It was February 16th, just two days after the Valentine’s Day storm paralyzed the Northeast. I had just finished my continental breakfast-a rubbery muffin and weak coffee -at a mediocre hotel near the Philadelphia Airport. My flight from California had arrived late the night before, following hours of delays, and I was tired and jittery.

I was on my way to pick up my twenty-year-old son, Matthew, who is autistic, at his special school in rural Pennsylvania, about an hour west of the city. He had been begging me to take him to Washington D.C. since he’d enrolled at the school three years before, and I thought it would be fun to go over the President’s Weekend break. When the storm hit I almost backed out, but maternal love and guilt pushed me forward.

It was an icy cold morning in our northern California community. I tapped lightly on my son Andy’s door to wake him for an early morning flight back to the East Coast, where he is a freshman in college. During his three week winter break, my husband and I were struck by how little time he needed to spend with us, and though he was perfectly pleasant and amiable, he was always in a hurry to be anywhere but home.

“Have you had a meaningful conversation with him?” I asked my husband after a week and a half, “I sure haven’t.”