When I started in entertainment, I didn’t realize that women in the industry were often treated with far less respect than men. I’d attended an all-girls Catholic high school where speaking your mind was not only encouraged, it was expected. I then went to Yale University, where being a woman was a victory. We’d broken through the Yale blue wall and we were there to stay. I naively expected Hollywood to be the same.

Then I got my first entertainment job as an assistant production coordinator on a movie with a female director. I often heard her referred to as a neurotic bitch who wasn’t as efficient or organized as male directors. This woman seemed to be getting a raw deal but part of me wondered whether what I heard was true. After all, the entertainment industry rules about women’s abilities versus men’s couldn’t be that far off from my previous experiences, could they? Then one day, I took a call from an actor whose driver was late picking him up. I tried to help him get the driver there more quickly but after we realized that was impossible, the actor called me a stupid bitch and said that clearly my female brain had addled my ability to handle a simple problem a man could’ve solved in two minutes. Instead of telling the actor he couldn’t speak to me that way, I took the abuse. I thought I had to in order to keep my job. And I was devastated to realize that I’d judged that female director just as this actor had judged me. My wonderful, male UPM told me, “I don’t care who anyone is in this industry or what they think of women. Never take that kind of disrespect.”
I am forever grateful to that UPM for teaching me early on that poor treatment of any kind, including that based on gender, is unacceptable. I’ve thought long and hard since that day about what it is to be a woman in this industry and what I need to hold on to personally in order to keep my self-respect and identity. There are all sorts of male/female differences that I could focus on here to point out how being a woman has worked to my advantage in entertainment. But what I’ve discovered has worked to my advantage most as a woman in this industry is this: I must think outside the box because I am outside the box. Women have moved many miles forward during the past decades. However, we have many, many more miles to go before we are treated as equals.

So when I approach a tricky situation as an assistant director or director, or I approach a difficult scene or set of notes as a writer, I draw on my experiences as a woman, a mother, a sister, a daughter and a wife. When I’ve had to negotiate a difficult actor out of his or her trailer, I’ve focused how I’d deal with my children, my friends, my family, as opposed to thinking about being the alpha dog or thinking about how a man would do it. When I’ve explored nuances in a delicate scene either as a director or a writer, I’ve drawn on my experiences as a woman and thought about how to convey that scene in a way I’ve never seen before. I push myself to see beyond the conventional not just because I am a woman but also because I know that pushing beyond convention leads to unique, exciting results that I want to explore and push farther.

My desire to push male boundaries has enabled me to develop a world view that only I can bring to the table. And because I’m a woman, I know that I have to work that much harder to make my voice heard within this industry, to make sure that every story I tell, every film I direct, is told in a way that only I can tell it. Should everyone push beyond boundaries? Of course. But as a woman, I know I have to do it that much better to rise above the male fray. Female voices are important in all walks of life, but especially in the entertainment arena, where society turns to dream, to feel, to step outside of their lives to have experiences they never could otherwise. Realizing that I can do this as no man can is an incredible advantage, and I mean to make the most of it.

Those are words I dreamed of hearing, couldn’t wait to hear, when I first found out I got into the AFI Directing Workshop for Women.  Those are words I yelled not once but five times during the SIX LETTER WORD shoot, the last time being late last Saturday night, after my wonderful cast and crew had worked their asses off for the last full day of shooting, punctuating it by refusing to strike dolly track for the last shot of the shoot, a shot the AD, DP and I thought we’d have to shoot on sticks because a dolly shot would take too long.  Yet when I got to the spot for that last shot, the dolly track was ready and waiting.  It didn’t have to be.  It would’ve made for a shorter night after a long shoot.  But I had a crew of amazing, dedicated people and they decided, without telling me, the AD and the DP, that we were going to get that last shot of the night the way we planned it.  I’d known the whole shoot just how lucky I was to be working with this crew, but I knew it best when I saw that dolly track.

So for five exhilarating days, I shot SIX LETTER WORD, watching my wonderful cast bring my characters to life in ways I never dreamed of, watching my incredible crew bring the visuals to life in ways I never imagined.  Those five days and all of prep have been a gift that I’d do again in a heartbeat.

But now it’s for reentry, time to resume my “real” life with my family.  I still have to edit SIX LETTER WORD, but editing won’t intrude on my day-to-day life in the way that pre-production and production inevitably do.  I’m now faced with two children and a husband who fully expect me to jump right back in where I left off (which I’m eager to do) and, in many ways, jump back in ten times as hard as I normally would to make up for lost time (again, something I’m eager to do).  But it’s already been tough, because I’m exhausted, irritable and going through production withdrawal.  What I missed the most during this whole pre-production and shooting process (including the AFI DWW Workshop portion), was spending time with my family.  I couldn’t wait to see them, hang out, do silly stuff, yet now that we have that time, the ways in which we all drive each other crazy have blindsided me like a freight train.

After reading an article in The Atlantic entitled, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”, I realized why reentry has been so tough.  While I read this article, quite honestly, I wept.  What I have felt most stingingly during the past few months is that the “women can have it all” theory – the one that says if I have passion, drive, and the right man, I can have both a fulfilling career and harmonious family life – is bullshit, pure and simple.

I won’t rehash the article, especially since I suspect many of you have read it.  I’ll just start by saying that in order to make this film, I’ve had to ignore my family quite a bit of the time and hope they’ll forgive me.  I’ve had to ask my sister and husband to take up an enormous amount of slack and hope I can make it up to them.  I’ve had to tell my children repeatedly that I can’t schedule playdates, be there for bedtime or solve a family fight simply because I CAN’T DO IT ALL.  I can’t make my career and my family life perfect.  I can barely make all the moving parts work.  I want to.  I was brought up in a society that trained me to believe I should be able to and I’m a failure if I don’t.

But I’m here to tell you, doing it all, having it all, is impossible.  Something’s got to give.  At times that something is my kids, my marriage, my friendships or just plain old me.  I have yet to find that mysterious balance I keep hearing about in the media, that balance that Anne-Marie Slaughter, the author of the “Why Women Can’t Have It All” article, frankly says is impossible.  I won’t choose between having a career and a family, since my family’s not going anywhere and I’m definitely directing again.  But as to how I’m going to make myself and my family happy, making sure they’re on track, calm and fulfilled while not shortchanging my own needs and my career, remains to be seen.

It’s not as simple as hiring a nanny.  For one thing, financially, that’s not gonna happen.  For another, I’ll be damned if someone else raises my kids.  But I am going to have to reshape what I think having it all is.  In a few years, my boys will have full lives of their own and won’t need me as much, though I hope they will always turn to me in times of trouble and happiness.  I need to cultivate such trust and closeness now, while they still naturally turn to me with their problems and triumphs.  But I also have to remember that in a few years, when they don’t need me as much, I do not want to contemplate my empty nest and think, “Shit, what now?”

So I’m slogging through reentry, dealing with days of non-stop tantruming (on all of our parts) as my family and I get reacquainted and try to navigate and adjust to what will most definitely be a different present and future than we once expected as I pursue this new career path.  I’m not quite sure how to make it work.  All I can do is take a leap of faith and trust that the determination (some might call it doggedness) that has always marked my nature will help carry us through to the other side, to some semblance of balance that may not resemble what I was taught I should achieve – that myth of “having it all” –  but does enable me and my family to meet our needs as best we can and remain a unit that supports one another through tough and happy times.  Because really, at the end of the day, that’s the most any of us can hope for.

My “what ifs” for my son on the spectrum got delayed quite a bit because diagnosing him was such an all-consuming process.  We simply didn’t have room in our brains for “what ifs.”  Then the first one came via a close friend who kindly advised me that my husband and I shouldn’t torture ourselves wondering what if our genes were at fault for our son’s autism.  I was startled by her words.  To me, if genetics were at fault (and I believe they partially are), then there’s nothing my husband or I could’ve done short of not having children, which wasn’t an option.  Life without either of our sons is unimaginable.  Okay, I can imagine it – the quiet, the solitude, the lack of fighting – and the boredom.  Much as I bitch about my boys (my husband included), I wouldn’t trade them in, though I could easily be persuaded to live alone a few days a week.  They keep life exciting, interesting, frustrating, exhausting and exhilarating.  So that first “what if” didn’t bother me.

However, now that both of our boys are more settled, and are maturing and growing into human beings I’m both in awe of and pissed at because they’re developing minds and mouths of their own that can be infuriating, I’ve found “What ifs” creeping into my consciousness that I didn’t expect.

What if during my pregnancy with our son on the spectrum, I had induced labor a week early the way the doctor had wanted me to?  Instead, our beautiful boy grew so big during that last week of pregnancy that after two days of labor and two and a half hours of pushing, he got stuck and was delivered via emergency C-section.  What if during that whole, long birth process, he was deprived of just enough oxygen to cause his autism?  Mind you, there’s a strong genetic link in our family to Asperger’s and autism.  Our son is not an isolated case in a family of otherwise completely typical people.  But what if my son’s birth experience was the tipping point that pushed him over the edge into autism?  That “what if” nags at me in a way that past events you can’t change do.

What if I’d followed my gut when my son was six weeks old and he burst into gasping sobs when my mom laughed loudly as she sat next to him?  In that moment, I thought, “Uh oh. We have a problem.”  A problem that even then felt like autism to me.  Not that I knew much about autism but I did know that autistic children were unusually sensitive to noise.  And his reaction simply wasn’t typical.  But when my son was six weeks old, there was no way to diagnose autism.  There still isn’t, though children now are being diagnosed when they are as young as six months old.  But what if?

What if I’d followed my gut as my son grew older and I noticed his ever-increasing sensitivity to noise, his unusual lack of boundaries with strangers, and his lagging language/social skills?  Granted, he was in speech therapy from the time he was four and I repeatedly asked if he could be autistic but what if I’d ignored my pediatrician, our speech therapist and every other professional who worked with him, who kept telling me, “Your son isn’t autistic.  He’s too connected to other people.”  And he was.  My son has always loved other people, empathized with them and wanted to be near them.  But what if I’d taken him to a developmental pediatrician from the moment my red flags began waving?

As I wrestle with these “what ifs” and so many others about both of my sons (I’ll probably wrestle with them for the rest of my life), what I’ve come to realize is that these “what ifs” are based in the past and should stay there.  These “what ifs” won’t help my son who has autism develop new pathways in his brain that will help him achieve his hopes and dreams.  These “what ifs” won’t make his autism go away.  They also won’t change the fact that both he and his brother are incredibly creative, unique individuals who I’m honored to call my sons.

The “what ifs” I’d rather focus on, when I’m not wrestling the other ones to the ground, are “what ifs” about my boys’ futures.  What if they want to go to college out of state?  Will I be able to let them go without constantly worrying they’ll be hurt emotionally or physically?  Probably not.  But I can help them grow into men who are strong enough to handle all that life throws them with grace, dignity and perseverance.  What if they marry women or men I don’t like?   Will I be the mother-in-law from hell?  I already know the answer to that one, so all potential unlikeable spouses, you’ve been warned.  But I can teach my sons to choose partners who treat others with respect and kindness.  What if my boys stumble, fall and don’t want to get up?  Will I be strong enough to help them stand and move on?

I know the answer to that “what if” too.  There have been so many moments in the past twelve years where I thought I wasn’t strong enough to bear what has come our way.  And yet I’ve recognized that the alternative – to give up and collapse – is not an option because giving up doesn’t solve the problems at hand, just like “what ifs” don’t.  Life happens.  It’s not always pretty.  It’s not always easy.  But it does always move forward.

And so do I.

When I was my boys’ age, naked was a matter-of-fact word.  You got naked to take baths, you got naked to change your clothes.  And it was a titillating word.  People got naked and you saw private parts of their body, parts you weren’t necessarily supposed to see (how very American of us).

When I became a teen, the intrigue of the word naked grew.  It meant skinny dipping, sexuality, body image and eventually, sex.  In my twenties, it mean proof of how physically fit I was, a reflection of my external strength.

In my thirties, when I got pregnant with both of my boys, the word naked embodied how much I physically changed inside and out.  Not only was I expanding on the outside, I had another naked life growing on my inside.  Once the boys were born, naked became naked babies in need of my protection, first unable to move, then crawling, then running, beautiful in their innocent nakedness.

It is only in my forties that naked has become more of an internal state of mind as opposed to a physical state of being.  The changes in my life – the death of loved ones, unexpected cancer, autism – have all made me reassess who I am and who I want to be as I move toward the latter chapters of my life.  I’ve made big changes.  I’ve changed how I relate to my children, my family, my friends.  I’ve tried to be more present, more spontaneous, more loving.  I’ve tried to simply be more human by being more emotionally naked with my internal circle of friends and family.

Now that I’ve made yet another change in my life and become a director, I’ve realized that I must again expand my vision of naked.  I must now be more naked, more vulnerable, more willing to expose the raw emotions that I feel, to a much wider circle of people – one that includes acquaintances, strangers, organizations – the list goes on and on.  Talk about scary.

When I first started the AFI Directing Workshop for Women program, I told my husband that I was starting to get an inkling what novelists, actors, painters, sculptors and yes, directors, feel when they put their work out there for all the world to see.  It’s the ultimate form of nakedness, a way in which to expose your internal self to the world, with all your flaws, foibles and strengths.  As a screenwriter, I realized I’d done this on a much smaller scale, since most screenplays never see the light of day.  I’ve had a screenplay produced and so had some idea of what that kind of nakedness felt like, but because filmmaking is so collaborative, screenplays become a blueprint once the films go into production, so the finished film becomes a form of group nakedness that I felt more protected within than I do now as a writer and director.  A director is ultimately responsible for the what goes up on that screen, for telling the story that’s within the screenplay and getting it right.

The responsibility of being a director looms over me even more than it would were I directing someone else’s screenplay because my AFI project is very personal.  My main character may not be me but so many of that character’s intimate moments, her discoveries, worries and pain, are all drawn from my internal, vulnerable, naked self.  In a way, this form of naked feels like the titillating version of naked from my childhood – one in which you expose parts of you other people aren’t necessarily supposed to see.  Sometimes I worry the project won’t be good enough, that people will reject it, ignore it, think it inferior.  But at some point I’ve realized I must let go of these fears because this naked, this exposure of the internal, vulnerable parts of me, are necessary in order to create something real, human and relatable.  I can’t do that with fear in my back pocket.  While this naked is far more difficult than skinny dipping at the Jersey Shore, it’s the only kind of naked that will enable me to move on to the next phase of my life, one in which I grow, change and mature into the career I want to and am meant to pursue.

Naked isn’t just physical anymore.  Not for me.

My Italian-American, New Jersey family uses this adage about as much as they use “Fuggedaboutit.”  And they admire smart-ass, tough women who can play with the big dogs, women like my grandmother, who had a piecework sweatshop in her backyard and ran for local Republican office even though her macho husband was a die-hard Democrat.

As a kid, I wanted to be a big dog too.  So, though I loved writing, musical theater and the arts, when I went to college, I put that “puppy” side of me on hold to start Yale as a chemical engineering major.  I got the first C’s of my life.  Big dogs don’t get C’s.  I switched to fine arts but that didn’t last either because, even though I applied and was accepted into the major, I didn’t believe in my creativity enough to think I could be the best – a big dog.  It didn’t occur to me that creativity wasn’t about being the best.  It was about finding your inner creative voice.  I switched to English, where I knew I’d excel because my analytic voice and writing skills have always been strong.

But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was pissing like a puppy.

When I moved to LA after college, I wanted to be a writer and a director, like zillions of us here in LA.  Instead, I became a Directors Guild assistant director via the Directors Guild training program.  An assistant director does not, as you might think, actively participate in the creative process of directing.  Instead, an assistant director manages film and TV sets.  It’s a tough, physical, “big dog” job and I was damn good at it.  I have excellent organizational skills, skills I was far more confident about than my ability to write or direct.  I was confident I would succeed.

And I did.  I got through the DGA Training Program in a year and ten months without one AD complaining about me (a feat in and of itself) and immediately started working. I was successful.  But I was also miserable.  I longed to create worlds of my own, populated by characters who spoke my words to express my thoughts, feelings and stories.

I needed figure out what kind of dog I truly was.

I quit AD’ing to write screenplays.  I’ve never looked back.  I did not, however, move forward in the way I expected.  I loved UCLA, where I got my MFA in screenwriting.  I wrote a new screenplay almost every quarter and explored ideas and stories and characters I’d been dreaming about for years.  But when I graduated, the big dogs came back to haunt me.  I wanted to be the biggest and the best screenwriter.  I stopped thinking about the stories I wanted to write and instead chased the market, determined to write a commercial screenplay.  I’d send my agent my ideas, which I structured around marketability, not my passion for them, and wrote what he thought he could sell.  It didn’t matter if he chose one of my ideas that I wasn’t particularly interested in.  I went for it anyway.  And wrote sterile, uninteresting scripts.

Then my son was diagnosed with high-functioning autism.  I write that line a lot.  It sounds dramatic and hell, let’s face it, it is.  It’s also a fact that changed everything in our lives.  I can chart our lives by BD (before diagnosis) and AD (after diagnosis).  Not surprisingly, my creative life is not exempt from this chart.

After Diagnosis, I was drowning in paperwork and doctors and IEPs and worry and fear and so many overwhelming emotions that I truly didn’t give a shit about writing.  In fact, I stopped writing for almost a year.  I followed my son around with a video camera twice in a year and made mini-documentaries about him, writing pages and pages of narrative to prove that he needed services to draw him out, help him cope, help us cope.

Big dogs no longer had a place in my life.

When my son got services after I turned in the mini-docs, along with pages of narrative I’d written to prove he was significantly enough affected by autism to need services (a ridiculous thing, I know – the fact that he has autism alone should qualify him), I was flooded by a sense of accomplishment and peace that I hadn’t gotten from screenwriting in years.  I realized it was time to take a new approach to my work and my life.

I dug deeper into my creative brain, thinking about what images, ideas and stories resonated with me and why.  I began writing a script based on a wonderful children’s book I’d optioned Before Diagnosis – MONSTER MAMA, written by the incredible Liz Rosenberg.  It’s the story of a boy whose mom is a monster and he can’t quite fit in with his peers because of her – or so he thinks.  It’s a story about insecurity, self-doubt, friendship and motherhood.  Oh how I could relate!  It has been one of the best writing experiences of my life.  I’m inordinately proud of that script, especially because my two amazing boys played such a large role in it.

When I started writing MONSTER MAMA, I decided to read the boys the first act.  They were riveted in a way I hadn’t seen them in years.  Not only that, they had suggestions about the story I’d created to go along with the amazing book I’d optioned.  Their suggestions were great, so great that I incorporated them.  Each time I wrote a new draft, the boys would read it.  In fact, one morning, I woke up to find my older son, pen in hand, reading a draft and giving me notes (yes, in Hollywood, everyone’s a critic).  Both boys still love this script and talk about not “if” it will be made, but “when.”  MONSTER MAMA made me realize just how valuable it was for me to write from my core, not just for me as a person, but for my family as well.

I was starting to figure out what kind of dog I was.

When I heard about the AFI Directing Workshop for Women Open House, I almost didn’t go.  I was scared.  I’d wanted to direct for years and had shied away from it as I had writing, certain I didn’t have the talent to succeed.  But this was After Diagnosis.  Nothing was the same, right?  I’d directed a couple of short shorts and had loved doing it.  Directing felt more right to me than any other job I’d ever had, including screenwriting.  I forced myself to go to that AFI/DWW Open House.  Once there, I discovered just how much I wanted to be a part of that program.  Here was an opportunity to do what I longed to for years – dive into directing, find my creative voice and run with it.  I’d done it as a screenwriter, why not do it as a director?

And so here I am, in the thick of the AFI/DWW program, still nervous each day, still figuring out my directorial voice, but gaining confidence and strength with each moment.  I’ve found my inner voice, one that speaks from vulnerability, longing, laughter, sarcasm, anger and pain. Being a big dog had nothing to do with that discovery.  I got there with my family.

And I don’t piss like a puppy.

Until I had kids.  And with them came the motherload of guilt.

I adore my two boys but they’re a handful and I often fantasize about escaping alone to a tropical island to sip martinis on a sun-kissed beach.  Damned if that fantasy isn’t quickly invaded by two bright-eyed little monsters I can’t live without.  When those little monsters were toddlers, I discovered that I could read to them for hours but ask me to pretend to be an orangutan or make up silly games with dolls and stuffed animals and I was outta there.  I love board games and cards (I come from a long line of card sharks) but have you ever tried explaining gin rummy to a two year old?  Drool and gin rummy do not go together.  Unless you’ve had too much gin.

I realized I didn’t like playing with my kids.  My guilt was spectacular.

Every time I told the kids I had to clean or cook or write or make a phone call instead of play with them, I felt awful.  Not awful enough to pretend to be Owl when they played Winnie the Pooh but awful enough to feel like I was paying penance for my sins.

Then my older son was diagnosed with high-functioning autism.  Suddenly we barely had time to breath, much less play.  We needed to figure out IEP’s and Regional Center evaluations and therapists for all of four of us and – the list was literally endless.  Most days I collapsed into bed thinking only, “Thank God it’s bedtime.”  Who had time for guilt?

Evidently I did.

Once we go through all the paperwork and the diagnosis and the bullshit associated with securing autism treatment, play became an integral part of our everyday life.  It was the best way to reach both my boys, to sooth their chaotic emotions, to let them know that we were there for them to guide them back to themselves, to us.

But I sucked at playing.  I hated it.  So I didn’t do it.  But I felt guilty about it so that made everything okay, right?

I avoided fully participating in play therapy by making lunches and dinners, cleaning the house, spending hours on the phone setting up other therapies for my son.  All this work had to get done, I reasoned.  And if I didn’t do it immediately, no one would.  So I observed our wonderful therapist being silly, goofy, funny, warm and loving – all the things I feared I’d never be when I played with my children.  My husband, always an expert at playing with kids (our friends and I joke that we can leave him alone with twelve kids and a pile of spinach and he’ll not only have them all eating it in five minutes, he’ll have them laughing about it), threw himself into play therapy, doing whatever it took to engage my son’s attention.  I felt pangs of jealousy as I watched him but I was also relieved.  The boys had two loving parents, one of whom had what it took to play with them.  That had to be good enough.

I kept avoiding play and feeling guilty about it.

During that first year, we learned to play more board games and we read together a ton.  But my son was never as engaged during these activities as he was when he made up worlds, characters and plots with us.  Then, he met our eyes and really saw us.  His speech became clearer and he pulsed with ideas as each story played itself out.  He was himself again and so much more.  Our younger son began to tantrum less, to let us redirect his anger into silly guessing games, I Spy and wrestling.   Our boys started to come back to us

Guilt was getting a little old.

I gingerly tried imaginative play with them.  But I never quite fell into their rhythm.  I felt awkward and useless and ridiculous.  They’d correct me or, worse yet, ignore my hesitant efforts.  Instead of pushing my insecurities aside and soldiering forward, I internalized their unintentional rejections and retreated to cooking and cleaning and doing all the practical things a mom is supposed to do.  Both boys became more and more enthralled with our therapist and Dakota and less interested in me.  They were thriving.  I was lonely.

Guilt is a shitty companion.

I mentioned to our therapist that I felt as though my family didn’t really see me, that I was a conduit for household machinations but wasn’t an actual person to anyone.  She delicately said, “You know, when I interact with you, I have too many wonderful adjectives to describe you.  Funny, silly, interesting.  But the kids don’t see that person because you’re always somewhere else, even when you’re in the room with them.”  She was right.  By refusing to participate in my boys’ play, by relegating myself to the keeper of the practical, I had removed myself not just from their imaginative world but from them.  I was becoming a stranger to them, just as my older son had once become a stranger to us.

I kicked guilt to the curb and played with the boys that day.

I didn’t have any breakthroughs.  I still hated it.  I still felt foolish and awkward and inadequate.  But when my older son looked me in the eye and hugged me, when my younger son belly laughed as I tickled him, I knew exactly what the point of play was – communication.  It didn’t matter that I wasn’t good at it.  It mattered that I tried.  I would get better with time – or I wouldn’t.  But without play, I would not reach either of my children, one captive to his spectacular imagination, the other to his gripping anger.

In the four years since my son’s diagnosis, we’ve worked hard as a family to become whole again, to be happy.  Through all this hard work, I’ve made a surprising realization about play.  It’s still a four-letter word that doesn’t thrill me.  It probably never will.  But what I did instead – feeling guilty while I cleaned house, organized, cooked, anything to avoid entering my kids’ imaginative world – isn’t enough when you have a child on the spectrum.  It’s not enough when you have any child.   When my family fell apart, though cleaning and organizing and cooking may have helped keep us afloat, play is what kept us together.

Guilt has nothing on me.

But my nervousness reared its ugly head again as we sat around a huge square set of tables and began to introduce ourselves.  “Tell us everything about yourselves, from where you were born to where you went to school and more.”  Shit.  I hate talking about myself.  Especially if I can potentially get emotional or – horrors – even cry in public.  So, when it was my turn, I kept it safe.  I talked about being a twin, going to college, becoming a DGA trainee and then becoming a writer.  I got to the part where I changed how I wrote because, as I put it, “I had a major upheaval in my life that made me reexamine how I write and so I began to write what I was passionate about.  And that’s how I was able to write this short.”

In short, I chickened out.  That major upheaval in my life was my son’s diagnosis with high functioning autism.  Now, as I’m sure you’ve all noticed by now, I’m not shy about telling people my son has autism, nor am I ashamed of him.  Both of my children are incredibly bright, talented, creative kids who I’m inordinately proud of (no matter how much I bitch about them on Facebook).  So not delving into that aspect of how I came to be at the AFI program had nothing to do with how I feel about autism or my son.

For a split second while I was giving my history at AFI, I contemplated going to that emotional place but I told myself I couldn’t because I didn’t want to be labeled the “autism mom of the group.”  But for Christ’s sake, I was with an amazing, supportive group of people.  That wasn’t going to happen.

I was scared to be vulnerable.  I would have to tell them how Anthony’s diagnosed stopped me in my tracks, how I spent hours obsessing about how to help him, and more hours crying because I didn’t know if I could, how I stopped writing for almost a year so I could follow him around with a camera and document all the behaviors the state agency denied existed so they didn’t have to give him services, how I cut all that footage together into a half hour doc and recorded ten pages of voice over to go along with it, how I did this two times in one year to get him services, how it was excruciatingly painful to have to write about all my beautiful, intelligent boy’s deficits in order to get him the help he needed – I knew if I told them all that, I would break down.  And I couldn’t bring myself to be that vulnerable.

But Anthony’s diagnosis changed me in profound ways.  I listen more.  I don’t sweat the minutia life as much.  And I set aside the bullshit writing I’d been pursuing.  No more chasing the market.  No more writing from my head.  It was time to start writing from my gut, writing from my passion, finding those voices in my head that screamed to be released.  And once I did this, I wrote SIX LETTER WORD.  It’s not perfect but it’s real.  I’m proud of it.  I hope to be proud of it once it’s a film.  But I realized yesterday that in order for that to happen, I have to be willing to go to that place of vulnerability that I balked at yesterday, to let people know what drives me, what’s behind this story.  I have to share my experiences, no matter how painful, because those experiences inform my film and my film can inform other people.  I have to take a risk and trust that that risk will take me and my film where we need to go.

So today I jump back in, full force, and move forward with my heart and mind open.

We work on theory of mind a lot in my house.  In the beginning, we worked hard just to get our son to tell us what was on his mind.  Then we graduated to him assuming we knew but teaching him to tell us anyway.  My other son has this problem too since of course they share genetics.  It makes for fun mornings.  I can’t tell you how many fights I’ve had to break up because “I wanted that book.”  “Did you tell your brother that?”  “No!  He should know.”  Or how many times I’ve heard about homework assignments that are due in mere moments that I should’ve known about because the boys knew about them and can’t I read their minds?  Now this may sound like a typical boy thing (sorry, guys, most little boys really are less attentive to details than girls are), but when it happens with such intense frequency, your choice is to either accept that you’ve lost your mind (not completely out of the question) or accept that your kids have an issue that you have to address.

Consequently, I’ve gotten a little smug about my theory of mind skills.  Not only is this an issue I work with my boys with on a daily basis, I’m a writer, a great communicator, so I’m ahead of the game.

Evidently, not so much.

This morning I realized that, while my kids are fully aware that the short film I’ll be shooting this summer is about autism, I’ve never told them why I’m doing it.  I just assumed they knew or could somehow read my mind and know my intentions.

So I carefully crafted in my head how I would talk to them about the reasons I was making this film.  I would sit them down and share with them the fact that autism isn’t easy for anyone, in part because not enough people understand autism, and that if I make a film that can help people understand autism, then maybe more kids will get diagnosed earlier and be less anxious and happier and learn to talk to girls and so on.  That last one I knew would get my older son’s attention.  Satisfied that I’d get my deeply felt intentions across, I sat down with the boys.

“You guys know SIX LETTER WORD is about autism, right?  Have you thought about why?”

“Because Anthony has autism.”  August’s equivalent of “Duh.”

“That’s not the only reason.”  I launched into my spiel.  Anthony and August’s eyes glazed over. I tried the girl comment.  Eh.  Not so interested.  They had bigger and better things on their minds, like the papertoy monster book they’d recently gotten obsessed with.

I sighed.  Such was life with boys.  And then I grinned.  Not ASD or ADHD boys, just typical boys who were more interested in making toys and hanging out than in the motivation behind the movie their mother was making a whopping two months from now.  Just the way they’re supposed to be.

Theory of mind or not, we’ve come a long way.

“Your quip about Einstein et al, helps others to ignore and dismiss the reality of what autism very often ‘looks’ like, a vignette that so many people wish to ignore or never ever see.”

Being the lapsed Catholic that I am, I was immediately flooded by guilt.  Being the type A personality that I am, I was also defensive because I always cross my t’s and dot my I’s right?

Wrong.

When I went back to watch my video, I realized this woman had a point.  While I still believe there are historical figures like Einstein who probably had autism, I never specified that the autism spectrum is wide and the reality of autism is often far, far different than a high functioning “genius” whose quirkiness makes it hard for him or her to fit in.  And my intention wasn’t to discount those children and adults who can’t speak or can’t care for themselves or who live in group homes or – well, the list goes on and on because, as I’ve often heard said, “If you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism.”  The range of people out there who have autism is enormous.

I tell my children, “If you want people to know what you really mean, choose your words carefully.”  Well, I should follow my own lesson.  I thought a lot about this woman’s post and finally responded:

“I think you’ve made a great point. My intention was never to define autism as a nerdy kid or a savant or to ignore the difficulties of parents and children severely affected by autism. I live with autism every day and know the difference. The spectrum is wide and I chose to comment on one part of it. I should have been far more specific. I believe that children on all points of the ASD spectrum need to be remembered, respected and acknowledged, as do their parents. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.”

So here I am today, reminding people that autism doesn’t just look like Einstein or Rain Man or Temple Grandin.  Autism can look like a child who bites instead of speaks.  An adult who lists to one side and types to communicate.  A teenager who wears a helmet because he self-injures for reasons he can’t tell us about.  Very often, other people look away, unwilling to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that there’s a human being in front of them, someone who thinks and feels just like we do.  And that human being has a family who cares for them.  It’s not easy for anyone.  But it is reality.  And I’ll remember that from now on.