Abbey's Mom
speaker
177 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Abbey's Mom’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
You mean going on Love on the Spectrum? Yes. First of all, it was happening during COVID and no one knew what it was. It was just literally a guy. This is how they found Abby. She was in a theater program called Spectrum Laboratories where it's, to me, therapeutic social skills in theater help you with your connecting socially. She's in that program.
The producer, Kian, went to many autism programs looking for just different people and meeting people. So they called us and just said, there's a guy who's doing some sort of maybe a documentary on relationships and autism, and he wants to Zoom with you because it was 2020. So I didn't know anything about it. I didn't know what it was. And they Zoomed. And that was great.
Then they called back about a month later. We Zoomed again. Still didn't know what it was. Third time they called back again. And then they say, we were kind of sitting next to each other because I still didn't know what it was. And the guy says, can we have a moment alone with Abby? Okay.
go in the other room I'm sort of standing by like our washroom but I can kind of see her and so she's zooming with Keon that's right I am and you were zooming with him and then you turned in the middle of the interview to me off-camera and you said mom when you're driving you call everyone an asshole And I don't know who these guys are.
I go, Abigail, that is, keep focused to the question that is being asked of you. And they asked her, at the very end, they said, you know, we want you to be part of this project. And I'm like, okay, what is this project? I had never heard of it because it hadn't come out yet. Maybe their season one had just come out, is what I think. I think maybe. Cool.
So he said it's going to be on this little network called, starts with the letter N. Yeah, just a little one. It's not NBC, and I said Netflix. It's Netflix. They said Netflix. I was like, oh my gosh. Okay, so then I watched the season one and the season two, or season one of Australia's Love on the spectrum.
And I'm just going to tell you the truth from my point of view, which was when I watched those individuals on the spectrum, I saw a man driving a city bus as his job, a couple traveling Europe on their own, uh, people that didn't need aides or helpers and people with no expressive language problem. Yeah. And I truly said to the producers, I love your show. I laughed. I cried.
These people are lovely.
She's not right. Yeah. I said, those people have what we formally called Asperger's.
And are you okay? Yeah. And I said, Abby doesn't have that. She has language struggles. If you want someone, that's going to be really hard. And they said, we want to show more diversity of the spectrum. That's when I said, okay, then we should include. So we're going to do this. So that's when we decided to give it a whirl.
And what Abby said earlier, remember what you were talking about once they came to the house for the very first day? I already explained that. I know. You sat in a room that was hot and you couldn't move, remember? She was sort of sitting there and they were asking these questions and it was a bit of a struggle. And I was listening in the other room and I thought to myself, what have I done?
This is so not fair that I sort of threw her in this thing or encouraged her to try doing this thing when the questions were too much. The reciprocal language was too much, and I felt really bad.
And I kind of cried a little bit, and I thought, I made a mistake. But I didn't want to rob her of the chance... Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah. Really, I felt caught. So by a miracle, they called the next week and they said, we want to come back. Because I thought, oh, we're never going to do this. They're going to say, no, this just didn't work. Yeah.
They came back and said, we'd like to shoot Abby in her natural environment, just letting her walk around the house. Yes. Like do her thing. And I was like, oh, okay. And that second day they came back, what did you do for Kian? Do you remember what you did when Kian came back? You told stories. You did impressions. Yes.
And she did an impression of Bruce the Shark from Finding Nemo because he's Australian too. But I'm not Australian. You're not.
Do you want a break? Oh, yeah. Let's take a break.
So Abby's walking around the house doing her own thing, leading the producers around. She's funny. She's articulate. She's a laugh a minute. And I now as the mother am going, that's my girl. Yeah. That's what I've seen her capable of.
And the producer turned to me and he said, is she always like this? And I said, yes.
This is what she's like.
And I learned in that moment that there are so many kids, not just like Abby, but with ADHD or neurodivergent learners, I call them, that need to be moving or doing that do not function their best selves when they're sitting at attention like soldiers in a quiet room and they're not supposed to move and they're supposed to listen and write off the board and learn the way that our traditional schools have us learn.
Showing 41–60 of 177 · page 3 of 9
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