I was raised with no threats and few real challenges in a world that was tranquil, placid and sheltered. The adults around me worked hard and succeeded, seemingly immune to any upheavals beyond. I seldom read the newspaper.

Consequently, in 1970, as a freshman in high school, I was only vaguely aware of the shooting deaths of four students at a protest against the Vietnam War at Kent State University, about an hour’s drive from my house. My parents did not teach me to advocate for causes or stand up for myself—or for much of anything—for that matter. I don’t remember if I registered to vote when I became eligible, and I don’t remember the first presidential election I voted in. I was totally apolitical, and it didn’t bother me that I didn’t care. I wasn’t into changing the world.

Even when I was forty-six and Leo was diagnosed, I took action to help Leo for a selfish reason: I didn’t want to take care of him for the rest of my life. With both my children, I was willing to sacrifice during their early years and raise them, but I expected that I could concentrate on my career after they both were in school.

That option, I felt, was taken away after Leo’s diagnosis. I had to help him and needed to restore a sense of hope and control that I had lost during the early days of his diagnosis. And what were my choices? Wait and see if Leo would grow out of it? From what the doctor told me, that was not likely. After his comment that Leo would always be autistic, the compulsion to fix Leo only intensified. I thought I could be effective to help Leo, even though I was blind to the immense job that lay ahead. I was determined to persevere.

I attribute my drive to conquer Leo’s diagnosis to my parents, especially my mother. In 1986, doctors diagnosed her with ovarian cancer, which had spread to her abdominal lining. There are four stages to cancer—four being terminal—and she was in stage three when she was diagnosed. I took her to a special cancer clinic at Ohio State University for a second opinion, and my dad retired in anticipation of spending whatever time he had left with her. The doctors there told her she had less than a fifty-percent chance to live.

After beating her cancer, she has been in remission for twenty years, and her doctors call her their “miracle baby.” Aside from that crisis, my childhood was idyllic. I grew up in Lorain, Ohio, a steel mill town cradled in the southernmost curve of the Lake Erie shoreline where my Mom and Dad had also grown up. We lived in a tidy ranch house with a neat, square lawn in a working class neighborhood built for returning World War II veterans that my parents paid cash for in 1951. My dad, Robert, planted the lawn with his typical precision, and the neighbors asked him to plant theirs, which led to Thompson’s Landscaping, a business he ran for the next thirty-five years.

My brother Dale was born in 1954, and I came along in 1955, and my mother, Agnes, didn’t work outside of the house until we left home. After that she put in twenty-four years as a nurse at Autumn Ages, a nursing home.