Hannah Brown’s blog post for Autism Speaks!

Whenever I get a text message with one of those little hearts, I know it’s from my friend, Sara. And I know it will be incredibly mushy, and will say something like, “I can’t live another day without you, Gorgeous.”

Whenever I send a message like that, it’s to Sara. No, we’re not lovers. We just do this to show each other how much we care. With our crazy schedules, we rarely have time to meet, but we are incredibly close. That’s because we’ve ridden what I like to call the Autism Cyclone roller coaster together.

We met over a decade ago, when my autistic son was four and hers was two. Mine was hyper-active and talked non-stop but could only repeat phrases he had heard. Hers was two, silent and still. Our boys were both in home-based Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) programs run by someone who thought that we could be a mini-support group for each other. So we got together.

How right he was.

We had an instant rapport. By simply connecting, we helped each other enormously. And we were able to join forces when we realized that the ABA program was hurting, not helping our very different sons.

To read the rest of the article, go to the Autism Speaks! site at http://www.autismspeaks.org/blog/2012/03/12/i-heart-sara