Hello! My name is Alison and I am a single mother of a 22 year old Aspergered and Cerebral Palseyed son. I brought him up to NOT use his (dias)abilities as a crutch to get out of doing things in life. So he has been working a part time job since he was 16 and went full time when he was 18. We have been through a lot of rough patches together in 22 years as my parents both died the same year he was born and I have no other family to rely on for anything. I have had my financial ups and downs through out the years but we have always made it through together.
I had a terrible accident when I was 20 when I was hit and run over by a two wheel drive Toyota truck~ in Mexico no less. The guy was drunk and didn’t have his headlights on and never saw us until after he hit us (my fiancé at the time was with me). In the accident I broke my pelvis in two places on my right side, my left hip, dislocated my shoulders, put 6 pinched nerves in my neck and back and had hematomas in tire tracks across the backs of my thighs! I should have broken my neck in 2 places and my back in 2 places but someone was watching over me that day. I stayed in a Mexican hospital for 18 hours and received 6 shots of morphine before they finally got me to the border for a helicopter ride to the states to a trauma hospital.
Back then I was bullet proof (or so I thought!) and after all of that…can you believe I walked again in 6 weeks flat with no surgery? Me 1, truck zer0! But I am lucky to be here and very blessed to have a great son who has helped me through tough times as much as I have helped him. When he was 16 I had a really bad neck issue from that accident reoccur and after a year of painful shots in my neck and feeling like my arm was constantly on fire, I was scheduled for neck surgery. That year and a half of agony kept me from working and we lost our only form of transportation by doing a voluntary repossession, as I could no longer keep up with the payments. My son went to work as a cashier at the local grocery store to make our rent and bills so that we could keep our home! He did great and stepped up to the plate as if he were a fish going to water! I was (and am) so proud of him!
I tell you all of that to tell you this… I drive him to work or he takes a taxi as he doesn’t drive because he doesn’t have the focus and is too fearful of making a mistake on the road and fears he might do something wrong and end up hurting someone. So he has never gone after his license and probably never will. He also doesn’t cook as he doesn’t have the attention span for it. He gets detoured too easily and has had kitchen accidents before. Thank goodness they only involved a way over cooked hotdog in the microwave of a burnt pizza in the toaster oven but if it had been on the stove, it could have been a real problem!
So in the last two years I have worried myself to the point of tears wondering what will happen to him when I am gone!? You see, when I lost both of my parents, I at least had a few friends around to help me through some of the chaos. But Aspergered people don’t generally talk about their feelings and they bottle them up and they also don’t have close friends as they are socially disconnected due to the nature of the disease.
When I lost my parents I also lost two best friends that same year on either end of my parents’ deaths. It was almost too much for me to bear on my own. I lost everything and went into a severe depression. If I didn’t have my son at my side at that time I don’t know what I would have done! I had a great job at Bank of America as a Loan Processor and I was just getting my name plate on my office when my mom died and one of my best friends died within a week of her death. I went into my office and I couldn’t even complete a sentence I was in such shock!
Then 6 months to the day later I lost my dad and a month after that my other best friend… and that was all I could handle. I put myself in shelter and walked out on my job. I just couldn’t see a way out of the emotional hole I was in… Going to shelter helped me regain some peace in my life and gave me time to breathe and not worry about money and work and gave me the grief counseling I so needed at the time.
But knowing about Aspergers and my son, what will he have when I go? Nothing… no one to help him through, no where to go, no one to talk to… I am afraid he wont make it on his own and will end up on the street or in the states care because he just doesn’t know what to do to survive with out someone helping him with the basic life issues like paying bills on time and cooking and driving him to work. and that’s not counting his mental health needs.
So after quite a bit of worrying; I thought what would work would be a community of like minded individuals like him that lived together with a supportive team, that is not controlled by a state agency and is staffed mainly by volunteers that are family members of the individuals living in the community. There he could thrive and have the supportive services and the social structure and a tiny home of his own to live in and it would be manageable and good for him. So I looked around and didn’t find any in my area. Well, I thought…then I guess I need to create one! I would love to be able to have an answer for other families with young adults in the same position as my son is in and I am willing to bet that their parents are worrying about as well!
So I have started out on this journey to create a safe living space for young adults and adults to transition into independent living in a Tiny House Community where they will be taught the life skills that they need to live and thrive on their own. We will have daily classes like cooking and cleaning as well as on line business and investing courses. We will have animal therapy with cats as they are quiet and wont put off the Asperger sufferers and help to calm their nerves and let them have fun playing with the cats once a day. We can have a garden and grow some of the food that we will be cooking for them and we will also teach job skills if they want to have a job in the local community. We will also supply transportation for shopping trips, outings, doctor’s appointments, going to and from work, etc.
What I need is to pay off about $10,500 dollars in Credit Debt, I need about $2k to pay off 1 year of taxes so I will be in good standing with the IRS so I can file for a NON Profit Exemption Status and get my DBA and Articles of Incorporation done. I’ll need to set up two other LLC’s for the benefit of the NON Profit so Investors are more readily able to invest and regain their investments. Those LLCs will be businesses that relate to the Non Profit and its services but will be for profit entities.
I already have a 10 acre parcel of land that a nice couple; hearing my desire to create this space, is willing to lease me the land for as long as I want it~ but I will never own it as it is in a family Trust. But they will get the grants to do the improvements which will run in the millions to get done. I am so grateful for them! And that takes a huge burden off of my back to get this done!
Now all I need to do is finish up the small stuff LOL! Right!?
So a little about my current situation so you better understand that I am no slouch even though I am in a tough situation at the moment and am in need of getting my credit cards paid down.
I work a 40 hour work week at a mattress store and we do pretty good even though we are located in a rural small town. The town has ben growing by leaps and bounds for the last three years (2020,2021,2222). But 2023 economics hit and the down turn has hit us hard. In the last year and a half we have had to close five stores in our chain here locally and I am lucky to work for one of the owners directly. So I am not going anywhere but my sales have fallen off and that means my commissions have been dropping. I have lost $1000 a month in income this year on average and am holding steady on paying on all my credit obligations so far. But I am starting to wobble as the interest rates rise and my double payments don’t go as far as they used to go and I am having to rely on them to take up the slack at the end of each month. So I am living on the edge and the creditors can smell blood in the water. I used my credit cards to start two online businesses and pay for inventory through out this last year and a half. Those stores are doing ok but they are not by any means booming. Although I will say that I am tripling my money at the very least on the items that I have sold over the last year and a half and still have plenty of inventory so I don’t need to buy anymore for quite awhile.
I also get rental help from my son who pays for his room and groceries and helps pay for gas in the car to get him to and from work so it doesn’t all come out of my pocket. I have also been helping him build his credit slowly as well. He only has two credit cards and he hardly uses them.
I have tried to do a personal loan to consolidate my credit debt into one loan but even though I make double payments my credit usage is too high and they wont give me a loan for that reason… which makes no sense considering the payment on the amount would be $350 a month versus what I am paying now, which is about $1000 in monthly payments. They say I am a high risk. But I would be less of a risk at $350 instead of living on the edge of a 50%dti!
If I don’t pay them all off and soon; I will be dead in the water for this project and all the work I have put in and the money I have spent getting my credit cleaned up from when I went through the neck surgeries (I had two, one in front and one in back on C5 and C6 Fusion/Cleanout and 2 knee surgeries in 2018 and 2019 respectively) will be for naught. I am begging you to please help me and my son by helping us get this part done so that we can move on to the next stage. The housing part. Tiny homes!
That stage is the start of a very good thing and should be done all over the country! This is sooo needed because their are millions of Aspbergers people out there that have fallen through the cracks and are not living a life that they should be because it just doesn’t exist for them yet! Many of them become wards of the state after their families die off and that type of existence is never a good one! These people are smart and capable and want to be seen and heard, live and thrive just like we do. They just go about it differently. It’s our job to learn how to listen and help them do that!
If you are willing to help in anyway, it will be greatly appreciated and I will be sharing our progress as we move forward in our journey to put this whole thing together because…as you can probably tell by now, I am NO QUITTER! With any luck we should be done with it within two years! You can send any donations to: https://paypal.me/AAgee?country.x=US&locale.x=en_US