14/30

The Fanfare

The perfect parents with the flawed children who are gaining perfection
like to throw the guilt at you
Their child has an forty hours of intensive interactive therapy in addition to the college aged aides who comes to their home for even more applied behavioral analysis

That is only during the week.

On the weekends there's a onslaught of art, music and sensory therapists who
come to the specially prepared space in the living room
 - and starting in two weeks there's going to be hippotherapy!

Didn't you see the Horse Boy at the special screening the local support group arranged?
Don't you go to the meetings, walks for awareness, fund raisers and golf outings for hope?
You lose so much time for your child if you miss just one networking opportunity.
Every day your child does not have his whole day planned out to the second is another week lost
Where's your lapel pin,
the magnetic multi-colored puzzle ribbon on your car?
Don't you want your child to be cured?

When does the child have a chance to be a kid?
To go to the playground, swing and climb,
Or sit on the floor with a picture book and dream?
When do the parents have time to go to their jobs so they can afford this, let alone have a life?

These organizations of obsessive advocates fail to understand that it costs real money
for untried therapies or medical tests from exploitative laboratories
that insurance companies will not cover
There are only so many grants, scholarships or trips to the trust fund,
even that is not enough to pay for it all
What happened to Jenny McCarthy's kid with her easily affordable posse of handlers
may not happen for mine, or anyone else's
Chelate the drama, the celebrity endorsers who provide little except for
blurred images of the cause, giving the condition a style with no function
No voice other than that of, the pretty people
Autism speaks does not speak for me or my son