Betsy Hicks Russ

We're talking of an entire like almost 30 years of me thinking that my son did not understand anything.

or very little, and really resigning to severe autism and all the words that they use.

I just thought he had IDD, intellectual developmental disability.

I just didn't think he had any abilities.

And one day, I made a post on social media, which still haunts me, that I said, somebody asked me, how much do you think Joe knows?

And I'm like, eh.

You know, I think it's like a foreign language where you understand some of the words and you don't understand the rest.

And somebody had reached out and said to me, you know, I thought that about my son too, and now we have spelling.

And I had heard about it before, but I just didn't know how accessible it would be for us to be able to get somewhere.

We lived in not a huge city.

So I looked into it, and it was five hours to get to a practitioner, and we started to go.

And just like every parent, you hope that first one is going to be like, hi, mom.

You're going to say something really incredible.

And he fell asleep during the first one and probably the second one and probably the first five after that.

No indication that he understood anything.

And I was kind of laughing at my commitment to it.

Like, why am I even doing this?

But I did it and I just kept going until one day the practitioner said to me, hey, I'm moving to Bellingham where I live.

And I'm like, well, that's a sign.

So we started going every week and I could see that he was now starting to understand the lessons and he was still falling asleep and he was still having meltdowns and he still would only attend for like 10 minutes.