About this blog



This blog is about my life with Luca, aka Mister Shmoo. He is my first born, and he carries around with incredible confidence his Autism and Down syndrome. Since last year, he has also developed a seizure disorder, because why not?

Living with a person with such diagnosis is very interesting: Luca lives in a world that only has the here and the now. He doesn't make plans for the future, he doesn't weigh consequences, he doesn't care about strange looks, cloths, haircuts, private property, wars, types of cars, illegal drugs, danger, education, cooking, alcohol, what others think of him. He doesn't care about movies, art, the latest best seller, having long or short hair, expensive sneakers, the weather, smoking, TV series, a career, building a family, learning to scuba dive. Luca loves music (especially bad covers of good songs), Little People (in English or in Spanish), car rides, goldfish, his siblings, traveling to Italy, a plate full of french fries (his or someone else's), walk around naked.

Luca has taught us that our way of seeing the world is not the only one; there are others approaches, other values that can be as great as ours.

Luca is not independent: he needs help with everything, from wiping his butt to cut his chicken. He cannot be left home alone, under any circumstance.

In this blog, I will share the fun and the not so fun parts of living with someone like him.


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So, this is us

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Luca was born on a Tuesday in November. The year was 1996, and the weather was cold with occasional snow showers. The hospital room was very cozy, the midwife comforting, despite her pronounced lisp; especially when she was encouraging me to push. Her S was unusually long - a bit distracting, but hey, we can’t all be perfect.   As I started to really push, Dan, my husband, started throwing up the rotten chicken sandwich he had found in the nurses’ fridge. Out went the whole birth plan we had so carefully put together - down the drain, literally. Claudia, Dan’s sister, showed up to replace him. It was she and I who met Luca for the first time - and the midwife with the lisp was there too, slapping Luca on the back so that he would take his very first breath, which came a bit later than expected. But arrive it did, along with his first huge scream.   Luca was ugly: he had a conehead, a red eye and red marks on his face. It took a long time for him to leave my uterus. Three hours...
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This year it’s been twenty-five years. A quarter of a century of Shmoo. As we all know, Luca is not a typical 25-year-old: he never smoked weed, never had a sip of wine, or coffee. He never made love with a person, only himself, he doesn’t have a driver’s license, and he never graduated from middle school or college. He has no ambitions, he never broke up with anyone, he never ordered a pizza to go. He was never sent to the principal’s office, never went to Greece on vacation, never travelled around Europe by train. He never wrote a love letter and he doesn’t have a resumé. He never cooked, never asked for expensive sneakers, he never went for a walk by himself. He made his own bed a few times, at gunpoint; the same with laundry, emptying the dishwasher or putting away groceries. Luce doesn’t care about any of that. It’s one of the many reasons I consider him to be the most amazing person in the world. Because he doesn’t miss anything. Whatever he doesn’t have, he has never wa...
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