Lesley Quinn’s essay “100 Percent” perfectly and poignantly captures the moment every parent of a child on the spectrum has experienced–when a colleague or someone else from outside the sphere of our private lives asks the question: ”So. How’s the family?” They ask “innocently enough,” to “pass the time,” to “be polite.” Yet, there are times when that question creates a “quickening tightness around your lungs—that gentle, uncomfortable squeeze—and you think, Here we go.”

At first, you may have done what Quinn does: “You smile. You nod your head, perhaps a little too vigorously. All is well in my world, is what you hope to convey. But what you think is Please can we not do the parenting check-in thing?” Then you “launch into an interrogation about his family, his offspring, everything in the world you can think to ask.”  Invariably, there is a pause. From the essay:

Today, your colleague asks, “How’s your daughter?”

You feel a wave of weariness. But you nod quickly. You smile brightly. You say your daughter’s name. You say she’s eighteen. You glance above the double doors to see where the elevator is now, how many more floors must you wait.

“Eighteen, already? Wow.” He will probably ask next where she goes to school. He does.

You push the elevator’s Up button again and make yourself answer matter-of-factly, cheerfully, without hesitation, “A small highschool for kids with neurocognitive disorders.”

Then you step back.

You wait.

Often—maybe 60 percent of the time—the response to this is, “Oh.” Because neurocognitive sounds so messy and not fixable, and it always seems to thwart the natural momentum and rhythm of congenial discourse. For people to inquire further, something special is required, something like a straight—yet supple—spine. The remaining 40 percent, those with straight, supple spines, might ask neurocognitive means. Is that some kind of learning disability, like dyslexia?

Your colleague today surprises you; perhaps, after all, he is a superior supple-spine person. At this point you elaborate (briefly, very briefly), that your daughter’s school is for kids with one of several brain disorders on the autism spectrum. But there is that word autism, and it sounds even scarier than neurocognitive, and often after you use it, you can move directly to weekend plans and the weather.

“Ah,” your colleague is nodding heartily now. He, too, checks the status of the elevator. He tries to decide if that Up button needs further pressing. “So,” he asks finally, “any plans for the weekend?”

But a small percentage—maybe 10 percent—won’t be content to stop there. These are the people who will ask how your daughter came to have this disorder. These are the people into whose faces you will look, and if you detect a certain quiet calm in their eyes, you will consider suspending your conversational acrobatics and saying, again without diving into detail, that your daughter had a rough start. You may say (very lightly, very casually and conversationally) that she arrived twelve weeks early, one of those micro-preemies who weighed not quite two pounds.

“But she’s okay now?” the optimists will want to know. “Except for the learning disability?” How they long to hear one of those triumph-over-all-odds, happy-ending stories! Here you face another turning point. You will bob your head around in what is mostly a yes, with a tiny suggestion of not exactly, because by now you are unwilling to minimize, unwilling to construct that simplified, satisfying conclusion. You could, and you don’t know why, but now you won’t. You just won’t do it. Instead, you reward their quiet eyes with that little head-bobbing triangle of truth. Not exactly.

You have no need to elaborate. If you can wrap it up comfortably now, and usually you can, you will say something wry and inclusive, something to chase away the small cloud of misfortune, like, “Parenting…always full of surprises.”

If yet more is required, which is rare, you will say to the remaining 2 percent, those few with supple spines and quiet eyes and something more—that lovely combination of gravitas and grace resulting from suffering—that your daughter has health issues still, but she is also an incredibly brave and wonderful kid. You smile reassuringly. You thank them for asking. By then, surely, your elevator will have arrived.

(The essay continues in the print version of the book.)

I received this update from Quinn about her daughter, Molly:

Molly (left), looking magnificent

On February 14th, twelve days before her twenty-fourth birthday, my daughter Molly opened her apartment door to find a valentine on her doorstep.

Actually she’d been alerted to its presence via a text message from her shy and handsome new friend, K.—whose apartment door is about 100 feet from hers—while she was eating a microwaved frozen meat-paste burrito and a Coke for breakfast. Perhaps K. was concerned she might not find the pink envelope he’d left for her, but find it she did and it precipitated a flood of phone calls home. What did this mean? Was this a friend thing or a love thing? What does one do in a situation like this?

“What about walking down to Walgreen’s to get a valentine for him?” Dan asked.

From Walgreen’s she called to ask if she should get the one with bees on the front that said Bee Mine, or something more neutral, like the one with a cartoon Shakespeare writing illegible (and, therefore, neutral) messages on wee little candy hearts, and also, there were these little heart-shaped chocolates, should she get those, too?—and once back in her apartment, should she write an additional message inside the card, and if so, what should she say?

“Well,” I said, taking the call this time, “you could say something like: I’m happy that you joined the program and I’m looking forward to getting to know you better…”

“Wait, slow down. I’m happy that…what?”

Two days later she called sobbing because her longtime online celebrity role-playing (histrionic, bi-polar) friend—her closest friend in the world for 2+ years (whom she’s never actually met)—was livid about Molly’s exchange of valentines with K. and was now doing and saying mean and hurtful things on purpose.

For years Dan and I have been suggesting with increasing vehemence—but without success—that flesh-and-blood friends are so very much more satisfying than virtual ones. So when Molly announced through her tears, “I can’t do this anymore, Mom. I want to leave the game and change my phone number,” I jumped around the kitchen in silent ecstasy. And despite all the discharges of telephoned grief over the ensuing days and nights, Dan and I, and all the flesh-and-blood human friends we had notified about this important development, remained ecstatic.

Several days later, Molly called Dan all out of breath. “Dad. Dad. I have amazing news.”

“What?!” he said, putting her on speakerphone.

“Guess.”

“K. held your hand?”

“No, but close.”

“He kissed you?”

“Dad. No! Come on.”

“I don’t know, honey. Just tell me.”

“K. just asked me out!”

“Hi honey, it’s Mom,” I said, leaning closer to the speaker. “That’s fantastic! Is he there now?”

“No, he just texted me.”

“And you texted him back?”

“Yes! Isn’t this fantastic?”

“Do you maybe want to invite him to come over?”

So she did, and he did, and there was actual human cuddling on the couch and, a few days later, declarations of undying something, and all of this was cause for a weeklong series of celebratory gin and tonics for Dan and me.

Our gaiety continued for several days until we received a text that sandwiched this breezy message: “A creepy guy just offered me a ride while I was waiting at the bus stop,” between two gushing assertions that K. is the kindest, handsomest, most loving person she has ever known—that she will ever know—and she has never, never been happier.

“How nice,” I texted her back, fumbling for the 24-hour hotline to her program’s director whilst trying to decide if the police should be the first call I made.

After a period of intense investigation that evening, Dan located a five-foot-tall woman with a 10^th degree black belt in something who had already worked with a few people on the autism spectrum. In an hour he’ll make the 2-hour drive to Monterey so he and Molly can spend six hours learning how to kick the shit out of a heavily padded pervert-shaped person.

In the meantime, Molly appears to be avoiding our attempts to reach her. We learned from her therapist this week that she canceled a 9 AM session at the last minute because it was “too early” and she was “too tired” ($125 down the drain). From one of the coordinators in her program we heard that she wants to drop one of her classes at the community college because it’s “stressing her out.” In the past, this behavior would mean the beginning of a downward spiral of the sort that often results in her inability to leave her bedroom. Now, however, it might simply mean that she’s assigned a higher priority to the pursuit of human contact on the couch with K.

In either case, Dan will soon arrive to handle whatever needs to be handled, and I have this day to enjoy a quiet home in which there no longer lives the lonely young woman who watched movies all day, and ate microwaved chicken nuggets and chocolate chemical cake, and pretended to be Anna Popplewell from the Narnia movies in an online game with someone who pretended to be James McAvoy—instead of learning to be a human who is truly attached to other humans.

For me, a pretty good day.

Lesley Quinn is an essayist and writing coach who specializes in assisting high school seniors create deeply felt and compelling college application essays. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous literary magazines and anthologies. She lives with her husband, a psychologist, and her daughter when she’s visiting, in Berkeley, California.