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You know the Holland Analogy?  The one where they compare having a child with autism to a vacation in Holland, and maybe it isn’t Italy, but there are windmills and other cool shit, so just enjoy and go with it?   I actually like that analogy.  It reminds me to stop and enjoy the journey, because there’s nothing wrong with Holland; a vacation in Holland really can be a wonderful experience.

But life on the Spectrum ain’t always Holland.

Welcome to Tijuana!

When you have a baby, it’s like planning a cruise to Cabo San Lucas.  You dream about lounging in beach chairs and sipping mango daiquiris on white sand beaches.  All your friends are going and you bought an adorable bathing suit that makes you look totally skinny, and you think it’s going to be the best vacation of your life.

But after you’ve been on the cruise for a few days and you’ve just started to get into the swing of shipboard life, a committee of smug and unsmiling professionals informs you that you’re getting off the boat a little early – in Tijuana.  Then they toss you into a little dingy before you have a chance to ask any questions or demand a refund, and you have no choice but to row towards TJ.

You never really knew much about Tijuana before.  You didn’t bother researching it, because hey – you were supposed to be in Cabo, right?  So you don’t know where anything is or who to ask for help.  Corrupt cops come and steal all your money and leave you destitute; the polluted water makes you sick and you suddenly have to follow a restricted diet; a five-dollar hooker tries to screw your husband so your marriage is on the rocks.  You get hit with all these problems at once and you don’t even know what to deal with first, and you can’t think straight because everybody is yelling at you in Spanish.

Tijuana sucks!  It’s filthy and confusing and noisy and there is poo smeared everywhere.  This isn’t what you signed up for.

Meanwhile, everyone else is sending you postcards from Cabo, where life is just awesome.  Everyone you know is visiting the Cabo friends and planning luaus and offering to babysit for them, because who wouldn’t want to visit people who vacation in Cabo and party with Sammy Hagar, right?  In the meantime, nobody will come and see you because TJ is just too loud and dirty and chaotic.  They don’t want to deal with it, and you can sort of understand that, because if you had your way, you wouldn’t be dealing with it either, but nobody ever asked you – they just pushed you off of the boat.

Sometimes it makes you crazy, because you know if you could just travel a little further south you could be in Cabo with everyone else, enjoying margaritas and napping in the middle of the afternoon and your biggest worry would be remembering the sunscreen, and you try not to hate those assholes who managed to get there while you got left behind, but it’s hard not to be jealous when you’re lost in a noisy city smeared with poo.

But eventually you learn your way around Tijuana.  You figure out the filthy streets and you pick up enough Spanish to get by.  You get a job luring San Diego teenagers into the bars and you start to get a life again.  You build up immunities and the filth doesn’t make you as sick as it used to.  You get really good at cleaning up poo.  If you’re lucky, you meet some wonderful people who got stranded there when you did, and you all try to sneak through holes in the fence together.  Sometimes you pretend you’re in Cabo…just for a little while.

Tijuana still sucks, and it will always suck, but at least you’re starting to get the hang of it.  Because, really,  what choice did you have?  It’s where you are, and you could have done a lot worse; you could have landed in Baghdad or Darfur or Dehli or Juarez or Detroit.  There are people that have it worse than you, so you suck it up and learn to appreciate the little things that TJ has to offer: cheap booze, bargain piñatas, those cool blankets you can’t buy anywhere else, illegal firecrackers, and an OK beach once you get out past the poo smeared streets.  It’s not Cabo, but it’s yours, and after awhile, it’s home.