Looking for Girls on Craigs List

“Will you help me find me some nice friends?” pleaded Matthew last summer. In the past I’d advertised at a local college for friends for Matthew, but now that he was 22 and older than most college kids, I needed to look elsewhere and decided to try Craig’s List.

“Seeking a mentor, friend type for my autistic son” said the ad. The replies came quickly and I was impressed with the great field of applicants. As I started setting up interviews, Matthew asked me if any girls were on the list.

He said it was so hard to find nice girls that he could hang out with. I was worried about what I was getting into -while I knew that Matthew was interested in girls, he came on way too strong and scared most of them away. But I decided to risk it, hoping that the one girl on the list could befriend him in a sisterly way.

She was Katie, 22 like Matthew. She seemed like the perfect candidate, as her brother ran a program for disabled young adults and she was clearly compassionate. We scheduled an interview for the next day.

Katie turned out to be very attractive, and during our talk, I told her that Matthew might develop a crush on her. She said not to worry, that she’d learned how to set boundaries with the disabled young men in her brother’s program. She met Matthew – he blushed and asked her which states she had been to- and she agreed to take him for a bike ride the next day. Matthew told her he liked girls a lot, and he looked so happy as he watched her drive away. I wondered if I was setting him up for heartbreak.

Katie must have been wondering the same thing- she called later that day and backed out. “I couldn’t bear to hurt Matthew’s feelings,” she said.

As I hung up the phone, I was transported to the day in the ninth grade that I invited a boy named Joe to a dance. “Just as friends, right?” he said and I was crushed. So when I went to tell Matthew that Katie couldn’t come after all, and he buried his face in his hands and cried, I told him what my mother told me all those years ago.

“You can do better than Katie, anyway.”

And thankfully, Matthew believed me.

Laura

Laura Shumaker (www.laurashumaker.com) gives readers a peek at the future,writing stories about raising her autistic son Matthew, now 22, every Friday. She’s the author of A Regular Guy: Growing Up With Autism.

I'm a fifth generation Californian and live in the San Francisco Area with my husband and three sons. My oldest, Matthew, is autistic and I've been writing about my experience raising him from babyhood to young adulthood for about 4 years. I've read my stories on NPR and published them in magazines, newspapers and anthologies, including Voices of Autism. My book A Regular Guy: Growing up with Autism is available at Amazon.

Laura

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