‘Her texts have frightened me’

This is a guest post from my bestie Aisling Keenan who writes a very wonderful Substack over here. She is writing on my one this week about what it’s like to be the friend of the person who needs a lot of support, the friend whose child is autistic and struggles to cope in the world. Over to Aisling…

There’s a particular kind of helplessness in watching someone you love go through something you can do absolutely nothing to fix.

The instinct, for me, is always to ask ‘what can I do?’ and to mean it.

So, at least once a week, I find myself Whatsapping Caroline saying a version of “is there anything I can do to help?” Nine times out of ten, there isn’t anything I can do to help her parent Caelan, her adorable, clever, kind PDA profile autistic son. But this week, taking writing a Substack piece off her plate was something tangible (and conveniently in my wheelhouse) that I could do. So here I am.

To write about what it’s like to be a friend to an Autism mam is a bit intimidating, to be honest. Like (I’m sure) plenty of us, I don’t know all the right terminology, I’ll probably mess up often with things I say, but the core message couldn’t be clearer, for me. All I want to be to Caroline, and to anyone I care about, is a totally non-judgmental safe space.