I first moved to Texas as a college freshman, straight from the Dairy State. There were all kinds of culture shocks for me, including the one where every woman on campus called me “Hon” or “Honey.”

No one ever called me that before. But here I was, trying to learn how to eat jalapenos and chicken fried-mistake and the lady behind the serving tray wants to know “do you want grits with that, Hon?” I heard it most was when the staff member and I were in the middle of something difficult, like dropping a class or cashing a check. It felt very patronizing.

And that is because it probably was.

When you get dropped into another culture, or subculture, it’s easier to pick up on those kinds of things. And that brings me to the word “kiddo.”

Now, I’m not going to blow this out of proportion. One-to-one, it’s a term of endearment. It’s not the r-word, which mercifully, and finally, the Texas Legislature has banished. All our MHMRs must be renamed.

And this isn’t something that requires a People First refresher.

But I’ve heard this sort of thing so often — “It was a tough day for the kiddoes,” or “I’m trying to find out whether it will help my kiddoes,” or “Who’s going to stay with the kiddoes?” — that I’m starting to wonder about the usage.

Unless you’re using it one-on-one as a term of endearment, then just don’t use it.

It’s sounding patronizing.

I didn’t think it possible we’d get through April, autism awareness month, without at least one discussion of “it.”

Andrew Wakefield and the MMR vaccine and autism.

Oh, I am so weary of “it.” But The New York Times ran a nice long one for us on Easter Sunday. All about the parents who irrationally defend the doctor who can’t even practice medicine anymore. He still believes. So do they.

His one legacy may be his identification of the need to research bowel problems, and to that I say, amen. That needs to happen.

But my goodness people, don’t go experimenting on our children based on some half-baked theory. First, do no harm. Even when we vow to be conservative and gentle, we can find there dozens of ways to get after problems that need to be solved.

I believe the rest of this battle is a distraction for parents who need support in their grief work, and support in dealing with this role of caregiver that can be unbelievably demanding. Don’t stand on a balcony in Austin, Texas, and pretend you are in Tuscany. You’re wasting our time.

My daughter, our youngest, decided to attend the University of Iowa this fall.

She has known for some time that she wants to major in English, and so had her sights set on the University of Texas.

For a time, I was feeling really smart about that Texas guaranteed tuition contract I bought when she was in kindergarten (oh, yeah, after tuition deregulation six or seven years ago I totally saw THAT train wreck coming.) And she’s a really good student — her GPA is over 100 points. It looked like things were going to line up nicely for her.

But because she’s also in a good school with lots of good students, UT capped her.

The only way to be sure they would let her in is if she were in the top 8 percent. She’s in the top 11 percent. UT says she’s welcome to populate one of the campuses in the outer hinterlands (I won’t let her go to UT-Arlington because they are drilling) and then they will let her come to Austin her sophomore year.

In addition to creating the financial train wreck of tuition deregulation, our legislature in their infinitely stupid policy making, told Texas colleges and universities — the public ones — they had to let in the top ten percent of every high school.

Now, Iowa knows what they’ve got when they’ve hooked a student like Paige. She scored so high on their admissions rubric, they offered her the regents scholarship package.

Got to buy lots more sweaters.

Texas never hesitates to squanders it best resource … its people.

I’ve thought a lot about this movie since I first blogged about it after seeing it over the holidays. As a storyteller, I appreciated the filmmaker’s storytelling elegance and prowess.

Now, the film stands to win as many as 12 Oscars, and I am still thinking about the film and its incredible humanity. My favorite scene came early in the movie when the Bertie’s daughters beg him to tell them a story. He delivers a touching tale of self-acceptance, a story within the story.

There is something to learn, as well, in the Lionel Logues of the world. It was a gift that he learned how to help people in a trial-by-fire kind of way. What he had going for him — a quality that sometimes gets drilled out of those with more formal training — is cultivating that sense of equality in a caregiver-client relationship.

In the case of a speech therapist and a stutterer, it seems counter-intuitive to not do that. But when you think about all caregiver-client relationships, that equality applies.

Trained expertise does not subjugate any portion of another’s humanity.

In 1976, somebody had a good idea: let’s protect people from toxic compounds. Then, the law designed to do that got pummeled by the asbestos industry. We’ve not had the courage, since, to revisit the issue.

Toxicologists used to say, the dose makes the poison. Now that 5 to 15 percent of children have neurodevelopmental disorders — including autism — they are learning that the timing makes the poison, too.

The EPA is building a roster of about 200 chemicals that pose the greatest risk to our health.

They aren’t getting very far with it.

Why do so many advances we make become the very things that seem to do us in? Why aren’t we smart enough to avoid that?

Some people do spend their whole lives together.
And some homes are forever homes.