When I was a kid, I was always restless and clumsy. I loved running and feeling the wind on my face as I ran. I ran until my sides hurt. I enjoyed climbing fences and trees and then jumping down from the fence. I often made my mother angry when I came home with bruises on my legs and knees because I hurt myself whenever I played outside.

Many times my father got annoyed with me because I was always breaking a plate or a glass and ruining my shoes. I was very, very clumsy. They would buy me a new pair of shoes, and the shoes would last only a few months. My father once said I needed a pair of steel shoes!

That may sound like I had terrible parents, but they weren’t. They were quite good to me and my sisters and raised us the best way they knew how. And I loved them both and still miss them very much.

But now, as a parent of a 13-year old in the Autism Spectrum, I am beginning to understand some of the quirkiness I had as a child as I see some of them in my son.

My son can be very restless; he can pace for a long time until someone watching him gets dizzy. He likes watching me do my dance workouts and tries to copy my movements but he has very poor coordination and can look like a worm trying to get out of a knot. He slams doors, moves quickly with jerky movements and speaks quickly, oftentimes skipping words which he probably thinks he has already uttered.

Like my son, I also spoke quickly and had poor eye-hand coordination as a kid. I liked dancing but my mother laughed at my movements, saying I was not a graceful dancer. Nevertheless, growing up, my sisters, cousins and I always had dance numbers at our Christmas parties. Even though I wasn’t a good dancer, I joined them. Wonderful memories.

Even when I was already in my 20s, I was still clumsy. I realized this when I was getting out of a friend’s car one day, and he told me I didn’t have to “move so quickly,” like, I could open the door “more gently.” That made me pause. He was right, and to this day I am grateful to him for pointing that out to me. I tried to control and learned to control my movements. It wasn’t long after that when I took Latin dance lessons, and Taebo and Zumba, and those lessons helped me so much with my coordination.

My parents did not have the knowledge that I now have about how and why some kids behave the way they do. Though I find my son’s movements funny, I try to help him improve them. We do the same thing over and over until he gets them right.

I have hope that the exercise I do with him will improve his coordination, and one day, we will be able to dance together.