My Job Is to Sign Up for the Exposure

On raising two autistic boys, being perceived in public, and creating a place where mothers can be seen in full.

By Alexis Blaydoe

Photography by Bang Images

“At the time, all we had was the footage, the fear, and the knowledge that something was not going according to plan.”

There are certain moments in motherhood when time stops. One of mine came when Louis’s Montessori school asked us to watch surveillance footage of him pushing another child from the top of a play structure.

We knew something was different with Louis. But this was before the diagnosis, the therapies, the specialists, and the language that would eventually help us understand him. At the time, all we had was the footage, the fear, and the knowledge that something was not going according to plan.

I watched it and wondered whether I was raising the next Damien from The Omen.

Louis would be asked to leave three schools before we eventually found our way to a diagnosis.

Motherhood, now with administrative duties

By the time I became a mother, I had already been an artist, a teacher, a designer, and a person who believed she could solve most problems through a combination of research, persistence, and hard work.

This proved useful.

Motherhood became evaluations, speech therapy, occupational therapy, ABA, insurance, school meetings, IEPs, waitlists, treatment plans, and emails written in a tone best described as “pleasant but increasingly documented.”

I learned how to advocate because I had to. I learned which questions to ask, which words opened doors, and which doors required repeated knocking, strategic irritation, or the threat of further correspondence.

But somewhere in that process, the mother can begin to disappear.

People ask what services your child receives. They ask how school is going, whether speech is improving, whether the behavior has a trigger. They ask about progress, regulation, transitions, goals, and data.

They rarely ask about you.

“The freedom I lost was not simply the freedom to visit another place. It was the freedom to believe I could build a life anywhere.”

The life I thought I could pick up and move

I am a dual citizen of the United States and France, and I grew up spending every summer in France. Movement was built into my understanding of life from the beginning.

After high school, I went away to college. After college, I moved to New York and then San Francisco. I loved being new somewhere. I loved knowing I could leave, begin again, and become slightly different in another city.

I have always had a nomadic streak. Home could be important without being permanent.

I didn’t think I would miss that freedom as much as I do.

Now, the idea of picking up and moving feels daunting. My boys have diagnoses, providers, routines, schools, supports, and people who know them. None of that can be casually packed into the back of a car or recreated in another country.

Travel is still possible. Moving is still theoretically possible. But neither carries the lightness it once did. Every departure now comes with calculations that did not exist before: what the boys need, what they can tolerate, what support awaits us, and what happens if the entire plan collapses somewhere far from home.

The freedom I lost was not simply the freedom to visit another place. It was the freedom to believe I could build a life anywhere.

This is one of the complicated truths of motherhood: I love my children completely, and I still mourn certain versions of my life.

Those truths do not cancel each other out.

“I am not responsible for making strangers comfortable. I am responsible for my children.”

My job is to sign up for the exposure

I have a rule: it is my job to sign up for the exposure.

I cannot control how the opportunity will go. I can sign us up for the camp, the trip, the birthday party, the restaurant, the soccer team, or the flight. I can prepare. I can pack snacks, headphones, preferred objects, backup preferred objects, and enough contingency plans to invade a small country.

But I cannot guarantee success.

What I can do is refuse to limit my boys’ lives simply because something might be difficult. They deserve restaurants, museums, airplanes, birthday parties, bowling alleys, camps, grocery stores, and the whole unruly world—not only the parts where their nervous systems are convenient to everyone else.

For a while, I was deeply self-conscious when my youngest screamed in public—usually at an octave not intended for indoor spaces.

Then I changed my perspective.

I am not responsible for making strangers comfortable. I am responsible for my children. I have to give them grace, even when no one around us understands what is happening.

That sounds resolved when written neatly on a page. It isn’t.

The feeling continues to evolve because the circumstances continue to test it.

Being perceived is, unfortunately, part of leaving the house

Recently, while trying to minimize a public outburst, I had to bear-hug my youngest and speed-walk him toward the car. As I struggled to hold him, he was slapping the absolute shit out of my face in front of the other parents at school.

A similar thing happened at a birthday party in a bowling alley.

In those moments, I can feel other people watching. I can imagine what they think: that I cannot control my child, that he needs more discipline, that I am allowing behavior they would never tolerate from their own children.

Maybe they aren’t thinking any of that. But when you are mothering in public, even a neutral glance can begin to feel like criticism.

I refuse to announce, “He has autism!”

I do not want to offer my son’s diagnosis as an apology for his presence. I do not want to disclose something personal about him simply to make a group of adults judge me more favorably.

His diagnosis is not a hall pass. It is not a confession. And it is not information strangers are automatically entitled to because they happened to witness a difficult moment.

So I keep moving toward the car.

Sometimes I am calm. Sometimes I am embarrassed. Sometimes I am furious that embarrassment entered the equation at all. Sometimes I get everyone buckled in, shut the doors, and have an ugly cry in the privacy of the car.

Grace is not a feeling I achieved once and kept forever. It is a practice. Some days it looks like patience. Some days it looks like holding everything together until the doors close.

“I saw plenty of information about what mothers should do. I saw much less about who they are.”

Where did the mothers go?

Much of the language surrounding autism focuses, understandably, on children: their development, their needs, their progress, their challenges, and their futures.

But I kept wondering where the mothers had gone.

I saw mothers turned into case managers, chauffeurs, researchers, insurance negotiators, amateur behavioral analysts, and relentless advocates. I saw them described as strong because the alternative made other people uncomfortable.

I saw plenty of information about what mothers should do.

I saw much less about who they are.

Where were their careers, their bodies, their relationships, their art, their anger, their humor, their ambition, their clothes, their grief, their pleasure, and their private dreams?

Where were the photographs of them looking beautiful and relaxed in their own environments—not performing resilience or standing beside their children as supporting characters, but occupying the center of the frame?

Where were the stories that included the good and the bad without turning either into inspiration?

Mothers in FULL

I created Mothers in FULL because I want to make the thing I have been looking for.

It is an editorial project about motherhood in families shaped by autism. Through photography, interviews, essays, and stories, I want to document mothers as complete and complicated people.

I want to hear about the school meetings and the relationships. The insurance battles and the work they still care about. The sensory meltdowns and the excellent coat someone bought because she is still a person with taste. The anger, tenderness, loneliness, intimacy, absurdity, beauty, and boredom of it all.

I want us to tell honest stories about raising our children without taking their stories away from them.

And I want mothers to encounter this work and feel excited—not merely grateful to be represented, but genuinely eager to see whose life we enter next.

I want them to recognize something familiar in another woman’s experience. I want them to see mothers photographed at home, at work, or wherever they feel most themselves: beautiful, interesting, relaxed, and fully present.

Not saints. Not cautionary tales. Not “autism moms” arranged into a single heroic identity.

Mothers in full.

“A complicated life is not necessarily a smaller one.”

A life can be difficult without becoming small

I still think about leaving.

I still think about France, about unfamiliar cities, and about all the lives I once believed I could pick up and inhabit. Motherhood did not cure me of wanting movement. If anything, it made the wanting more complicated.

But a complicated life is not necessarily a smaller one.

My boys have expanded my understanding of courage, dignity, communication, and what it means to belong in public. They have forced me to reconsider how much of my behavior was designed to reassure strangers. They have made me braver, although rarely in the picturesque way people prefer bravery to appear. Hell, I even joined the PTO.

So I will continue signing us up.

Some experiences will go beautifully. Some will end with one of us screaming. Some will involve a speed-walk through a parking lot while I am being slapped in the face.

We will go anyway.

And here, I will tell the truth about it.