Real-life reads
After 25 years of marriage, three women celebrating their silver anniversaries talk about what they wish they’d known on their wedding days
‘You’re far stronger than you know’
Writer SARAH ZIEGEL, 62, married JONATHAN, 61, a government lawyer, in October 1997. They live in Richmond, Surrey, with their four sons, twins Thomas and Benjamin, 24, Hector, 21, and Marcus, 15. She is the author of Marching To A Different Beat: A Family’s Journey With Autism (Lapis Print).
On the autumn day we married at our local church, I was already dreaming of a house filled with four children. Jonathan and I had met a year before our wedding through a Guardian newspaper singles column in which he’d described himself as: ‘A professional male, 34, interested in walking, theatre and the arts.’
My own parents had divorced when I was in my teens, so I was determined that when I got married it was going to last, and Jonathan was exactly the type of kind, sensible man who would stay the course. I was already 36 and because we both knew we wanted children, there was no time to waste, especially as I was one of four siblings and very keen to have that number of kids, too. I was so optimistic, we bought a four-bedroom house. I found out I was pregnant just as we were about to move in. When the scan showed I was expecting twins, we were already halfway to our goal. It was deceptively easy and Thomas and Benjamin grew into lively, happy boys. But when they weren’t communicating at all by the age of two and didn’t seem to understand what we said, we decided to get their hearing checked.
Walking into a routine clinic at our local health centre, I wasn’t really that worried. But then the consultant paediatrician who examined them told us: ‘They’re both autistic.’ Twenty years ago, a non-verbal autism diagnosis meant something very different. It was not well understood and there was little knowledge of how to help those with the condition reach their potential. Parents were often told their children would need full-time residential care. It was scary. So, on hearing those words, Jonathan and I were both numb with shock.
POSITIVE THINKING
After that, I started worrying about my third son, Hector, who was then eight weeks old. To start with, he seemed to be meeting all his milestones. He walked early and was learning to talk. For us, that seemed like a tiny miracle. But as he got to two, we noticed that while Thomas and Benjamin, now five, were starting to learn new words with the help of one-on-one tutoring, Hector was losing his speech. I first read about regressive autism after the twins’ diagnosis. I’d thought how cruel it must be to have a child who ‘lost’ skills. It seemed worse than if they’d never had th
