Somewhere Over the Sea: A Father's Letter to His Autistic Son
Halfdan W. Freihow
Language: English
Pages: 110
ISBN: 1770891005
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this deeply moving and elegantly written book, Halfdan W. Freihow takes Gabriel, his young autistic son, on a journey through the full spectrum of human experience. With great love, profound tenderness, and gentle wit, Freihow captures Gabriel's triumphs and disappointments, his joy and frustration, while struggling to help him make sense of a world that he himself does not, and cannot, fully comprehend. A powerful, honest, and achingly beautiful narrative, Somewhere Over the Sea describes a complex, loving relationship that is sometimes fraught with misunderstanding, but always bolstered by unconditional love. A must-read for all parents.
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what you’d come to find confirmation of. Nor did it take long before you, with minimal indecision in your voice and eyes, proclaimed triumphantly: — There, you see? There are real pirates! Only they live here on Kristiansand! (For a long time you said that, “on,” presumably in line with an unconscious logic that made pirates = treasure = island, so that the city of Kristiansand therefore had to be an island one was “on.”) The argument was, in a way, irrefutable. In the crowd around you pirates
luxury — is the most recent addition. Among other things it led you to suggest, when our old car finally had to be junked, that now we should get ourselves a limousine. — Or a normal car, if you can’t afford it, only make sure it’s long, as you put it. You have, thank goodness, not yet begun to take an interest in antiques, though you count Buddha statues, pill boxes, Egyptian scarabs, and miniature Turkish sabres as treasures, though they are made by people and of brass, and don’t even have
school when you weren’t having “a good day” and in the end the teacher had to hold you to prevent more kicking and punching and biting: — Why did they have to hold me? Don’t they understand that it was the other kids that made me angry? If they’d understood that then they would’ve done something about them and not needed to hold me, because then I wouldn’t have been angry. Often I have to admire your ability to think logically. When I’m tired and worn out or busy with something else and you ask
or at least not given them as much thought as I have. And believe me, son, I wouldn’t want to be without them. The sense of wonder you’ve given rise to is, at heart, the reality in which I feel most at home. Perhaps — but this is only a guess — because it ties me so closely to you. You probably won’t remember, because you were so little at the time, but several years ago you and I passed through New York. You were perhaps two or three, and we didn’t know much about you other than that you were a
girlfriends. To the contrary, the point is precisely that in this field there are no rules, nor any sets of instructions. I know you are painfully aware that social relationships between people are guided by complex and unwritten laws, which seem impossible to learn. But you mustn’t let this tempt you into believing that guidelines exist for what and how and how much you should feel. If you hear your friends describing, or perhaps even boasting of, the way in which they’ve done “it,” you mustn’t