Following Ezra

"Full disclosure here, Tom helped me write my book and there’s a reason I sought him out for that: I read this book about his son, which came out in 2011. Tom tells the story from when he and his wife had initial concerns about Ezra’s development all the way up to Ezra being thirteen years of age. The book ends at Ezra’s Bar Mitzvah which they never thought he’d be able to accomplish. Unlike so many books that parents have written over the years, Tom did not see having a child with autism as something that was an absolute crisis and totally devastating. From the very beginning he tried to connect with Ezra’s passions and Ezra’s interests. There’s a wonderful part in Following Ezra when he and his wife were taking Ezra for play therapy shortly after the diagnosis, he was around three or four years of age. Tom is a very grounded, quiet man and he was not speaking a great deal about all of the agony and pain involved in having a young child with autism. And the therapist said to him after a few sessions, “Tom, I think I know what the issue is. You have not grieved the loss of your typical child here.” She was responding to the fact that he was talking about how anxious he was and how scared he was. Tom’s response was basically, “This is my beautiful little boy, I don’t feel the need to grieve.” As I mentioned, the book ends when Ezra is thirteen—Ezra is now twenty and I know him. He’s a delightful, confident young man and he’s doing what he’s always loved to do: computer animation. His father, his mom and brothers have always nurtured that interest and what I’m seeing is a young man with autism who has a wonderful sense of who he is and a wonderful sense of what he’s good at. He’s aware of what he’s not so good at and he knows that he has autism and he’s able to talk about that. So, what I learned from Tom is that when you really appreciate a person for who they are and you support what they enjoy and you use those interests creatively, you can have, as a result, a person who happens to have autism who is an engaging, interesting person."