Teaching was my dream. I wanted to make a difference in the life of children by sharing my passion. Elementary music-that was the goal, but all of that changed when my little brother was diagnosed with High Functioning Autism.

Autism: A word that I had never even heard yet somehow it changed my entire life. After taking time to process this life changing event, I was left with two major questions. The first question being: how am I in my second semester of the teaching program at school and yet I have never heard this term? The second question being: where do we go from here?

After a month of working with my mother and grandmother to attempt to find services and programs for my brother, we were dumbfounded. The lack of knowledge that, not only myself and my family, but our community had towards this disability was extremely overwhelming. We were able to find plenty of services for children with a wide variety of other disabilities, but why was it so difficult to find services for a child with Autism and how did we even get ourselves into this mess?

When my brother was growing up, we were unsure of what was happening with him. School and being around peers has never been an easy task. He would have meltdowns that would terrify those around him. He would hit and kick people, make remarks about killing himself, tear up his school work, and often target his meltdowns towards injuring his little sister. He would tell the family that the day our little sister was born was the day that his life was ruined. He had even ended up in a children’s psychiatric unit for attempting to jump out of his bedroom window to kill himself. As his big sister, I often felt responsible for his behaviors. I became very protective of him. I would stand up to his father (who felt like there wasn’t anything wrong and he just needed a good beating to fix his behavior). His father’s anger towards me became so bad that I could no longer continue to live in the home with my brother and left to live with our grandparents. I abandoned my brother and could no longer protect him from the “enemy”. That next year, I left for my freshman year of college while my brother stayed at the house and began fifth grade.

During the first semester of my freshman year, all hell broke loose. Our mother decided to file for divorce against my step-father, a choice that ended up making all of our lives better, but the chaos and disorder affected my brother seriously. On one day in fifth grade, that chaos and lack of structure ended with a phone call, from the school to our mother, that her son was in handcuffs.