I brooded with premonitions. Small in stature but bulging pregnantly on a walk through the woods, I had the horrible thought: “What if something is wrong with him?” He was my fourth child. I’d worried with the others, but they all turned out “fine.” I told myself to let it go.

The night of his birth, he had what could only be described as a meltdown. He screamed, truly screamed, without surcease. I could not calm him. Dark, smoky panic welled inside me. Exhausted, he finally conked out.

The next day, my parents arrived. I was an older mother—three weeks shy of 46. Suddenly I looked at my mom, terrified.

“What’s wrong?!” she asked, alarm on her face.

“I just realized…” I searched for words. “This parenting thing… doesn’t end when they turn 18. Does it?”

She laughed—there I was, two-and-a-half times that old and she’d flown in to be with me, her youngest. “No, it certainly doesn’t,” she managed, suppressing her grin. But it wasn’t funny.

Ed smiled late, didn’t point, lacked eye contact. All the things. Still, the pediatrician dismissed my concerns with, “He’ll probably be fine,” and I couldn’t get him diagnosed until he was almost two. And then, by a well-meaning speech therapist who was, I’m sure, appalled he hadn’t been diagnosed before. She wasn’t supposed to offer diagnoses herself. She did so with her back turned, gazing at her desk.

I grew depressed, devastated. College psychology films of young children in shadowy rooms, banging heads against walls, reeled through my brain. I knew better, I was a psychiatric nurse practitioner, but it felt dark, isolating, alone.

Years stuttered by. Grindingly hard years. Changing........

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