The Home Front by Margaret Vandenburg Read Free Book Online

couldn’t afford to do. Todd accused her of being Pollyanna. But in reality she was prone to depression, a fact she did everything in her power to disguise even from herself. Had her father not been an alcoholic, she might have self-medicated with booze. Instead, she kept the abyss at bay with almost manic optimism. She had inherited this technique from her mother, a chronic Midwesterner with superhuman powers of repression and denial. It had never let her down before, and she wasn’t about to let a little thing like autism rain on her parade. She reviewed Max’s bedtime routine and chose the most upbeat explanation for his agitation.
    “I had to wash his sheets. But that hasn’t set him off for months now.”
    “When was the last time you washed them?”
    “Day before yesterday.”
    “Why so often?”
    “He had an accident during nap time.”
    “An accident or an incident?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “He may have done it on purpose.” Sasha recorded the incident in her notebook as she spoke. “Kids can get pretty attached to their own smells. Like animals marking their territory. It probably makes them feel safe.”
    “An accident,” Rose said, unconsciously gravitating toward the more positive alternative.
    “Try using unscented detergent. Less of a shock to his system.”
    “That should do the trick.”
    “It might.”
    “It will,” Rose said, somewhat more adamantly than she had intended.
    Sasha looked up from her notebook. “It’s certainly worth a try, one way or the other. But don’t get your hopes up too high.”
    Part of Sasha’s job was managing parental expectations, boosting morale without making false promises. She struggled with this balance herself, especially in a profession that focused on pathology rather than wellness. Sasha was on the verge of completing her MA in developmental psychology. Her recent decision to postpone getting her doctorate meant she could work with Max on a more regular basis. The chair of her department at the University of Nevada was disappointed. They lamented the fact that graduate funding had dried up. He blamed the economic downturn. She blamed the Republicans and told him she’d continue when she saved enough money to cover the cost of another degree.
    What she didn’t tell her professors was that Max taught her more than they did. She didn’t need a PhD to know that the theoretical foundations of psychology were way too drug-oriented, not to mention diagnostically slaphappy. No wonder everybody was allegedly so sick these days. In practice, they were pretty much the same as they’d always been, anxious or depressed one minute, happy enough the next. It’s just that the spectrum of acceptable emotions was shrinking in direct proportion to the number of prescriptions being filled at Walmart. The fact that pharmacies were located in supermarkets was symptomatic of the real problem. Pills were like food now.
    Judging from the expression on Rose’s face, Sasha needed to tread lightly. She had that wounded mother look. Sometimes fathers wore this expression, but more often mothers, who seemed to take autism personally. Even if parents didn’t blame themselves for their child’s condition in the first place, they felt responsible for anything less than a full recovery. Out of guilt, they often pressured their kids too much. Like stage mothers. Or like fathers coaching their sons’ football teams as though recovery were a touchdown and normalcy the two-point conversion.
    “Don’t be silly,” Rose said. “Hopes can never be too high.”
    “I guess it depends on the context. In this case, expecting too much is unfair.”
    “Expecting too little is even more unfair.”
    “I’ve seen it work both ways.”
    Sasha appreciated the value of wishful thinking as a coping mechanism. It certainly beat wallowing in despair. But Rose’s blind optimism seemed selfish, if not outright intolerant, a refusal to accept Max’s fundamental right to be Max. He was