Cliff Moore

AUTISM FACEBOOK POST: His belly was distended from the dysbiosis. It was caused when he was given the MMR vaccine. It got to the point he couldn’t eat a piece of plain white bread without crying in pain. I borrowed $15K to take him to the Bahamas on short notice to try a treatment unavailable to him in the United States. I was desperate and frightened for him. It’s April, autism awareness month. A month I’m told to celebrate autism. Where I’m gaslit repeatedly for not celebrating autism. Just yesterday i was told that I don’t love my son because I refuse to accept this for him. Imagine how hard that is to hear and subsequently ignore. Yet thats what I did. That level of ignorance and hate doesn’t deserve a response This is reality for Landry who now has autism induced enterocolitus, or Crohn’s Disease. This is his life. A life of inflammation, constipation, pain, the inability to speak and the awareness that he doesn’t have friends. He can’t play little league. He won’t go on dates, he won’t have a job. And yet I’m told to celebrate this disease. Do we celebrate cancer or do we march for a cure? Do we celebrate strokes? Epilepsy? Alzheimer’s? There’s only one thing I celebrate, and that is Landry. Who he is. I celebrate the fact that he was the one who made me a daddy. I celebrate how brilliant he is and that hes learning to communicate despite his apraxia. I love my son more than anything. He’s not a burden, but his disease is. One that won’t clear up in a week or two like a measles rash. If you are a high functioning autistic, great. If you’re the parent of one, fantastic. Be that. But please, stop the gaslighting. Be a decent human being. Understand that families with severely autistic children do get torn apart because of this. Life expectancies are shorter. Siblings are affected. PTSD does run rampant. Divorce rates are higher. And financial stress is sometimes insurmountable. No amount of denialism will change the fact that it is possible to love your child and hate autism at the same time.