I’d like to nominate ‘Sam Thompson’s Nephew’s Mother’ or simply ‘Leo’s Mother’ as a thread title at some point. The latter, especially, because it’s what she should be doing/part of her identity, but emphatically isn’t.
(I think it’s a bad idea to ‘diagnose’ Leo with autism at this and any point. I’m autistic myself, and have to deal with the stigma of my condition, the daily struggles to act within and interact with society, being designated as ‘odd’, ‘unlikeable’, ‘different’, ‘other’, masking, sensory overload et cetera - there are so many different manifestations of autism, and I feel that in our zeal to be fully inclusive, we can see ‘symptoms’ where there is none. If you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person. Global speech delay isn’t necessarily a component of autism, and can be an indicator of a plurality of conditions. And many individuals with autism have no such delay: I started speaking at seven months, reading at eleven. But life has been often intolerably hard, nonetheless.)