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I am weary of Emily Perl Kingsley's essay Welcome to Holland -- which likens a child's special needs diagnosis to being rerouted to Holland after embarking on a long-awaited trip to Italy -- being passed to parents by well-meaning pediatricians or social workers as the cherry atop stacks of life-changing autism diagnosis paperwork. Welcome to Holland, with its gentle visions of tulip fields, is a beautiful piece of writing, but it was written for parents of children with Down syndrome. It doesn't speak to my family's experience with autism, and I'm not the first to say so. For Autism Awareness Day, I'd like to propose a new and more appropriate geographic autism analogy:
Welcome to Yellowknife!
Receiving a child's autism diagnosis is like living in the world's most wonderful city, San Francisco, then being suddenly informed of your family's relocation to Yellowknife, a busy city in Canada's subarctic. Even parents who know only that the subarctic is where the globe turns from green to white are aware it's not a place one lives casually. If you're going to survive the long, dark, fierce winters and bug-ridden summers, you have to be prepared. You have to budget for expensive supplies and services that people in San Francisco never need consider. Yellowknife is also remote -- you may find that not all of your former families and friends are able to visit you there.
Living in Yellowknife can be exhilarating, it can by trying, it can be depressing, and it may just fill your soul with light. Accepting that your child is going to be raised in Yellowknife is not easy, but it's the first step to being the parent your child needs -- because you're going to have to step up. Though parents love their children as much in Yellowknife as they do anywhere else, life in Yellowknife is challenging. To keep your children not just safe but thriving requires effort and vigilance and consistency. Children need extreme bundling for winter, and hardcore bug evasion gear for summer. Frostbite lurks just outside your door during the twenty-hour-long winter nights. The seasonal rhythms are balanced by twenty hour summer days -- which makes perfect sense to your child, but may never make sense to you, or your child's siblings.
But, once you've settled in, you start to realize how cool Yellowknife can be. You start to see that Yellowknife is a crucible for the intrepid and the fearless, for people like the Ice Road Truckers who brave long and grueling journeys to provide subarctic children with the supplies and services they need. You find that, as in San Francisco, people come to Yellowknife from all over the world. You'll also find that not all of them will be staying.
Some people leave Yellowknife because they not only embrace their subarctic identity, but have no intention of living any place else -- so they founded their own semi-autonomous territory, Nunavut. Though they maintain government ties, they self-govern and live as they please with minimal outside interference. They also have long memories -- they remember the not-too-distant days of being treated like second-class citizens on their own turf. They do not appreciate being patronized or stereotyped, even about some members' special talents for art or communicating with animals.
Some subarctic residents don't cotton to life in Yellowknife or Canada - in fact, they reject it. They claim their children were forcibly dragged out of California, and so want to redefine subarctic living as an American condition. They bide their time in Alaska, where their resentments are kept simmering by an outspoken, glossy, self-professed maverick woman who thrives on promoting her controversial books, flogging conspiracy theories, and claiming that her experience as a mom gives her opinions more weight than those of professionals and experts. She does little positive work for the subarctic community as a whole. Many Alaskans-by-choice aren't pleased to be associated with her, and would rather she focused on issues that unite rather than divide the subarctic.
Some Yellowknife families discover that they're more comfortable closer to, though not across, the U.S. border. They move to cities like Vancouver, and Toronto, where they meet plenty of children who are like their kids, some of whom have been raised there, some from resident families of multiple generations. Vancouver and Toronto kids are often mistaken for Americans to those unfamiliar with their subtle Canadian variations in speech patterns, and
