A mother's journey from a devastating autism diagnosis to a profound, life-altering lesson in what it truly means to love.
Have you ever loved someone so much that you felt an overwhelming urge to fix them? To smooth out their rough edges, to solve their problems, to make their path easier? It often comes from a place of deep care, a belief that to love is to repair. For years, this was the driving force for Heidi Rome after her son, Ethan, was diagnosed with severe autism.
But a single sentence, typed out on a keyboard by her non-speaking son, would unravel everything she thought she knew and teach her the most profound lesson of her life.
The Weight of a Diagnosis
Heidi’s younger son, Ethan, is now 19 and has severe autism. He is a non-speaker with a very dysregulated nervous system. The journey began with missed milestones—no eye contact, and most noticeably, a complete lack of babbling. The turning point came when Ethan was five. After a full evaluation in New York, Heidi was given a soul-crushing verdict: her son had the mental capacity of a five-month-old infant.
"It was shattering," Heidi recalls. From that moment, she believed her mission was clear. "I loved him," she says, "Therefore, my job was to fix my broken kid".
This set her on a years-long path of desperation. She and her family tried every therapy they could find, spent vast sums of money, and encountered charlatans preying on their hope. The constant effort yielded few results, and the fixing wasn't working. Heidi sank into a deep despair, feeling like a failure as a mother and reaching a point where there was "no hope".
A Crack of Light
Everything changed when Ethan, at age nine, enrolled in a new school. This school operated on a revolutionary premise: behavior isn't something to be extinguished; it is communication. It’s a reflection of an unmet need.
The school offered assistive technologies to help non-speaking students communicate. Heidi was skeptical, having been told by a previous speech therapist that Ethan "doesn't speak because he has nothing to say". But one week in, the new teacher called. Ethan had been asked a simple question: "How do you like the new school?".
The three words he typed in response defied all logic and every diagnosis. They were: "basking in joy".
Heidi was floored. How could a child with the supposed mind of an infant compose such a phrase? The cognitive dissonance was "through the roof". This was the first glimpse into the vast, intelligent, and deeply feeling consciousness that existed within her son.
The Message That Changed Everything
The ultimate revelation came when Ethan was 11, just before he was to move to a residential school that could better manage his safety. Knowing they might lose the ability to communicate this way, Heidi had one more session with him. She decided to ask him a question she’d never asked before: "What are your thoughts about God?".
What followed was a conversation that would change the course of her life.
Ethan typed, "God is in my heart and he will always protect me". He explained that he remembered a time before he was born, "when I lived in heaven" , a place with "no bodies, just spectacular energy". He typed that he chose his life, saying, "Yes, I picked to be me and have many challenges".
Stunned, Heidi asked the final, critical question: "Is there anything we should do to help you?".
Ethan’s reply was the answer to years of struggle, the release from a burden she never should have carried. He typed:
"You just have to love me and that is your job, the rest is my job to do".
From Fixing to Loving
In that moment, everything shifted. "I took my first deep breath in 11 years," Heidi says. The instruction wasn't to cure, to change, or to control. It was simply to love. "Not fix me, not change me, not take my sovereignty and live my life for me," she explains, "Just love me".
This story is a powerful testament for all of us. The impulse to fix implies that something or someone is broken. It establishes a power dynamic where one person knows best. But love, in its purest form, operates differently. It doesn't impose its will. Instead, as Heidi learned, love asks two simple questions: "How can I be of service?" and "What is needed in this moment?".
This is a lesson that extends far beyond parenting a child with autism. It applies to every relationship in our lives. It’s a call to release our white-knuckled grip on control and to accept and honor the sovereignty of the people we care about.
Today, Heidi Rome is an autism mindset coach, and her mission is to build a new type of supportive community for adults like Ethan—one founded on the principle of "presumed competence". It’s a community that will provide a new model for a world that too often sees only what is missing, instead of the spectacular energy within.
To learn more about Heidi’s work and her vision, you can visit her website: https://heidirome.com/
I’d love to hear from you in the comments: Have you ever felt the pressure to 'fix' a situation or a person you love? What did you learn from that experience?
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Chitra Rochlani is a Wellness Coach, Speaker, and best-selling author of She’s on a mission to help her clients eliminate stress and loneliness, feel more aligned, and live a life of fulfillment and passion.As a medium and intuitive healer, she educates and empowers her clients to tap into their most underutilized superpower—their intuition—to navigate their lives and make WINx3 decisions.She uses her P.F.H. (Peel, Feel, Heal) framework to inspire transformation through:
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