person named Claire and I thought, well, she has a nice face but I won't click yet, I'm going to investigate. So I went on to your timeline and discovered some really astonishing things. First was that you are an author. I thought, well, so am I. And second to your book is about autism. I thought, this is incredible. Third, that your book came out, as you say, within three weeks of mine, just before mine. Four, you're from the West Coast. And I thought, well, this is so amazing. And at that time, the reviewer Tom Sanborn from the Vancouver Sun had just written a lovely review on Dispatches and I read the review and there was a lot of illumination about who you are as a person as well. And I thought, well, I need to read this book and I need to meet this person. So therefore I clicked tick yes, accept and we connected and started messaging and emailing and finally we had our blind date and we zoomed and yeah, it's been a really a fun collaboration over the last four months and that brings us to tonight. And that's a little bit of background about us. So to progress from that to the next step, let's look at part one, the writing process. Claire, I have to say, I loved your book. It's clear writing, it's polished writing, it's funny, it's sensitive, it's illuminating, it's so many things and it's just a very enjoyable read, which makes me ask the question to you and to think, what is writing to you have you always written and how does it feel when you're writing? What's it like? Yes, I've always written as far back as I could hold a pencil. I consider writing to be actually my natural habitat. It's not a hobby for me, it's more of an instinct or a pressure, I have levitated myself out of bed at four in the morning to write when I've felt the need to and when I am writing, I kind of enter a flow state, a zone, another dimension and I become a little bit unaware of everything else. And we all know life rips by really fast and when something is written and I've saved it, I feel like I've captured a moment in time and it can't get away from me. So that's why I kept 20 years worth of emails between my brother Ray and I that ended up forming the basis for my book because we all know memories plastic and you and I are memoirists and memoirs from the root word memory. Memory changes over time, it's not static. So when I've written something or I've saved something that someone else wrote, I feel like I have this perfectly preserved room that I can enter and it will never change and never slither away. So, Theresa, what about you? You've always written for? Yes, I've got that. I've kind of savoring some of the words you just use. I like the flow state, absolutely. And also how you sometimes get up in the middle of the night and I will describe that, that the same things happened to me where there's so many words in the room and I need to get up and I need to write them down. But yes, rolling back as a child, I always wrote I was terribly, terribly shy and the thought of getting up in front of the classroom speaking made me sweaty and hot and I just, I couldn't do it. But I knew I had something to say and I knew that I had a voice and that voice was through my fingers and it was, I don't consider writing really as writing but as recording these thoughts and these passions that start here and I can almost feel them flowing down. And so for a child, well, that was then writing in my journals, in my storybooks and I would stay in that recess and write stories about a little people. And I think I was inspired by the borrowers. Do you remember the borrowers and the secret world of Og and little worlds? So that progressed on and I became an English teacher and I taught around the world and I shared my passion with others. But now I write for myself and through, for others through this memoir but it just feels like this, as you say, a flow state and two things happen that I can kind of identify. One is a catharsis, all of the emotion, the thoughts come out and the second thing, it's very crystallizing and I'm sure you feel this as well as I do. And I've heard others authors say when I want to know what I'm thinking, I write and that delivers it for me. And one of the things that came out in writing this book was that how connected I was to my family and I didn't realize that until I started writing. That was the crystallizing moment and that aunts and uncles and grandparents and parents and the brothers and sisters and cousins and father-in-law and mother-in-law they're all part of who I am. And they're part of my weave and it comes out in the stories in the book. And so the family journey is not just the nuclear family it is the ancestral family too and the guiding lights and how they keep us guided and that came out through the writing all that to say. So let's move to your book in particular to dispatch us from, I don't want to say Claire's planet but from Ray's planet and tell us about the process. Did you always want to write a book and how did it move from word doc to this polished book? Well, I did not set out to write a book that would have taken more hubris than I had at the time. I was actually just in a really wonderful critique group and I brought short pieces. And one of the pieces I brought was about my brother Ray and his practice of free diving. And of course that's very different than scuba diving where you have tanks. This is breath hole diving. So we're talking Finn's mask and a lung full of air. So I brought a piece about that and my group was fascinated by my brother and asked me to write more into this piece. And week by week that kept happening and pretty soon I had this enormous manuscript. And as it happens, my mentor, she doesn't like me bragging about her, but I do anyway. She has won almost every literary award going and this year, 2021, she has just been granted the Lifetime Achievement Award for Outstanding Literary Career. So her name is Betty Keller and in Western Canada or in Canada, that name open stores. And she worked on this manuscript with me for seven years. So she personally walked my submission materials into a publisher, Caitlyn Press, that she does work for. And voila. So that gets a publisher's attention because anything that's been workshopped under Betty's eyes is gonna be a pretty clean manuscript and pretty good. So Teresa, back to you. You're a parent of three young adults. Your son, Eric is 23. You mentioned you're a teacher, you're a writer. You're an advocate with people with autism. And it seems as a military family, you move every 10 minutes. So I'm in awe that you managed to carve out the time to write, but I wanna know more about what prompted you, what impelled you to write your book. So speak about the evolution of what's not allowed. Well, Claire, like you, I did not sit out to write a book. And I'm listening to what you're saying and I thank Betty for encouraging you and for believing in you. She was your believer and she told you you could do this. And I think we all need, well, we all need those. And I have them as well. And I didn't set out to do this. It was actually an invitation from a believer like Betty in Ottawa and her name is Kathleen Rooney. And she's a music and therapist, sensory specialist. And she works with lots of families of children with autism. And she said, you know, I've worked with hundreds of kids in their families and there are about 10 of you that I'm noticing that your kids who are now, you know, elder teenagers, young adults, they've done quite well and they seem to be very self-aware and well, you know, self-assured. What did you do as mothers to take them from this kind of dismal prognosis at diagnosis? What did you do to take them there to where they are now? And that's what I want to write about. And I think that's what we should be writing about. So there are about eight of us who said, yes, this is a good idea. And she said, Kathleen would send us these writing prompts every week, which I kind of loved because as much as I love teaching, I like being a student and I like being assigned work with a deadline because then I know I'll do it. So she was sending us all sorts of really deep and interesting writing prompts about the journey, things that parents had asked her. And we wrote and wrote and wrote for months, but we realized, you know, this book could be about this thick because there are eight people with a lot to say. I ended up moving to Vancouver Island and I took my writing with me and I contacted a publisher north of Toronto in Berry and she was recommended to me by another friend. And I said, I would love to publish this, but I'm not really sure how or what or what it is. And she said, I'm not either. Your manuscript has identity crisis. And it's kind of self-help. It's kind of memoir and it's kind of how to, but you have to choose and you have to find to what you want it to be. And she said, I really see this autism journey as a memoir like you because autism doesn't live in textbooks, it lives in our homes and our hearts and in our lives. And that's where stories, that's what stories are. They represent bigger messages. And I think that's true of both of our books. We have entertaining stories, we have sad stories. We have stories that will make you laugh and cry and go, ooh, and really make you think. And those are entertaining onto themselves, but they're carrying bigger messages and themes. And she said, that's what you need to be doing. And so I did and it took two years to write and two years to rewrite, you know, right again. When you know that. It took seven years. Yes, I did. I really relate to that, Teresa, because I'm also part memoir, part exploration journey, part self-help, kind of a mixture of a book where you're sort of wondering what am I writing here? But I want to move on now to our exploration of common themes. So we identified many as I was reading through what's not allowed. I, you know, I was scribbling in the margins. Yes, yes. But for the purposes of being on time today, we will confine ourselves to four of them. So those are rules, water, moving and school. And moving and school are almost one theme because moving by definition almost necessitates a new school. So to introduce this topic and our first common theme of water, my favorite, my brother Ray and your son Eric have spent a lifetime trying to figure out the written and the unwritten rules. And the titles of both of our books allude to this because in my case, from the time we were young teenagers, Ray was always telling me how much better things were on his planet. And to my befuddlement, he couldn't seem to learn the rules of engagement on this one, even though they came factory-installed in me and in our other four neurotypical siblings. Now, in the case of what's not allowed, very interesting title with this dropped question mark. I know from reading your book, Teresa, that those were actually Eric's first words, not even a word, a fully formed question. And it indicates a really keen interest in trying to figure out the rules and the patterns. So can you talk about Eric's fascination with and his need for rules and order and how you discovered this? Absolutely, well, thank you. And just a little sidetrack, that was not the title that the book was going to be. That evolved, the title of the book was, Continue Is The Power. And that is something I learned teaching in Japan just to keep going. It's one of their creeds to never give up. But the English was kind of funny because it's a translation, direct translation from Japanese. So Continue Is The Power, that fortitude, we put that to the side and the publisher said, well, what's another title we could use? And I said to Eric, how about your first words? What do you think about that? He said, I love that. And he says, because that's still true for me. I'm still trying to puzzle out the world. And so that became the title. And as you commented to me once, Claire, what's not allowed is his perspective. Continue Is The Power is Mine. And it really should be through his eyes because that's what I'm trying to show here. So he was around two or two and a half and he hasn't said much. His speech was slow to develop, but he was going, datts, datts, datts, meaning datts. And he was drawing our attention to those things that fascinated him, like the clouds and signs. And so I'm told later that this is very good because quite often children with autism are not drawing our attention in their own space, but they're not showing joint attention, it's called. So I knew he was aware and he was drawing us in, but he wasn't really speaking. So I think my teacher, mom, Pat, was probably labeling everything, datts, this, datts, what's not allowed, datts, datts, datts. And probably every time we went to the park behind our house, I pointed to the sign. It was a sign with three of those like ghostbusters circles and it was no littering, no loitering, no skateboarding. And Eric would show interest in it. And I would say, oh, what's not allowed? One day behind me, what's not allowed? This little voice, and I couldn't believe it. It was a full sentence and I understood it. And it just came out of nowhere. And I'll just read a little excerpt here. I said, I whirl around, astonished and observed Eric pointing at a sign on a nearby post. It's a series of circles with red slashes through them, no littering, no loitering, no skateboarding. Up to this point, we have heard a variation in datts plus a few murky words, but this, this is an entire question straight out of nowhere. And I understand what he's saying. He's pointing at this sign, he's animated and he is asking what it means. In my relief to hear this little gush of language, I have no idea that these words may be telling me something more deeper and significant. Obsession with symbols and signs is not as a marker. So we knew that this was really important to him, equally difficult for him. He needed to know. And quite, I think quite extraordinary, extraordinarily, we live in a what's not allowed world right now. During the pandemic, our theme has been what's allowed and what's not allowed. So it kind of gave me a lot of compassion for that boy back then, you know, because we're trying to puzzle this out as well, just like he was. So it was hard for him. So what we ended up doing, this very quickly show you, we ended up taking hundreds of pictures of these what's not allowed signs and making these little books. And there are probably, I don't know, 200 pictures. And this was before digital photography. So sometimes there were places where you weren't supposed to be taking pictures like at the airport, but he was insistent that we take these. We created these books. And in doing this, we were creating a treasure chest for him and we were valuing what was important to him, never really realizing how much we were pouring into this little boy's soul and his self-esteem. And we went through his interest and that was the start of this autism journey right there, right with those little books. So moving from those literal signs, I was fascinated when I read your book and you know, your big brother Ray as an adult was perplexed not by those kinds of rules, but by the unwritten rules, the hard unwritten social stuff. And so I've written here, I said, Claire for Ray, it's not so much those literal ones, but the unwritten ones that were confounding. And he writes to you in this book, the rules are unwritten and yet somehow everyone seems to know them. Now, Ray has come up with this brilliant word and I've been practicing it. So let's see how we do half the time I get it right and half the time I get it. Can you teach us how to pronounce goong-belong? Well, bad. What it means and more about Ray's perspective around the unwritten rules and the challenge to figure them out. Thank you, Teresa. And you get an A on goong-belong. This is Ray's word. He made it up when we were in high school. And in fact, when I was working on my manuscript, I implored Ray to make the word easier because I thought it would be off-putting to people to see this such an unfamiliar, cumbersome word. First, I'll give you Ray's definition for goong-belong. It is the game that humans play among themselves. It's the game of tact, social niceties, subtle hints, little white lies, polite chit-chat, maneuvers that have eluded him all his life. To him, those things amount to a lot of people working very hard to not say what they mean. And as you mentioned, the rules of goong-belong, or the rules, as Ray calls them, always with air quotes for emphasis, are unwritten. And yet somehow everybody else seems to know them. The consequences of floating them are swift and severe. So the word does not roll off the tongue and that is just the way Ray wants it. He's not gonna let me mess with the spelling of his word. He said to me, it's hard to say because goong-belong is hard to play. He said, every time someone has to pronounce my word, they are forced to do something unnatural and counter-intuitive. That's my life, my word is my revenge. So we could spend the rest of our time here talking about the rules written and unwritten, but I think we need to move on to our second theme. Can I just say one thing? Yes. I love, love, love the line, working very hard. What is that? Working very hard to not say what they mean. What they mean. And I think a lot of men say this about women. I mean, it's not just people with autism, there's a lot of people having a hard time figuring out other people's agenda and all that hidden. So I like to say, nothing is just about autism. We're all on this spectrum of traits and we're all trying to do our best and puzzle this out. But I just love the way he's so honest and says that. And I laughed out loud and I read it and I reread it and I'm so glad you highlighted it. And that's raised funny, you're funny. There's a lot of humor in this book and that is delivering more serious messages but I like the way you've handled that. So anyway, I just had to say that. The humor sort of helps the medicine go down because it hasn't exactly been a cakewalk for Ray. So my favorite theme of those that we've discovered in common is water. And I found many references to water in What's Not Allowed. It's a huge theme in my book, it's huge in Ray's life. So both of them seem to become more of who they are when they're in or around water, right? And also, yeah, I've written here around water and in water, your brother and my son, I think I'd like to say they become more of who they are. They can just relax and just be and joyously and peacefully and they seem free. It's like my dad, he was a pilot and he was different when he was flying. He was in his place and I like to think that Ray and Eric are in their place when they're around and in water. So I love reading the water parts and dispatches and the wonder and the serenity in those freedives, you describe it beautifully and it's just, you feel like you're there kind of terrifying but fascinating and the humor and the bravery, there's a really good story about Ray crossing swimming across the Rhine River in Germany naked. And I laughed out loud, I said, Frank, you gotta read this, it's great. And so please share with us a water story from dispatches and how Ray appeared to you around and in water and how he describes that to you, that experience. Right, thank you. So yes, it is a huge theme in my book because it's hugely important for Ray. In fact, in the book, I amused that maybe he's from a branch of the human family tree called Homo Aquaticus and that this branch made a terrible mistake moving up onto land to live with us. Ray describes being in water, particularly when he's diving as a spiritual thing. He actually says about his practice of freediving. He says, it is about the only sport where peak performance is related to serenity and a deliberate slowing down of oneself. For me, it's not just recreation, it's a very spiritual thing. It's hard to explain but I feel closer to God in the water than anywhere else. So you asked for a story. Ray did a very dangerous dive once, stark naked to kiss the bronze mermaid who is sunk at Salterie Bay. I don't know if you've ever heard of her but she's been sunk down there for the pleasure of scuba divers but no Ray decided to freedive on her. He wanted to kiss her head and she was standing at about 20 meters at the time which to me is 115 feet. And of course, that deep in the ocean, it's dark and it's freezing. You've passed through several thermoclines. So after I found out that Ray had done this thing alone, I asked him why on earth he would, why would he do it? And I want to read you his answer because it invokes both music and poetry and this starts to show you who Ray is when he writes to me. So I said, why the heck would you do such a thing? And his answer is, it's hard to explain really. There are reasons, although listing them is sort of like giving the reasons why one likes bronze. I dive to explore the beauties and mysteries of the water world, to do so without the encumbrance of scuba gear, to explore my limits physical and mental, to slip the surly bonds of earth and fly through the water. So Ray enters with a zone, he calls it. It's a very, very zen feeling of total calm and total awareness at the same time. His longest breath hold is five minutes and 37 seconds. His deepest dive is 35 meters. So that's about as far as a man can get from the human race on a lung full of air. And that is where my brother finds his greatest peace. So go ahead. I want to jump in two things, many things go through my mind. One of the things we discussed before, and I told you when I read about these free dives, I thought not only is this a spiritual thing, it's incidentally a therapeutic thing because at that depth, I mean, there's great pressure and that deep pressure is a known therapy, a calming therapy. So does he speak to that as well? Ray doesn't. And he gets a little irritated with me for connecting his freediving with that sense of pressure. You and I both know that Temple Grandin sort of was a pioneer in creating her squeezer machine or her hug machine in which she had longed for that sense of pressure and she created this contraption in order to achieve it. And I believe that Ray finds it in a beautiful and ingenious way 100 feet down in the ocean. Totally unplanned, yes. I mean, it was just part of the experience, wasn't it? Absolutely. And for me to try and pathologize that in a way and say, well, you're doing it because you're autistic and it's deep pressure and it's calming therapy, I think it irritates him. But nevertheless, it's just part of the package, yeah. It's part of the package and he is a passionate freediver and he's taken all my kids down as far as they can go. So, Teresa. Wait, wait, I'm not done with you. Well, do I had two things? Yes. First of all, I want to say and I've said this to you and I need to get this in. You know, I read all these things about Ray and some things, you know, he feels tormented. But I think to myself, oh man, I would have loved to have had an uncle Ray. All the things that he's taught your children and your cousins and your family about music, about swimming and about the heavens and stars and constellations and chess and memorizing poetry like the digital society. All these really, really interesting things and it's made them a lot richer. So, Bravo to Ray, I hope you see this at some point, but I just thought, wow, I would have loved to have had you in my life. The other thing is, I know that Ray is a fan, I am and you are of John Elder Robison. Yes. Is someone in the States who's quite well known, well, he was known first because he did all the special effects for the band Kiss and he figured that all out. He's on the autism spectrum, he's brilliant and he figured out how to do all this. He's had a very interesting career. But one of the things I remember from one of his memoirs reminds me of what you're talking about. And he said, and whenever I can't, I'm tired of figuring out people that goomba long, there is that, I go to the woods, I go to the forest and I seek solace, I seek solace in nature and there's nothing, there's no rules there. And I just feel so wonderful. And I'm thinking that is the same for Ray when he does these free dives. Absolutely. He has to escape from all of that stuff, you know? You can't play goomba long, 100 feet underwater. No, you don't need to, you don't need to. Yeah. Okay, so let me move to Eric because one of the things that was, it's one of the most moving parts in your book for me was when you realized that your little kindergarten kid was not thriving at school and you decided to pull him out of school and take him pedal voting on a lake in Halifax, I believe you were. And I find that remarkable, Teresa, because you're a teacher and so your paradigms would say, my child must be in school and this is where he belongs. And yet somehow based on intuition, you played hooky with this little boy. So talk about that. Yeah, I played hooky more than once, probably once a week. And I tell you, you know, my teacher self, the sense inside said, you know, sometimes you need to break the rules. And when things aren't working, I mean, the definition of insanity is to keep repeating what's not working. We weren't going to do that. We were going to tune into him. And that's what I would always emphasize. What's going on here and what does he love? And we need more of that. To just give you a sketch about school. Yes, it was kindergarten. He was five, but he was developmentally, probably two and a half socially, emotionally, physically he was five. But, you know, so he was a small child in that five year old body. He didn't want to go to school. He cried. I told him he was ready. He wasn't ready. I should not have done that, you know? And so I was feeling, I wasn't feeling too comfortable about this. And it was all day kindergarten. So he changed, you know, at home, I say, I was thinking about the words to describe him at home. He was at ease at school. It was, you know, dis-ease. It was on high alert. He was a boy on high alert because he couldn't figure out what he was supposed to be doing. What is my role here? I know my role at home. I'm a member of this family and I've known it well. And there's an environment at home that's very comfortable and set up to support me beautifully. School is organized. That's good. But there are 20 children there that are variables and they're unpredictable. And he didn't know what he was supposed to be doing with them. So it became something quite awful. He'd come home on a school bus, the little guy, and he would bolt up to his room. When he came down, he would spend a lot of time, he started to do this. There's a certain searching his hand. So almost for the answers. And he would run in circles on our Turkish carpet. And then he would start to spin like a whirling dervish on this Turkish carpet. And it was almost to me like a metaphor, like he was unwinding from this terrible day at school. And I thought, oh, I can't be doing this. And I knew, I thought, I need to, I know what he needs. He needs water. And so here's the little line, a little excerpt from the book. I call on heart and instinct. And it tells me what makes sense for a little boy so clearly out of his comfort zone, not this. Take him to the water and feed his soul. Sorry, I messed my spot there. Where is it? Oh, yes, there. To tap into Eric, immerse him in what he loves, water. I start playing them out of school two afternoons a week. And those hours are a dillock for us both. We dress in our comfy clothes and become marine biologists on the lake behind our house. Peddling the little blue and white Mother's Day boat, we visit beaver lodges and hover on the glassy surface adjacent to the muddy entrances. Still patient, holding out for incoming traffic. And then I describe a bit more about that. But at the end I say, years later, Eric will tell me that our pedal boat afternoons are the only memories he has of kindergarten. The rest has been very likely scrubbed from his timeline. I'm doing my best to ease his anxiety, I tell the school. I need to keep my son in our world. And that is all that matters. So they were telling me I wasn't meeting, might not meet the attendance quota. And I said, don't worry, you're reporting to me. I know where he is. And with me, he was totally engaged. He was totally thrilled and talking and sharing at school. He was withdrawn into a little knot. And I just want to show you one more thing, the little prop here. This is a reenactment. Can you see it? Yes. So on this lake, there were many boulders. And so there were bleach bottles as markers. So people who were boating wouldn't know where the rocks were. So I put his name on one and we called it Eric Hedley Marker. And he said, are we allowed to do that? I said, what's allowed and what's not allowed? He said, sure, why not? And so we had these stickers in the boat and we would visit all of the markers, especially Eric Hedley Marker. And I would give him a role, put the sticker on the marker and you can see count how many times we've been here. And then we would go to the beaver lodges as I described. But wow, this boy, he'd just shone and we would look at the clouds and just have a wonderful afternoon. And I felt no guilt for pulling him out of school. And as I say, it's the only thing he remembers. So I think the less of the words, sometimes you just got to do what you got to do. I am amazed, Teresa, because you had to overwrite your paradigms as a teacher and you went purely on intuition and instinct with Eric. And so that part, take him to the water and feed his soul. I mean, you can imagine reading that, what I felt. So moving from my favorite theme of water to our next two themes, which are moving and school. And again, we will blend these themes because they're necessarily interrelated. So as I mentioned, Ray and I are the eldest two of six kids and our nuclear family was constantly on the move. And Teresa, you are an armed forces family. So you are uprooted and moved every few years and often across the country, if not out of the country. So we know that moving placed a huge strain on both Ray and Eric. And those results tend to show up particularly at school. So at home, life can be fairly smooth, it's familiar. And I know with Eric, you instinctively knew you had to create an ideal, supportive and above all predictable environment for him because school, well, it's unpredictable, you can't control it, it's loud, it's stressful. And particularly high school is the ultimate in terms of bewildering social rules. So this, as we both know and have written about in our books, can feel terrifying. So since relocating and reinventing ourselves as big parts of both our lives and memoirs, I'm interested in you pulling this off. I was a kid, you were the mother, that's very different. And you call your three children the explorer, the experimenter and the enigma because you really like alliteration, don't you? So I wanna know what moving was like for Eric. At one point you described him heartbreakingly as this unraveling child. And you have a child on either side of Eric. So you did something that I find remarkable to help these children adapt from the foreign to the familiar. And one thing stuck out for me in particular, you wrote about Eric. If he can see it, he can imagine it. If he can imagine it, he can do it. So I want you to talk about the process you came up with your kids and particularly how you helped Eric with these changes. Well, thank you for applauding those efforts that I sort of just trying to pull out rabbits out of hats, trying to figure out what I was going to do to support him. And part of these times when I did this, I didn't know he was on the autism spectrum, but I knew that change was hard for him. So I thought I would approach this question because you and I have talked about this through this model that I love and I call it the what, the so what and the now what. So our topic is moving and that's change. Change and transition is the what. And the so what is how hard this was for Eric because change takes away everything that's important and necessary for him. The order, the rules, the routine, the structure, that house that he knew and loved, all of a sudden dissolves, it gets packed up and we're on our way. And that's really hard and stressful for him. And I sort of wrote about it in the book and to imagine an octopus and the arm with all of the the sections. And each time you receive that posting message, you have to take up that arm, that carefully cultivated arm and pull up that tentacle arm and all those connections you've made with therapists, with friends, with schools, with routines, you've got to do it again, you've got to reinvent that. So that's the what, the so what. So what it's hard. And I just want to read a couple of little blurbs about the so what. In one stroke, Eric's organized world, the only home he has ever known is dismantled. This proves to be the beginning of Eric's undoing. It is a mighty and confusing switchup and it is one that accelerates the inward journey. And a little bit later, I talk about what you described, he was the unraveling child and I saw it like a ball of wool. The farther we drove from home, the tinier he became. I want to avoid unravel and withdrawal. So in wanting to avoid that, I came up with a plan and that's the now what. And so it's what you do about it. That's one of our family guiding lights. It's not what happens to you in life. We had to move. It's what you do about it that matters the most. So I thought, like you said, I like that line you pulled out. If he can start to imagine it, he can do this because change starts here, everything starts here. That's part of the journey as well here, right here. So I thought, what happens in the military? I'll give you a quick snapshot. You get a posting message, which means you're moving and you receive that in about February or March. In about April or May, you go on a house hunting trip and H-H-T and it could be like from Halifax to Comox and Vancouver Island right across the country. You get one week to buy a house and then start to establish ties. You go back, excuse me, to where you're living and then you move to that house in the summer. So for that one week, it's pretty busy. We took our children with us and in the past we used to put them with a daycare and so we could go with a real estate agent. What we did later is we took them with us. And I think this is the part that you liked. We made them invested in this move and part of the real estate team. And so that they wouldn't just be parachuted into this life in the summer and know nothing about it. So they came from house to house to house with us with little clipboards with photocopied pieces of paper and they could write things about each house, what they liked and pictures and draw. I mean, they liked the hot air popcorn poppers and the jukebox and the bubblegum machine. And I said, no, no, no, that doesn't come with the house. But interestingly enough, at night in the hotel, we talked about the houses and we liked the same ones for different reasons. So they helped to choose the house. Then they took pictures of which bedroom they wanted. So all the seeds of change were starting to be planted there and the neighborhood, you know, scope out, out, out. And we met with the school and to block the pictures there and made another one, a little book and the rec center, I met with some therapist. So you start early. And another thing we did, and I showed you this and I glued it for tonight so it doesn't, we always carry this frame. And I actually, I do, I hold it up. They say, we need to reframe this change and make it something good and make it adventure. It's not so terrifying when we can manage it like this. And so we did touristy things too. I said, this is our opportunity to explore Vancouver Island or explore Nova Scotia. So we're going to make this into a family adventure and you need to step in line, you know? But just taking them there, it just changed everything. And as you say, from foreign to familiar. So that was the strategy. It's remarkable. Well, it was fun too. And I mean, we need to have fun. So that was part of it. So I'm going to move on to you and your many, many moves. And I was kind of gasping in the book and there's some pretty cool ones in there too. So tropical islands and things. And you're a family of six children and two adults. So this is eight people moving, moving. And you write in your book, Ray was lost. He couldn't make sense of the rigid social structure that was so apparent to everyone else. Ray lived for a year like a hunted animal. In time, I had figured out how things worked, but Ray never did. So likewise for you, Claire, you had stints in West Vancouver, of course, and in Alberta, Barbados and St. Lucia, which I think is very cool. And so your family's constantly on the move. It's exciting, but it could not have been easy. So I have a three parter. And if this is too much to throw at you at once, I can keep feeding them to you. So I want to know the effect on Ray and pull out a few stories at home or abroad that shows the effect of moving and having to reinvent yourself. And as I'm curious to know whether you understood how difficult it was or challenging at the time or only later. Yeah, thank you. That is a very multi-pronged question, but I will try to remember the answers to all the parts of it. Starting with the last question you asked, the answer is no, I did not know until Ray and I connected through email and I had tapped into what I call his writing man, how utterly traumatic these moves were for him because home base for us is West Vancouver, Edmonton West Vancouver, Barbados West Vancouver, St. Lucia West Vancouver, and each of these moves involved not just a different location, but a different culture. So in Barbados, Ray was a young teenager, maybe 13, 14 at the time, and he was sent to a boy's school where he was tricked out in a very military looking khaki uniform with epaulets and knee socks and the culture at the time in the early 70s in the Caribbean was very militaristic, very still British colonial. So you stood, teachers were gods to us when they passed by, if one addressed you, stood to make your answer. And at that time insubordination would be punished by caning. So girls would get it on the palm, boys would get it on the backside and Ray lived in perpetual terror of being strapped. And of course, if you read my book, you'll see that he knows he's to some degree at all times at the mercy of his mouth. And I do write about, I love teachers. There was one teacher who saved Ray by my dad hired him as a tutor because Ray was so smart that he was floundering and no one could figure out how these two things could go together. And this one teacher would unlock the chemistry lab after school and let Ray in. And Ray said, I could ask him anything on any subject. And he said, together we just flew through knowledge. And he said, I could ask him anything. And he said it wasn't just that the noise and the chaos of a regular school day was gone. He said, no, no, it's better than that. He said, he described it as un-noise. So it was a joy for me to actually, this was a very young, maybe 27 year old American Peace Corps teacher who was a teacher trainer in St. Lucia at the time and to dig him up 47 years later and say, do you know what you did for my brother? Of course, he had no idea. So from there, from this culture, back to West Bend Secondary where the students are calling teachers by their first name. And I remember the art teacher in the smoke pit with students smoking. Now, where we had just come from, this would be punishable by firing squad. So I looked around and I quickly realized we have to revert to North American high school protocol. But Ray didn't and inexplicably to me when we were back, he would stand up to address a teacher. And he, you know, he called his teacher ma'am and this instantly broadcasts his status as something strange, something weird. And I write about Ray finding a strategy to survive high school at the time Star Trek, the original Star Trek with astronaut William Shatner was a big deal. And everybody knows Spock who was half human, half Vulcan. I didn't quite get what these humans, full blood humans were up to. So Ray basically adopted that persona. And he says to me much later that it was his way of hiding in plain sight. So I distinctly remember these crowded high school hallways and other kids coming towards Ray and giving him the Vulcan salute. I thought it was really resourceful. So, yeah. He's a survivor. I mean, and I was thinking about this after you described this to me a couple of days ago, what's easier, you know, a very highly structured environment in St. Lucia, militaristic almost, where there are rules, but that wasn't easy. And you would think it'd be perfect if you just sort of think about it or this very slack one. Well, that's hard because there are lack of rules. But the hard, I think the hard thing maybe for Ray about the militaristic one is that he's so authentic and he's just so honest. He's just gonna say what he thinks. And maybe that's not such a good thing all the time. So it must have been really, really difficult and stressful. And I love your example of your teacher who took him in and nurtured him and gave him this quiet atmosphere. And I think let Ray know that he was worthy. He's a smart guy, you know, and just made an oasis for him to learn. And, you know, that worthiness comes first. You know, you can do this and that belief and then everything builds from there. And thank goodness for him. We all need those. Yes, yes, we all need those. So, well, thank you for telling us those. So I think we're going to move on to our third part, which is one theme specific to each book. And the question I'd like to ask you, Claire, is one of the real central themes to your book. It's all about writing. And I call these kind of things, these ways to know a person, these ways in a portal to potential. And for me, reading your book, Ray became known to you through writing. So it was the portal into Ray. So I say, I've written here a quote from your book, that placing computers between Ray and me causes his social deficits to magically disappear. When my brother places his fingers on the keyboard, the inner voiceless man shimmers into view. I love that. Respond by email and you will find yourself in conversation with writing man. So, you know, written communication is a big part. You save 20 years of emails and texts. And I love it because it's just raw, open, honest, both of you. And it's a big part of this book and you've expressed your thoughts so clearly, so openly, you've laid everything out in the table in this book. So I'm wondering, having done that, if you continue to text an email or is everything sort of out the open? Maybe you just talk face to face or what is your preferred method of communication and has anything changed for you because of this book? Well, one thing that's changed is Ray's a little freaked out because he never knows when I'm quoting them. Everything is good. Yeah, I mean, when we were writing, before he knew we were sort of working on a book together, I told him, I think we're writing a book here, Ray. And he said, well, Shucks, if I'd known, I'd have polished my prose. His prose is perfectly lovely and eliquid and eloquent. But once the advent of email had made this sort of written communication possible, I realized that writing slows everything down. It levels the playing field. It allows as much processing time as you need. And it cuts out all this extraneous stimuli that are always threatening to overwhelm Ray. And because writing is my medium too, once we figured out that it worked for both of us, well, we were like a house on fire. I could ask Ray questions that perplexed me for 40 years and I did. So we still prefer email or text if something's really important. But I want to share something that Ray wrote. It was one of the first times I had tapped into what we call his writing man. So the context is Ray had written an elegy to an uncle who had passed away. And it was frankly beautiful. And I wrote to him and said, Ray, that was simple but profound and he said, well, thanks. I strive for clarity and I hit send only when I have achieved it. The problem only arises when I speak. It most often seems like it's someone else speaking. The inner man, the silent man does not like most of what he hears. The speaking man is often rude, sardonic and has an irritating voice and manner. And I'm always disappointed with what he says. No, I don't like him at all. And I said, well, Ray, you're truly an enigma because you seem like an entirely different person when you write. That, as it turns out, was an invitation, Ray's cute. And this is what he wrote back to me. It's true. My mind lives in the nonverbal half of my head. Words for me are hollow and inadequate. Phantoms of the living reality of thought and emotion. Writing is just a shadow. But the only way I can communicate is in the one-dimensional world of text. Sad, isn't it? It's so limited, so puny but it's the only thing I've mastered. My soul would speak with better tools if it knew how. And that pretty much blew the doors off me. And from then on, I knew that the version of my brother that I had tapped into was the real Ray. Oh, yes, yes. And, you know, it's not sad at all because the world is shifting to writing, to texting. So, you know, we're coming, we're coming Ray's way. And if you can write like that and express yourself like that, you have a gift. So I don't worry. For sure, for sure. No worries. Yeah, and Ray has reminded me many times that I can't know what it's like for him. And I've accepted that to be true. I imagine that's true for you and Eric as well, although he's your child. So your relationship is closer. And in your book, you say that you learn to respect his space and his pace. I know how hard one that wisdom is, Theresa. So in what's not allowed, you say that when it comes to autism, there are more questions than answers, more unknowns than knowns. And you explain that even now that Eric's a young adult, you're forever learning, you're forever receiving, you're forever growing. So I wanna ask you, do you think there will ever come a time when you can say, yep, I figured it out? No, in a word, no. But that's okay. And this is the evolution of me. This is another part of the journey, my journey. And I realized at some point, the journey is mine too. Of course it is, that I don't need to figure all this out. What I do need to figure out as an adult, as Eric is an adult now, is how I can best help him and how I can enable him. And we both have to be self-aware enough to know what to ask and how to help. So I spent years, 17 years going across the country and taking every workshop and reading and signing up for everything. And thinking that I could just really have a handle on this, but it's pretty slippery because we evolve. We're dynamic as people, we're always changing. So I don't need to have this grasp on it. I just need to know what I can be doing. So a couple of things, I also wanna talk about, we haven't really touched on how it's a very difficult journey when your child is first diagnosed with autism and that's part of this knowing and part of my development. I mean, I like to say that it came as it's kind of new but I didn't know. I kind of wanted to know and I didn't want to know. It was a jolt and then it was an adjustment and then it was juggling, therapies and what do we do? And it was, then came the joy, the joy came back but life isn't linear, life is very loopy. So you get another jolt and then a more adjustment and then juggling. Then you have to take all of this autism therapy and all of this autism attention and you have to place it in the middle of a very busy family on the move across Canada back and forth. And autism is never stand alone and autism care is just part of a very dynamic family. So it's not easy. That's why continuous the power is a very good title as well and it's a very good title for the pandemic world. It fits, everything fits. But I do want to say that I've come out the other side. I think it's pretty interesting. I spent years and I've got this prop that I used to carry around in Ottawa and you think, oh, what is this? I brought it to the Parliament buildings and I took it on television and it's Eric's shoe as a teenager. And you think, well, what the heck? Well, it's very telling. And this is my effort to stand in this shoe. And this shoe is very different from mine. You know, as there's that saying you can tell a lot about a person by the shoes that they wear but you can also tell maybe even more by the way they wear their shoes. And this shoe is quadruple tied, these laces. This is someone who's pretty careful and doesn't like surprises. And so I carried this around as a metaphor and as a reminder that when we see behavior it's always communication. It's always telling us something. In order to understand what it's telling us we need to step as close to these shoes as we can in order to get the interpretation right. For example, when Eric used to run and butt his head into my stomach hard and I thought, you know, he's hurting me. No, he was seeking deep pressure to the top of his head. He needed calming. And there was all these things he was doing and the more I understood about autism and the more I could stand in these shoes the more I could figure out what he was trying to tell me. So that was part of the journey. And then came this part of the journey. And this comes up a lot in the book doesn't it? Buddha's hand. Because I taught in Japan for a while and one of my favorite poses for Buddha was this. And this is the teaching. This is the teaching hand. And this is the receiving hand. And I think when Eric was little I was doing a lot of this and getting of course some of this back I was learning from him. But now I think that the teaching hand has moved to the background and the learning hand has moved to the foreground. I believe I learned more from him than I teach him. And certainly we're never this. If we're this, then we're losing out on all this great stuff. And there's so much great stuff. And that's another question entirely but all this beautiful stuff. So these are the kinds of things that I there's been part of the journey. And I'll wrap it up there. I could keep going but I will stop. I relate to it because I think having read possibly 30 books on autism spectrum and Aspergers I thought I thought I was all this. And to my surprise I've been a lot more of a learner than a teacher. So let's move to our part four which is say it in five. So each of us is going to give you five things that we hope will be takeaways from our work. And if it's okay, I'll start with dispatches. First of all, as I mentioned, I set out in the beginning which I now realize is quite arrogant. I set out to discover, raise pathology and explain him to the world. And to my surprise, the one who's changed the most and adapted the most is me. Sometimes people might say, well, how can you speak for an autistic person? And the answer is I don't. Writing man speaks very eloquently and very passionately for himself in the pages of my book. I would suggest that if you want to get to the heart and soul of a person with autism, you can try writing to them, but never assume you know another person's reality. As I mentioned, race says when you get closer to wisdom rather than paternalism, when you understand that you can't understand what it's like for me. So that also was a hard lesson to learn because I thought I could. I thought if I read enough and studied enough that I could and I can't. That said, there is a danger in thinking that one person's experience is everyone's experience. So just because Ray has this articulate writing man just certainly does not indicate that every autistic person does. And you and I both know that this sort of maxim in the autism community that once you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism. So our stories don't have endings. Like you, I'm still learning. I'm still trying to walk in those shoes a little bit. I'm trying to imagine how the world looks as seen through Ray's eyes. And there's Henry David Thoreau, the poet, said, if a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears. However measured or far away. So I try to remember that. And Theresa, tell me your five takeaways. I'm sure they'll be more eloquent and there'll be some alliteration in there for sure. I know, I don't think so. But I love that quote that you ended up with. I mean, we all, yeah, it's where, you know, I always say you should never, we should never have to apologize or explain or elaborate on our neurology. We are who we are and we walk different paths and we drum different drums and so be it. And it's taken me, the journey has delivered that to me as well. But I had a big long list. I thought, I'll never remember this. And we may run out of time. And I think we have four minutes left according to the time clock. So here I go. I'm going to give you five things that I think as humans we need and we see. No matter what our journey is, it doesn't have to be supporting a family member with autism. It could be a personal journey. It could be after a divorce. It could be an illness, whatever it is, something that's challenging. We need five things. And let me just say quickly, before I tell you those five things, that I very much wrote this book to the younger me, the mother 17 years ago. And here's what she needed to know. Here's what she needed to read and how she needed to connect. So I think we're looking for connection, direction, illumination, inspiration and hope, the greatest gift. And I'll start with connection. It's such a great feeling. I know we all know it. To know that someone else has experienced what we've experienced. Thought what we thought, felt the joys, the frustrations, felt those emotions, went through the decision making process. As soon as someone else says, yes, it's the same for me. There's a huge amount of relief and comfort. Comfort, you're not walking alone. You're never alone. So that's the connection, direction. What do I do? What are some of my options? Inspiration. I mean, I remember a police officer in Ottawa said, my son just got his driver's license. And I thought, really? Maybe we can too. And Eric did. And it was because I listened to that man. I was inspired. What was the other one? Inspiration, illumination. What does this mean? What are we looking at? And hopefully some of the answers are delivered in the book, in both of our books. And hope, a message of hope for the future that this journey will become recognizable and will become our normal because honestly, whatever we live is normal. That is our normal. And so the connection, direction, inspiration, illumination and hope are elements that are part, very much part of both of these books. Absolutely. And I felt them when I read yours and mine. And I think they're part of any work of art that comes from the heart. You will find these things there. And that is how I'm going to end on that note. And I think we're pretty darn close. Yes, 814. We did it. Yeah, we did it. Excellent. Thank you both so much. That was so amazingly fascinating. People in attendance, if you have any questions, please take this time now to start putting your questions into the chat. And while you do that, I will ask a question. You both are clearly passionate advocates and have been long before you wrote your books. But I am interested to know what, you know, Eric and Ray, how they responded to your books. And if anything has changed for them, you know, since you're starting to get all this attention. Do you want to start, Teresa? No, go ahead. Okay. You know, Ray is a very private person. He says like Spock, he has deep emotions, but he prefers to keep them private. And I said, why did you take a chance on this, Ray? Why did you let me do this? Why did you let me bury your, you know, some of your painful moments and your deepest thoughts and feelings in a book? And he said, well, because of it helps anyone else. I'm an open book. And at one point when I tapped into Ray's writing man, I said, I want the world to know writing man. And he said, well, he could use an advocate that's for sure. So he fully cooperated. He never actually, he wouldn't read any part of the manuscript. He said, no, when you put it in my hand, when it's a book, I will read it. It's yours. I don't want you to interfere with it. So I was able to give Ray a copy of a book that he deeply participated in. It was a groundbreaking moment. And since then, because Ray is a pretty respectable amateur astronomer, he's had a lot of requests for, from people wanting him to show them our night sky. And this is in spite of COVID, which has damped everything down. But yeah, he's a pretty hot commodity around here. Risa? Yeah. Well, you know, many things going through my head. Eric and I were writing for six years before that. We used to write for Autism Matters magazine in, we were in Ottawa, I was in Toronto. So we really started burying our soul for six years, this back and forth mother and son, and he would illustrate beautifully these articles. And there were a lot of tears during this. There was laughter and tears. And so the process was something familiar to us. So by the time the book came, he was okay with it because we had done this. We got through the hard stuff. And you know, he's like Euclair and like me too. He says, I'm so glad we have our family history recorded, that's the first thing because he really loves looking back at life and he likes to have it captured. The second part, he said exactly what Ray said, if this helps other families and if this can move them a little bit ahead and make it more understandable, that's good. I hope that is the case. And quite often I find him upstairs just reading a chapter or little bits and pieces and laughing and smiling. And he's pretty pleased about it. Yeah, that's great. Okay, Teresa, how would you as a mother of an autistic child help your child if they didn't find out until their late 20s that they have autism? So this woman writes that her daughter had a learning disability but her journey has gone this way. She has other challenges. She's isolated herself from their family. How would you reach out to this child to make a connection? You know, that connection direction, those five things, I would go through those. I would start by, there are all sorts of really good movies about women on the spectrum. And so it's a little bit different the way it plays out with women and men. And, you know, maybe start with some people that are maybe think like you and have her look at some of these movies and watch them and accentuate all the positive, all the things that she can do. Always start with what she can do and is doing and everything about her that's wonderful. And then we look at some of the challenges and we think now how are we going to meet these? And I think the biggest thing that you probably want to focus on is self-awareness. When you're self-aware, when you know everything about yourself, your strengths, your inclinations, your, the things that are hard for you, you can do something about it. And so maybe I would have it visual. I would chart it out because whenever I do that for Eric, he says, thank you, words float. But, you know, when you write them down, then it's something I have, it's a plan, it's organized. So start with all the great stuff. And then over there, the challenges and then how are we going to meet those challenges? And it could be starting conversations with people that's very difficult and making a friend group. And so maybe we can get you into something like that. So making kind of, you know, when the pandemic came out, I made a pandemic battle plan and for Eric in three categories, you know, it was the what so what now what is what we know, what we may be feeling and what we can do about it. And so we always want to identify those things and then take the plan forward and what are we going to be doing about that? So I would make it very visual and very structured and very loving and, you know, absolutely go through all of the fascinations and that's what we did because that's the respectful thing to do. That's my two cents worth. Thank you. Claire, your book seems a little different because it's about your brother, not your child. How do you think your perspective adds to this conversation and how did your mom and dad react to this book? I love that question. You know, it's always a little nerve-wracking writing memoir because my memoir is different than my five siblings' memories and my parents' memories. However, my mom never really wanted to read any of it. She said, no, no, no, I'll read it when it's a book. And so she did. She was the second person who got a copy of Dispatches and she phoned me up after two days and she said, well, I read your book. And I'm like, and? And I could tell she was tearing up and she said, you know, Ray is my own son but I see him through such different eyes now. And I've had other feedback from people who say they see with a different lens. So, yes, I don't have the deep attachment that you would have for your child. Ray and I have oftentimes gone our separate ways but this correspondence and the things that have happened in our lives, I've always kept that. So it's very different. And also I'm speaking to the demographic of people who survived without a diagnosis. So that's why my book adds to the conversation I think because there's a whole heck of a lot of rays out there remembering that when he was being Mr. Spock there was no such thing as Asperger's syndrome. There was just weird kids. So those kids have had their own traumas in getting to be adults. And Ray has allowed me to share that with the world. So I think it's of value. Can I just jump in? For me, I had to do this. I am his mother, I am his sidekick and he's my sidekick. Claire, you didn't have to do this. And that's the beauty, I think. You took it upon yourself to do this. You didn't have to as a sibling but you felt like you had to. And I salute you for doing that. And to all the siblings out there who are trying to understand their brother or sister with autism, this is a hugely valuable resource. And I just, I thank you for doing what you've done because like I said, you didn't have to. I did, it was my duty, you know? Well, your book is really, to me, when I read it I see a love story. And mine is a story of attempting to connect with somebody that I really thought I knew. But imagine by surprise that I didn't know a brother who's 16 months older than me and who grew up in the same house until I wrote to him. Yes, that's incredible. I love that portal to potential that weigh in. Teresa, you are clearly a devoted mother and a passionate teacher. Can you speak to what changes, if any, your experience has made you yearn for in the school system? Great question. Yes, well, when I was, when we lived in Ottawa actually was the representative for autism Ontario on what is called the SEAC, the Special Education Advisory Committee for the Ottawa Public School System. There are many school systems in Ottawa but this was a large one. And I was a voice around this large table and around this large table, and I will get exactly to the question, I'm building up, around this large table, they were represented as a lot of parents, Down syndrome, Tourette's, Learning Disability Association, hearing, they didn't call it hearing impaired, but challenged and they were all sorts of representation and saying what these children needed to succeed. And then I was also on the side, I was also doing consulting with my Mary Pelton's bag into family's homes and troubleshooting for them. And we were supposed to be talking about what was difficult for them at home. But you know what 90% of the questions were about? School, because our children are there for eight hours a day. And while we can set up these lovely environments at home, we can't always guarantee what school is going to be like. And I know that for me, my stomach was knotted thinking of Eric in high school all over, standing on the periphery and they often was. So what the number one biggie was for schools was, please organize something for these children in the free time, in the recess, in the lunch, in the before school, in the after school because there's an expression, work is play and play is work. Play, the outside time is totally free range and you're supposed to be able to get in and talk with people, they couldn't do that. And these poor kids are just sent and they get off the bus and there's no structure. So I advocated very hard, it's in the book and helped to set up lunchrooms and these really neat little areas for these people to thrive because it was very difficult. So that's the number one structure for the unstructured time. And also all the teaching strategies, all these accommodations about showing a model of the end product, about where the children sit, about making things broken down step by step and using visuals, you can see I used a lot of visuals. To me, that's not an accommodation, that's just excellence in teaching and we should hardly have to ask for that. That's part of the package when you're a professional. You need to teach to everyone and I got tired of asking for that. I just thought, no, this is the way it should be and you actually know that because you were taught that in university. So those are kind of those things, the outside, the inside, create those environments that support and make our kids thrive, allow them to thrive. Excellent. Claire, you were a writer for a very long time and you've always written and you said you're an essayist and a journalist. How was this writing process different from your other writing experiences? Well, they were all easy and this was not. I still had to do it, but because I didn't set out to write a book, I had no outline, I had no plan, I had no end goal. Therefore, I sometimes wrote my way into blind alleys and I covered the same topic twice and I think the writing was still a joy and a pleasure but oh my goodness, cutting it down to a workable manuscript was horrifying and everyone on the Sunshine Coast heard my screaming and crying, but fortunately, at one point, I mentioned that Ray is an amateur astronomer and he asked if I'd like to go out and do stars with him. And I was pretty cozy with my husband watching a Netflix by a fire and I didn't really want to, but I thought I should. So I went out and Ray showed me my own sky that I should know very well because I've been looking at it for 60 years and it was as new to me. So I burned home and I wrote what had happened and that chapter became kind of my, it's where I was going, it was my lighthouse. So I always knew from the middle of this great mess that I'd written my way into, I knew where I had to end up was looking at the sky with Ray. So yeah, it was hard, I credit my writing group, my fellow writers and particularly my mentor for helping me find the through line through my own story and Ray's story. Excellent, thank you. Teresa, what process did you go through to get Eric his driver's license to help other people accomplish the same thing? A long process. Yes, yes, no, it's actually not in the book. No, it was after the book. And oh, and I think the bottom line is I always, I fast forward like a hummingbird and Eric is no, no, no, he's the tortoise. I had to respect his timeline and I had to respect that we don't need to rush this. This is going to take a while. And so I knew my two other kids, children and young adults, they took their driver's ed in Ottawa and it was a lot of frantic note taking. I thought, that's not gonna work, we know that. And so we moved out to the West Coast and part of the reason was to create a smaller space for Eric to learn to drive in these small country roads in the Comox Valley versus Ottawa, which would have been very difficult. So I found it a smaller fishbowl to begin with. And then I researched online and I phoned around to some of the driver's schools to see how they taught their in-class driver's ed. And I said, my son is on the autism spectrum and I'm advocating for him. Writing a lot is gonna be hard. And I believe it was young drivers of Canada and it was a little bit more expensive but it was absolutely worth it. And they said, no, everything will be in a book and we're going to use a lot of visuals and even little cars, magnetic cars on the whiteboard. Oh, how cool. And the guy who taught it was a retired police officer. So he had taught officers how to drive and all those cool chases. So I told Eric that and he thought that was pretty neat. But when I phoned to register Eric, I said, be sure the instructor knows Eric is on the autism spectrum. He may need some breaks. He needs everything to be visual. All the things that would work for him. And so he went through this classroom part and did all right and passed that. But there was a lot of preparation on my part, a lot of role playing and I would text him throughout the day and pick him up and he was silent. He was done. There is one part in the book Claire, you're right. And it took him a long time to come down from this. But then the actual road, I found someone else really good, a very empathetic man. And he has my text number, I have his and how did he do today? And we probably took twice as many lessons and it probably cost us twice the cost. And it went over two years. And I kept phoning Toronto and said, we need a few more lessons, we need a few more lessons. It just took longer. But with everything with Eric, he will eventually get it. You know, I know that the driver's end guy had to slam on the emergency brake a few times and prevent accidents. But eventually we did this in small steps. But it had to be slowed down and we probably doubled the number of lessons. Thank you. Well, thank you both so much for this amazing presentation. I'm so grateful to you both for being with us this evening. If anyone is interested in reading these books, we do have copies at the library and you can also reach out to the authors through their website. So Clairefinlayson.com and TeresaHeadley.ca. If you have, we didn't have time for all the questions. So I will pass them on to the presenters. And if you have more questions or comments, please feel free to email them to me and I will make sure that they make their way to the authors. And again, thank you both so much for joining us this evening. I'm so grateful. And it's so refreshing to, you know, you're so passionate about your books and about what you do and about the people in your lives. And I'm grateful to you for being willing to share that with everyone. Thank you to everyone who tuned in. We appreciate that very much. Excellent. Again, thank you everyone and have a really wonderful evening. Good night. Good night.