I finally joined a support group

I’ve joined a support group. Not an ironic Jacob Elordi will never be our boyfriend support group but a real one with real humans needing genuine support. It’s a PDA support group, full of parents of PDA kids.

I have gone back and forth on the idea of joining such a group since we first got our son’s diagnosis. At the beginning, I was reluctant. I just didn’t want to be overwhelmed by too much advice, too many suggestions, too many voices in the mix. I wanted to go through it on our own, letting the dust settle, before throwing myself full force into a world of new information and things to try. I defaulted, as I always have, to simply broadcasting what we were experiencing, be it on social media or writing about it here, and I felt buoyed by the few people who would reply and say they totally get it. I also didn’t know where I would best fit, in terms of support groups. Yes, my son is autistic — but we don’t see his autistic experience mirrored very often, and a lot of interventions for an autistic child would not actually be helpful for a PDA child.

But after a particularly rough start to the month, and finding myself exhausted, trying to articulate our experience in such a way that parents of neurotypical kids would really understand it, I joined this particular group.