I'll be honest.  I decided to join Autism Blogger mostly out of desperation.  I've been struggling mightily with issues related to my 9-year-old son Owen's autism.  I'm a full-time mental health counselor/social worker, so I know all of the "textbook" methods I could use to relieve my stress.  I do use a lot of them.  But I often feel alone in my struggle.  I have a lot of good friends, but none of them have any kids with autism or anything that remotely resembles autism.  Along with working F/T and trying to be a good mom, I'm a P/T college student.  My driving motivation for going back to school (which I've been doing for the last 2 years already) is to make a career change to a much more lucrative field, and the main reason I feel compelled to do something that will be more profitable is that I worry a lot about having money to provide for Owen's needs when he is an adult.  I know from my 14 years of non-profit social service experience that I don't want to have to rely solely on "the system" to support my son financially.  I don't want him to have to just "get by" with whatever funding scraps the government is willing to toss his way.  I also want to start earning enough money within the next 5 years to start setting money aside for my other son's college fund.  He's almost 11 already, and we haven't saved a dime for his education.  He is an academically gifted kid who dreams of going to a particular out-of-state university, and I want to help him make that dream come true.  And since my husband and I barely get by financially right now, I also believe that a lot of my overall stress would be alleviated if I were earning a decent salary.

So I work hard getting through my classes, and as I plug away at my schoolwork, I also try to be a good mom to my boys.  But it is such a battle for me sometimes.  My older son has been suffering from some intense anxiety recently, and I know that a lot of his stress is related to his brother's autism-related behaviors.  Meanwhile, Owen's behaviors sometimes have placed our family at risk and under scrutiny.  The other night, for his own safety, my husband and I had to restrain Owen in our driveway when he was having a severely aggressive tantrum.  Some of our neighbors witnessed this, and someone called the police to report that we were hitting our child.  It was pretty unnerving when an officer showed up at our house shortly after we had finally gotten Owen into the house and he had settled down.  My husband and I both used to work for a child-welfare agency, and we've both had extensive training in nationally-approved child restraint techniques.  We would never intentionally hurt either of our kids, and in fact, we both put our own bodies in harm's way at times (Owen has left more bite-bruises on my arms than I could count) to protect Owen from hurting himself or someone else.  It breaks my heart and scares the crap out of me to think that the criminal justice system could get involved and the state child welfare agency could start breathing down our necks simply because we love Owen enough to restrain him.  Fortunately, the officer who visited our house the other night actually believed our story and didn't pursue the matter any further.

All of the issues I've mentioned so far also cause stress within my marriage.  So I often feel as if I'm at my wit's end.  I didn't think I really had time to participate in a support group of any kind, but now I know that I desperately need to be part of a caring community of people who understand some of what I'm going through.  I definitely don't have time for in-person support group meetings.  I've investigated other online autism support groups, and so far this one seems like the best.  I hope that as time goes by, I'll have something to offer the rest of you and I won't just be crying HELP!