To an autistic parent:
I hope you have support. I was married for 26 years (until my husband passed away) and we have seven children. I have homeschooled for many years; I have one left to graduate. One of the strengths of homeschooling is that I can set our family schedule to fit me: I prefer to stay up late and sleep in, so I schedule nothing early, no classes, no commitments. We start school at 10 a.m. and when my children were all elementary age and younger, we'd end official schoolwork at noon with exercise. Now that my last child is high school age, we work around his theater schedule. He performed in a play last night. My husband and I made a point of going out to dinner without our children once a week or once every other week, so I could have time away from the children and so he could reconnect with me. I live in a city that has a lot of co-op classes I can take my children to, so for subjects I don't want to teach, they can learn from someone else. I despise grading papers, so we use other ways of showing what our children have learned. They make art, they write, they make music, they give presentations; each one is different. I feel blessed to get to learn something about everything they're interested in, because my focus is on figuring out how to help my children become their best selves. It's like opening live puzzle boxes, exciting and frustrating and wonderful and painful all at once. My most difficult child so far is the most obviously autistic; she is so sensitive to touch that I can tickle her by waving my fingers in her sight. She has enough instability that she chooses not to ride a bike at all. My other children, however, are one by one being diagnosed ADD or ADHD as adults. I'm fairly certain that I'm autistic, but my strength is in words and in following directions to the letter, so I fit in really well in school, that is, teachers loved me. Other students mostly got ignored, if I was reading a book, or selectively listened to if I was between books.
You can do this. You only have to do what you can do, and God will make up the rest. He gave you and your husband the children he did, so you AND they can learn from the experience.
