In the mid-90s, I was happily involved in building my family which, in addition to my wife and me, consisted of two twin children, a boy and a girl, and little Federico. A family with three young children was very demanding, at times tiring, but it also gave a lot of joy and gave great hope for the future, in which I imagined my three children, now teenagers, starting to experience life together.
Diary of an autistic boy – The archive
Autism, how early intervention helps
The first signs
This joy was undermined by the observation that little Federico, who was two years old, was beginning to show a clear regression in his ability to manage situations and relationships. Like all families who enter into the experience of autism, we began our process of concern, first at the pediatrician, then with periodic observations at the ASL and finally at the Child Neuropsychiatry department of the Polyclinic, where Federico was diagnosed with Generalized Disorder Developmental Disorders, one of the diagnoses that fall within the autism spectrum.
Those who are projected into the reality of autism initially don’t even have time to despair because while they try to realize what is happening they are thrown into a carousel of clinical analyses, medical checks and bureaucratic procedures.
Diary of an autistic boy: “I’ll tell you what a train journey is for us” by Federico De Rosa 25 October 2023
“You will live like us”
When I emerged from this phase, I developed my existential strategy for responding to the problem. It was as if I said to my son Federico: “don’t worry, even if you were born different from us, neurodiverse, now with therapies we will teach you to behave and live like us”. I conceived the therapies that my son experienced essentially as a training process towards normality. For me, my son Federico was like those Italians who, if they learn to speak English well, can live and work in London, “as if” they were English.
My strategy was to train him with therapies to make him “as if” he were normal. The more I continued reasoning like this, the worse things got because Federico didn’t feel accepted in his diversity.
Autism, music therapy improves communication skills by Sara Carmignani 14 November 2023
The crisis
When he was fourteen, Federico had a fit of anger and I had to intervene to contain him and prevent him from getting hurt. It was a huge shock for me. I had used my strength against my son’s strength, even if only to contain him. The problem of autism had no solution for me but in that moment my pain made me leap to another level. I brought Federico in front of the computer which was our way of communicating and I wrote to him straight away: “I understand that you will never become like me. Since I don’t want to lose you, because you are my son, will you teach me to become like you?”.
Diary of an autistic boy: “Autonomy? Living with kids like me” by Federico De Rosa 11 December 2023
I like him
I had turned my training logic upside down. Now it was I who wanted to be trained by Federico to become “as if” I were autistic and be with him in his world.
Federico was very happy with the proposal and writing (even today at the age of thirty he speaks little) he said: “Of course dad, I can teach you”.
A very beautiful period then began. I couldn’t become autistic because my brain didn’t work in autistic mode, but Federico started training me in his autistic way of life.
Diary of an autistic boy: “I’ll tell you about my dreams and desires” by Federico De Rosa 15 February 2024
The ‘autistic’ walks
The first experience was autistic walks which meant walking for hours, often in the woods, side by side without ever saying a word. At the beginning it was the anguish due to the forced silence but then I understood something very important, that is that it was not true that my son Federico did not communicate, he did not communicate verbally by voice, but he could communicate and he was very good, with communication he did not verbal.
I then discovered that many small movements of Federico’s body and face actually communicated all the emotions and moods possible for a human being and I also realized that my body was doing the same thing. I had entered non-verbal autistic communication mode.
Asperger, how much effort it takes to take off the mask by Paola Emilia Cicerone 18 February 2024
Always in the same restaurant, at the same table
I had many other experiences of autism together with my son and I cannot tell them all otherwise this article would become a book, but I will only mention the autistic dinners, that is, being guided by Federico to always go to the same restaurant, always sit at the same table, eat always the same things and always pay the same bill. After a phase of strangeness of the thing, I began to realize that in the chaotic world in which we who live in big cities live, repeating what is already known is truly a relaxing break.
“Differently happy”
At Federico’s sixteen years old, a new phase began when he wrote to me “Since I am differently abled then I will have to be differently happy”.
This sentence had a disruptive and healthy devastating effect on me. In our society, we do many things for people who have limitations of autonomy such as autistic people, but this is like polishing something that then remains sad because, as we often hear, “he is autistic and can never be happy” . There is a part of truth in this sentence that makes the lie more effective. The part of the truth is that my son Federico who is autistic cannot go to the shopping center when he is at his most chaotic, he cannot drive a car, he does not know (maybe he still does not know how) to travel alone. But if he cannot be happy like us self-proclaimed normal people, he can be happy according to his own path. He can become Differently Happy. Differently Happy was the liberation from a life condemned to sadness due to the autism of a child.
Writing
The rest is today’s history or almost. When I saw that Federico wrote so well and wrote such profound things, I told him that, in my opinion, he should write a book. I remember him writing back, “Dad, that would be wonderful.” The whole world was against us because the dogma was that non-verbal autistics cannot write books.
Federico has written three books, has sold (at the latest available data) 14,280 copies, writes for various newspapers, the most famous of which is certainly Repubblica (Health Section), travels around Italy to spread his word of Differently Happy among students, teachers and families experiencing autism.
The law After Us
To conclude, I would say that having an autistic son, helping him grow into his thirties, was certainly a tough experience for me and there were many problems.
But now that he, thanks to the Law of After Us, is starting to experiment with his independent life with other particular kids like him, now that I am close to retirement which will give us much more time to do beautiful and hopefully useful things together, I believe to be able to say something strong: I am happy to have an autistic son.