I love this photo for its rarity: our son’s needs require us to mostly parent our kids separately, which has many consequences, one of them being that we have painfully few photos of us together as a family. I love mine and Claire’s true smiles. I love that Claire is wearing her Judith Butler “Gender Trouble” T-shirt and I’m in my red Saltwater sandals, which I still wear every summer. I love the slightly suspicious expression drawn on my daughter’s glorious two-year-old face and, like all nosy mothers, am irritated that I can’t recall what’s in the brown paper bag. I love that Daphne, our greying rescue staffie and the great dog-love of my life, has adopted her customary scared/stoical position known in our family as “jug-tail”. I love that we are in a place that possesses the one quality that means everything to parents of autistic children: namely (aside from the almighty din we make), it’s quiet. Entire hours can pass in this garden without sight of another mortal – there have been days when we have seen more kingfishers (two!) than people. There is no judgment here. We are free to be the family we are elsewhere rarely seen as being. No wonder this photo makes me cry.