Hi Sara,

What a wonderful thread. Thank you.

I'm glad these boards were there for you when you most needed them. Although I wasn't suicidal, they were very much a lifeline for me, as well. I joined the boards when my son was rather young. As many here know, he has some *major* special needs now. He had had even more then. (He no longer has a feeding tube or life-threatening allergies, for example.) Back then, I was working full time and trying to raise him by myself. (My now-ex-husband had abandoned us when our son was an infant.) I had almost no free time. I lived too far away from family and friends for them to provide much help, and my son's combination of physical and behavioral needs meant that years would go by during which I could find no qualified and willing respite providers.

These boards were about the only place where I could put aside, for a few minutes, being "Dr. M." or "Mom," and I could be just plain "Lynn." The few minutes I would steal here and there to write fanfic or to interact with others here were my lifeline to the outside world. (I was, of necessity, socially isolating for many years before COVID. In fact, I've found my COVID isolations to be a lot more pleasant and less strict than my isolations then -- at least during COVID, I am able to leisurely walk around in my yard.)

My own favourite fanfic of what I have written is a series in which Lois and Clark have a child with autism. Over the series, we see the family dynamics from every POV within the nuclear family and we see how the family dynamics change over time. The tone of the series ranges from the dramatic to the humorous. The series, in in-story-chronological-order, follows. If I had to pick one as my absolute favourite story, it is "Hitting Close to Home," since it is the one most fraught with emotion and since it discusses a topic that I don't think I have ever seen presented in any fiction, at least not in a realistic way: Physical abuse of a parent by a minor child. The story provides, in fictionalized form, a glimpse into what my life was like at the time and a major decision I had to make.



I've written the stories in such a way that they can stand on their own, but I think the reader would get a lot more out of them if they chose to read them in order.

Be well,
Lynn