We often talk about growth as progress you can measure. A milestone. A trip you never thought was possible. For us, the Disney trip was growth, huge, visible, and undeniable.
But tonight, growth looked very different.
Tonight, growth looked like sitting quietly, watching snow fall.
The snow triggered something in Jacob. Not fear in the way most people experience it, but memory. Deep, stored, waiting memory.
Christmas Eve, 2012.
Jacob had just come home from a dentist appointment. There wasn’t a single snowflake falling. The driveway looked harmless. But there was black ice—silent, invisible, unforgiving. As he stepped out of the car, he slipped and fell hard on his side.
Jacob was 14. Minimally verbal. If I hadn’t seen him fall with my own eyes, I don’t know how I would have explained anything to the doctors.
He was angry. He got up. He walked. Soon to find out with a broken femoral neck. The doctors later told us they were stunned. That injury is so severe that if it isn’t surgically repaired within 12 hours, it can require a full hip replacement.
I knew something wasn’t right. He was pale. He didn’t want to move. What followed was a terrifying guessing game, X-rays, confusion, urgency-until suddenly we were told he needed emergency surgery and had to be transferred to the children’s hospital in upstate New York.
They gave him morphine. That’s the level of pain this injury causes.
After surgery, we were told something that felt impossible: once discharged, Jacob couldn’t get out of bed for eight weeks.
Eight weeks.
We went from a child who was constantly moving- jumping, eloping, active- to complete stillness. Ten weeks in bed. A body forced to be quiet. A brain that doesn’t forget.
That trauma didn’t end when the bone healed. It shaped so much of Jacob’s life and ours.
Every year, when Christmas comes and the snow arrives, Jacob becomes anxious. His brain works cyclically. Christmas comes every year, so why wouldn’t the fall happen again?
For years, he couldn’t tell us what he felt. He couldn’t tell us he was scared. He couldn’t even tell us he was injured back then.
And yet growth has been happening quietly all along.
Two years ago, out of nowhere, Jacob said a full sentence:
“Remember Christmas Eve 2012. I slipped and broke my leg and went X-ray and Children’s Golisano Hospital.”
I remember sitting there, stunned. So much of his communication is echolalia. So much of it is inaccurate or borrowed. But that sentence was clear. Precise. Real.
Tonight, on a day when he’d been mostly quiet, something else emerged.
He started listing injuries. Dates. Events.
He fell off the swing in the playroom in 2007.
(Dad never told Mom. Busted—19 years later.)
He fell off his desk in Ms. Amidon’s classroom in 2009.
I asked what he was doing on the desk. No answer.
He fell off a scooter in the gym, no date.
He slipped on black ice and broke his hip in 2012.
Then he said something we didn’t know.
In 2017, a teacher hurt his elbow.
We knew the teacher had been fired. We never knew why.
And suddenly I wondered what else is in that brain of his?
What memories are stored without language?
What pain was never named?
What truths are still waiting for the moment they feel safe enough to surface?
This is the part of autism no one prepares you for. The long arc of memory. The delayed telling. The way trauma can sit quietly for years and then spill out in the presence of falling snow.
Tonight wasn’t loud. It wasn’t dramatic. But it was profound.
Growth doesn’t always look like forward motion.
Sometimes it looks like remembering.
Sometimes it looks like finally having words for something that happened a lifetime ago.
And sometimes, growth is realizing just how much our children carry silently, bravely, until they’re ready to let us in.
Tonight, Jacob let us in.
And that might be the biggest growth of all.
