The Month Between: On Armenian Motherhood and Autism

2026-03-23 - 07:41

Listen to the AI generated audio article. Your browser does not support the audio element. In Armenia, “Women’s Month” begins on March 8 and stretches to April 7, marked as the Day of Motherhood and Beauty. Tucked within it is April 2, Autism Awareness Day. As the mother of an autistic child, the timing feels like poetic humor to me. And as the mother of an autistic child, I should probably be writing about autism. “I should,” I think, looking at my child with desperate curiosity. She is unique in every sense of the word. She lifts her hand to the light and watches it through her fingertips, making them twinkle. Then she studies her shadow on the ground and throws a pebble at exactly the geometric center of its shoulder blades. She shifts slightly, aligning the pebble perfectly in the middle. These are the moments that remind me of how fascinating it is to observe my child, someone who is different not only from every neurotypical person, but also from every other autistic child. Because this is a spectrum. She is somewhere within it, her own planet, with her own weather. “Happy Women’s Month,” the cab driver says. My daughter doesn’t say hello. I do, and I smile back at the driver. My daughter gazes out the window, completely ignoring us. A few seconds pass, and she giggles into the silence of the car. I can only wish I knew what she saw in the flashing scenes outside. And I do not know what I am doing. I want to say this plainly, before anything else. I go through the therapies, the educational methods, and the specialist appointments. I read. I take courses on autism. I calibrate the mornings to the millimeter. I can schedule, but I cannot overschedule, because my child, unlike many autistic children, does not want complete order and predictability. This was something I had to unlearn from the books: autistic children need order and predictability. My daughter needs something unique in her day, every time. She also needs to see every possible sea creature, again and again. She needs to be in a new place once, and then she will find it again, like a cat, no matter the size of the city. She understands me in three languages, but speaks none. I am awestruck and absolutely terrified. I cannot foresee whether my child will ever be able to speak, to communicate, to form friendships, to be independent. At the end of most days, what I know most clearly is that I do not know enough, that I may be failing her in ways I have not yet discovered. And the fear does not leave. I do all of this within the delicate landscape of Armenian society. It is almost Mother’s Day. What is expected of me here? As a woman. As a mother. As an Armenian mother, specifically. Nothing easy. The Armenian mother, you see, is a mythological creature, a venerated figure. I have been taught about her through history books, poetry, literature, through the Bible, for Christ’s sake. The Armenian mother is the epitome of veneration. She is a saint. She is the fire in the home, the ojakh, the hearth, the flame that does not go out. She is also a statue. She stands 42 meters tall above Yerevan, a sword raised in her right hand. Mother Armenia gazes over the city with vigilance, endurance, and the refusal to look away. She replaced a Stalin monument in 1967. She has been watching ever since. The poets have always known what to do with her. Paruyr Sevak writes of his mother with a tenderness that becomes theology. Hovhannes Shiraz writes, “She is the chapel of our home. She is our cradle, my mother.” The mothers in Armenian literature are not quite women so much as elements: symbolic things, buildings, ground and sky, the specific quality of light through a window in a house that may no longer exist. And there is always, somehow, suffering. Not incidentally. Not as a side effect of circumstance. The suffering is constitutive. It is what makes them. It is, somehow, the proof. I once walked into the home of a mother I did not know. Her son had died in the war. On one wall, she had built what I can only call an altar: his photographs from childhood onward, his drawings, objects he had touched. In the middle was a large portrait of him in military uniform. A hero. And she... she is the one who gave birth to him, the mother of the hero. She sat beside it the way you sit beside something sacred. She was suffering in the full Armenian sense: completely, uprightly, with a devotion that the culture around her knew how to name and honor. Standing in that room, I understood that this is the template: the mother who loses something irreplaceable and stands beside the loss for the rest of her life without collapsing. But what the template does not account for, what the poets have not written, what the statues do not depict, is the mother whose child is alive, present, in the room with her. Different. Not lost. Not a hero. Just a child whose mind works differently than the mind the world prepared her to raise, and who will need more from her than she was told to expect, and for whom the world will offer her very little help in return. In Armenia, one in 30 children is on the autism spectrum. Marine Marutyan has spent 25 years working with them. She opened her center, Little Genius, in 2020. What she has observed is that the children are as varied as the spectrum itself: no two alike. The manifestations shift, and sensory disorders combine in new configurations. The label is a door into a room that turns out to contain many rooms, each one different. And the mothers who bring them, she says, are the same: no two alike. Some arrive still in shock. Some have been fighting for years, and it shows in their posture. Some have become, through sheer necessity, the foremost experts on their specific child. They sit in the back of classrooms, work every hour, and develop an understanding of their child’s needs that no specialist can replicate. These mothers, Marine says carefully, can help other children too. The knowledge they have accumulated, at such cost, is real and transferable. It simply has no formal recognition. No pathway. No name. This is, she explains, because the system around them is not ready. Inclusive education has been law since 2004, but it remains incomplete. Teachers are not trained in the methods that work. Adapted environments do not exist in most schools. When a child is assessed, it happens in a day or two—enough time to assign a label, not nearly enough time to understand a person. And after school, there is almost nothing: no clear pathway to vocational training or higher education, no built system, the children left, in her words, suspended in air. She says all of this without bitterness, the way you describe weather. What she does not say, but what I hear beneath her words, is that the system has made a calculation: the mother will absorb what the institution will not provide. The mother is the safety net: the adapted environment, the trained teacher, the specialist, the advocate, the therapist’s assistant, the data tracker, the scheduler, the translator between her child and a world that does not yet know how to see them. The mother will do this because that is what mothers do. Because suffering is the credential. Because the culture has a very long and very beautiful tradition of asking women to give until there is nothing left. Anaida’s son, Daniel, is six. She first knew something was different when he was two years and eight months old, at kindergarten. She had come to pick him up; the children were eating lunch. She called his name joyfully: “Mama has come to kindergarten,” and Daniel did not turn. The other children turned. She called again. The whole group called his name. He did not turn. She took his hand and walked out into the street, and did not know where to go. She walked through streets that had become alien, estranged, as if the world she had known had become a foreign country overnight. “It is impossible to forget,” she says. “It is as if the world is collapsing.” What followed was a harder education than any she had planned for: centers and specialists, and a year lost to people who were, she says, simply working, gaining experience on her child, treating him as a case rather than a person. For these children, she says, time is very expensive. She lost a year. She will not lose another. The hardest part, she tells me, was not the doctors or the system, devastating as both were. It was the family. Convincing relatives and close friends that Daniel would still develop, that they must not be disappointed in him, must not consider him sick, must not simply fail to see him. She defines poor treatment not as cruelty but as invisibility: չնկատել, to not notice. To look at a child and decide, quietly, that he does not quite count. She no longer lets the surrounding world influence her decisions. She doesn’t feel bad when Daniel makes irregular movements in public, when his behavior does not conform to what is expected. Naturally, it looks unpleasant from the outside, she says but she has simply decided to stop looking from the outside. She never tries to force her child to behave in ways that will please everyone. I am not that kind of person either, she says, by nature. Karine’s son Vahagn is 17 now, a college student. She describes her transformation in spatial terms: at the beginning, she was a protector, a translator standing between her child and a world that did not understand him. Over time, she became something else. A companion. Someone walking beside rather than ahead. What she is most proud of is not the milestones. It is the moments when she sees him remain true to himself. She wants other parents to know this: people assume that if a person is intelligent, they do not have real difficulties. They do not see the internal work, the energy that ordinary social contact requires of someone whose brain processes the world differently. The effort is invisible. And then she says: love your child as they are now, not only as you imagine them in the future. It is a gentle sentence. It is also a complete dismantling of a certain kind of Armenian motherhood: the kind that orients entirely toward what the child will become, what will be proven, what sacrifice will at last be justified. The kind that defers love until the outcome arrives. To the culture that built the altar and wrote the poems, Karine is not the mother of a hero. She is something the culture has not yet created a name for, something it is still learning to see. Here is what I have been circling, and trying to say...I feel my identity being stripped from me. Not violently, not all at once, but steadily, without my consent, sometimes even without my noticing. I step into the therapy center, and I become, in the minds of everyone in that room, a single thing: the mother of an autistic child. This is not unkindness. It is, in its way, a kind of recognition. But it is not the whole of me. The gap between what I am and what the room sees is something I carry out into the street every time, and set down only when I am alone. And I recognize, very suddenly, that I feel this stripping of my identity not only because I am a mother of an autistic child, but because I am a mother. The first time I brought Maryam to an autism therapist in Yerevan, the therapist, herself a mother of an autistic child who had raised her daughter to become a vocalist and a student at the Yerevan Conservatory, learned I had a career and in a tone that left no room for discussion, said: This is your job. She pointed at my daughter. This. There is no other job you should be concentrating on. She was not wrong about the level of commitment my daughter requires. But she spoke as though it were obvious, as though it needed no justification, that my daughter’s needs and my own existence were in competition, and that I had already lost. That I, at that moment, was a bad, selfish mother. In Armenian culture, this stripping away has a name and a long literary history: devotion. The mother who gives everything, who gives until there is nothing left, and then gives that too. She is the one the poets write about. Her completeness as a mother is measured precisely by her incompleteness as a person. The suffering is the credential. Anything less is, essentially, selfish. But I am not a statue. I am a woman who is desperately, violently curious. Yes, about my daughter’s mind, but also about the world and what it means to be alive in this particular moment. I want my daughter to thrive. I also want, quietly and without apology, to continue to exist as myself. The culture has made the mother’s selfhood the sacrifice that proves love. And the system has quietly relied on that arrangement, year after year, to avoid building what it should have built: real inclusive classrooms, trained teachers, post-school pathways, and actual support. If the mother will do it, the institution does not have to. Mothers of autistic children in Armenia are caught in this arrangement with particular intensity. The demands on them are greater. The visibility of their effort is lower. Institutional support is thinner. And there is always, beneath everything, a silent question that never fully disappears: did you do something wrong, could you have prevented this, is this somehow “your fault”?...even after it has been scientifically disproved, even after you know better, even at three in the morning when you are simply tired, afraid, and doing the best you can. It is not an accident, I have come to think, that Autism Awareness Day sits cradled between International Women’s Day and Armenian Motherhood Day. The calendar, perhaps without meaning to, is telling us something we have not yet fully learned to hear: you cannot separate the question of how Armenia supports autistic children from the question of what Armenia asks of its mothers. The two are not parallel problems. They are the same problem, seen from different angles. One in 30 children. The teachers are untrained. The classrooms are unadapted. The assessments are too brief.