every so often, in the midst of the flurry of my daily activity on the web, i stumble upon something so direct and honest that it hits me upside the head with a big cluestick. hard.

ned gulley does just that by being brave enough to write about his son jay’s pervasive developmental disorder:

“So this is what happened: my wife and I are lucky enough to have a little boy. He is not a normal boy. I can add quotes: he is not a “normal” boy. Or perhaps I should say he is not an ordinary boy. Or: he is not common. It’s easy enough to play with the language. But it’s damn near impossible to see past everything to the child. Behind the thicket of words, behind the jargon, the diagnoses, programs, forms, appointments, doctors, therapists, and speech pathologists, behind the adjustment to new realities, behind it all there is a boy, a little man, two years four months old. He is not a cute drooling toddler. He is Jay. He is not a darling angelic lost little boy. He is not autistic or developmentally disabled. He is Jay. Then again, he is not Jay. He is the one we mean when we say “Jay”. He is himself. He is… well, there he is. He is the one I love. He is my son.”

i wish ned well and – at the risk of trivializing the situation – thank him for proving the quote in the sidebar, “In our culture, we’re suspicious of strangers. They’re a threat. They lurk in shadows. On the Web, however, strangers are the source of everything worthwhile. Strangers and their utterances are the stuff of the Web.”

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