Crossing an Ocean Without a Compass - by Lyn Elizabeth Ujlaky (Paperback)

About the Book

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink . . . fittingly describes one mother's experience of parenting a young adult with high functioning autism. As told in Crossing an Ocean Without a Compass, the author led her daughter Cait to the trough of independence, but the actual drinking she learned, is not something she can control. All those parental expectations of launching children into adulthood went out the window as she struggled to support Cait, helping her secure employment, find a place to live on her own, and establish a healthy social network. She'd thought her efforts could make a difference - but not to Cait, a least not how her mother had expected. This mother learned while all parents want their kids to eventually "leave the nest" to lead full, independent lives, there's another reality when a child is on the autism spectrum. Then everything is up for grabs - nothing is guaranteed.

Crossing an Ocean Without a Compass is a series of short narratives, topically organized and candidly told through one mother's lens. All the foibles of parenting are laid bare, and the mistakes along the way honestly shared. It delves into Cait's struggle with maintaining a job and daily schedule, entering a social world online, keeping family ties, and ultimately figuring out the skill set to secure and keep her independence. While books have begun to fill the shelves offering advice on raising children with high functioning autism, there are no guides for when that child becomes an adult. Transition programs are growing, but they provide little real support for entering an adult world that is becoming increasingly more complicated and fast-paced.

While Crossing an Ocean Without a Compass doesn't pretend to propose easy solutions, the real-life stories of one mother and her daughter, told with humor and insight, offer renewed hope to all those struggling to meet the needs of neurodivergent young adults to transition to independent and successful lives.

Book Synopsis

Crossing an Ocean Without a Compass is a collection of vignettes, chronologically ordered in eight parts, that recount a mother's challenges and rewards while supporting her young adult daughter on the autism spectrum. Told through the lens of my experience as Cait's mother, it is a story of survival and resilience in the face of the odds stacked against neurodivergent young adults becoming independent. On a personal level, it is a story filled with hard-earned lessons that anyone parenting an exceptional child to adulthood needs to learn. In the end, in spite of all the support, both from family and social programs, the lesson learned is one of trusting and letting go.

In the Introduction, I provide a recap of my earlier book, She'll Be Home In The Springtime, chronicling my journey of raising Cait from birth through high school and then in a two-year college program designed for students with learning disabilities. Crossing an Ocean Without a Compass picks up after Cait has graduated and is facing life on her own. That experience, told in eight parts, each highlighting an area of independence faced by Cait over a period of seven years, forms the main part of the book.

The book's eight parts cover the challenges mother and daughter face in Cait finding and keeping employment, using technology, learning life skills, managing emotions, striving for social competence, valuing advice, navigating family relationships, and dealing with the many agencies in place to support a successful transition into adulthood. In each part, short narrative pieces illustrate, in dramatic and at times humorous settings, the frustrations, dangers, and occasional victories - the many bumps in the road, some more harrowing than others - that we endured together. Readers learn my struggles to guide, support, and then let go of shaping Cait's trajectory as she embarks on her own version of what adult life looks like. The driving theme of the narrative is seen through my eyes, as I gradually learn to balance love and support with stepping back and letting Cait find her way.

While this book focusses on parents of young adults with high functioning autism transitioning to independence as the target audience, parents of young adults with different kinds of neurodivergence will find themselves on these pages too. The many challenging situations and how we as guides and parents choose to handle them are universal.

About the Author

Lyn Ujlaky has worked in the educational field for over thirty years. Her teaching experiences included working with families and students on the autism spectrum. She holds a Masters in Evaluative Clinical Sciences and Science in Teaching. Her first book, She'll Be Home in the Springtime, is the story about raising her then younger daughter when very little was known about spectrum disorders or programs. She was an early advocate for social thinking curricula and continues to explore better ways for young adults to make successful and meaningful transitions. She lives with her husband in Vermont.