Our Glass Child: What Autism and Full-Time Travel Taught Her

For a long time, Eden was our easy child. She has always been that way. Helpful, older than her age, mature, loved by adults and other kids alike. Responsible, maybe a little short on attention, but compliant and loving, and fiercely loyal to her parents and her siblings. She made friends quickly and was independent. When we were busy taking care of her siblings, she could essentially take care of herself.

It took us a while to realize this wasn't all personality. Part of it was a skill she had built as a glass child, the sibling of kids with high needs, especially her next youngest brother, whose needs are extraordinary. Some of it was having a father whose businesses kept him gone, leaving early and home late through most of the years we spent living in Farmington. In some ways, we weren't much different from other families in our neighborhood. A lot of those households had busy parents too, sometimes two working parents, and life ran full for most of them. For us, running multiple businesses and raising Hyrum was what tipped a few things over the top.

Her brother Hyrum is profoundly autistic, minimally verbal, and needs constant supervision. Eden adapted well to her family. But as our lives changed more and more around Hyrum, and we finally uprooted everything to give him the environment he desperately needed, we started seeing things we hadn't seen before. It pushed us to sit her down and really ask her the hard questions. It turned into an interview, and we decided to write about it.

We thought we were sitting down to talk about what it's like to have a brother like Hyrum. That was part of it. But the more she talked, the more it became a different conversation. It was about how much she had changed through all of this, and how much she had grown. What we heard was a kid who had worked a lot of it out on her own, and we hadn't fully realized it until she said it out loud.

Hard, But Kind of Nice

We started with the obvious question. What's it like to have Hyrum as your brother?

"Hard, but kind of nice," Eden said.

She started with hard. "It's really hard to have him as a brother because you can't do things like any other person," she said. "You can't leave your stuff out in the open unless you want it to be eaten or pooped on or broken."

That's the part people miss. They picture the big dramatic moments and skip the daily math. Nothing gets left out. Drawers stay locked. On her own birthday, Eden can't open presents in front of him. "We'll have to take him somewhere," she says. One year they tried it with him there. "That was kind of a disaster," she says.

Hyrum needs change to stay regulated. New places, new scenery, movement. It's the reason we live the way we do. What he can't handle is other people's events, the birthdays and holidays that ask him to sit still inside someone else's routine. His OCD and his need for control can't absorb that, and when it overwhelms him, the whole day goes sideways. The family bends around it without much discussion. It's just how things work.

The mornings start early, and they start with him. "Usually I'm woken from Hyrum jumping on the couch, or him slapping his head in his bed, which is really loud," Eden says. "It's his way of stimming." We feed everyone early, mostly to keep the whole crew from going hangry. The boys are up at dawn regardless, sometimes six or earlier, and Hyrum is hard to feed at the best of times because he eats with no rhythm at all.

The hardest part for her, though, is the embarrassment, and she's blunt about it. "Probably because he's a little embarrassing. Well, a lot. Very embarrassing," Eden says. He'll lie down in the middle of a road. He'll scream, strip without warning.

At one of the bigger family campgrounds, Hyrum hit a rough stretch. Eden was on the jumping pad when she looked over and saw him on the playground with his clothes off, other kids walking up, freezing, and turning around. She heard strangers nearby talking about "that boy," and it was clear from how they said it that they meant it badly, none of them knowing his sister was standing right there. Most never connected him to a family, because his family was always somewhere behind him, chasing. Sometimes she'd say it plainly, "that's my brother," then come find us and tell us where he'd left a mess so we could clean it up.

She tells that story now with a little smile. When it's just us, we shake our heads and almost laugh. Around other kids, though, it's still embarrassing, and we understand that. It's hard as a preteen to carry the embarrassment of your sibling in front of other kids. It took us years of raising Hyrum before the little things stopped getting to us. There are too many chances to be embarrassed in public, and somewhere along the way we went mostly numb to it, even as he gets older and keeps pushing those boundaries.

The relief is allowed too. Eden got to spend a week at her aunt's house, playing with old friends, while we stayed a few hours away. She told us part of her loved it. "That was the best," Eden says. "The only screaming I heard was Zoe's yowls in the morning." Zoe is their dog. And in the same breath, she said she missed Hyrum. There are things he does that she loves, and a week away was enough to feel that too.

We asked what she'd miss if Hyrum were suddenly typical, and she went straight to his birthday treasure hunt, watching him dig for his presents. "His little way of getting excited, I would miss a lot, because not a lot of other people get excited like that," Eden says. "It's really cute to watch him." We asked if she feels protective of him. "Yes," she said, and left it there.

What Changed

We moved into an RV full-time, mostly for Hyrum. The first four and a half months weren't too bad. The real test came when we left our home state of Utah. We started our journey in southern Utah, close enough to our old home to shut down our old life, and Eden folded right into local homeschool groups, found friends, and kept a social life that looked like the one she'd always had.

Then we left Utah and started moving every month, state to state, the life we'd actually planned. That's when it hit her. There was no steady friend group waiting day after day. Not every town had a homeschool co-op or kids her age. Idaho was the hardest. Quiet, rural, and nobody around. She had built her whole world on her friends, and the friends were gone. We heard it every day. I'm bored. I want friends. I don't like this.

We'd been reading about peer orientation, the idea that kids who look mainly to their friends for identity and direction have a harder time than kids anchored in family. It gave us words for what we were seeing. It also came with a warning we took seriously. You can't pull a kid away from her friends without putting something real in their place. So we took a few days, then sat down with her as a family, not to lecture, just to figure it out together. We asked if she wanted help building new rhythms. She said yes.

What we focused on were daily rhythms. Nature time every day. Reading. Journaling. One hobby. Homeschool around one subject a day instead of six crammed into an afternoon. Nothing complicated, just a backbone that held steady while everything else kept moving. "That helped a lot. That really helped," Eden says. "It made it way easier at first, when I didn't like not being social. That's when I started to feel more connected with nature, and more connected with my brothers and my parents."

Brittney played her part like the loving nurturer she is. She bought art supplies and sat down and did the projects alongside Eden until Eden found her footing, and we got her what she needed without making her prove she'd stick with it first. We put one-on-one dates with each kid on a rotation, and Eden brought that up on her own. "What I really liked is how my parents made it one of their goals to have dates with me, switching off with all the kids every couple of weeks," she says. "That was really nice and fun." Dinner became the fixed point of the day, all of us together, usually ending on the couch with Brittney reading aloud while Eden sketches.

It took about two months. Brittney had to stay close and keep nudging the whole way, but after roughly two months, we stopped hearing that she was bored, and she started drifting into her own hobbies without being pointed there. That was a bigger deal than it sounds. Boredom had been her signal, the word she used when she needed something and didn't know how to ask for it.

None of it required an RV. The slowing down, the daily backbone, the time set aside for each kid. Brittney says if we ever live in a house again, this is the part that comes with us. We just needed a change big enough to force it.

What She Found

The space the boredom left filled up fast. Painting came first. "I just didn't know I could paint. I had no hobbies at all," Eden says. Then calligraphy, sketching, and crafting. "Since I'd played so much with friends all the time, I hadn't really found out my hobbies," she says. "I probably would have never found that hobby ever if we had stayed at the house."

The electronics fell away on their own. "Before at the house, whenever I wasn't playing with friends, I just watched a movie for the rest of the day, because I was bored and didn't know I had any other hobbies," Eden says. Now she takes a book out into the desert and reads for hours. She joined adult art classes at community colleges in towns we passed through and fit right in. Strangers guess she's fifteen. "I've gotten a little more mature than I used to be," she says. "I just used to be really hyper all the time."

She's honest about the cost. "What I do miss from being at the house was being close to family more, and the room. Definitely my own room," Eden says, meaning the grandparents and cousins who used to be ten minutes away. Her dream now is a small one. "That's like my dream. To have an art studio room and a desk," she says. She wants that room for the art. She only found it because we left the old house behind.

The road opened her up in a way we didn't plan. Back home, almost all her friends came from our church, and anyone outside it felt unfamiliar. "It's been nice to meet friends who don't go to the church, because I'm able to see more cultures," Eden says. Some of her closest friends out here don't share her faith, and she'll tell you they're some of the kindest people she's met.

And she came home to us. "I feel more seen and heard. Before I just felt very invisible and just not seen at all," Eden says. "I definitely have a big bond now with my parents and brothers." Then she said the thing we keep coming back to. "I felt like when we were at our house before, we just went really fast," she says. "We just learned how to smell the roses right now."

That bond now includes Hyrum. The mornings that start with his stimming often turn into a game. "Sometimes we all play a little game together in the morning," Eden says. "We'll play where I'm the horse and they're just trying to get me. We all just kind of roughhouse around early in the morning." Brittney has noticed he's more receptive to her than he's ever been. That didn't exist before, because before, everyone was always somewhere else.

When a local news station ran a story about our family, most of the responses were kind. One commenter said Hyrum was dragging the family down, that we were all suffering because of him. Eden's answer came immediately after we read it out loud. "He isn't pulling us down. He's building us up," she said. She was speaking from the heart, and she spoke all of our thoughts. What he built, by forcing us to change everything, was a blessing to all of us.

What She'd Tell Another Kid

Near the end, we gave her a scenario. A kid your age comes to you and says, I just found out my brother or sister is autistic. What do you tell them?

She didn't dress it up. "It'll be really hard sometimes, and you'll probably just wish sometimes that they weren't the way they are," Eden says. "But that's kind of when you can go to your room, do something that you want to do, just have some alone time. Listen to an audiobook, read, paint. So I usually go somewhere quiet."

Then she turned it back to him on her own. "Even with those hard times, usually when we go hiking, it's really cute to see him find a little stink bug, or just some creature," she says. "It's cute to watch him."

Brittney asked whether the sad feeling was important to let yourself feel. "You can feel that if you want to," Eden says. "It kind of helps it drain away, and then you'll kind of feel better after it."

"You kind of have to grieve," Brittney told her. "They're not that typical sibling that you wish you had. Let it be sad and wash through you."

"Yeah," Eden said. "So you definitely kind of have to let your body process it."

She was eleven when we had this interview with her.

Closing Thoughts

We didn't know what Eden would say when we sat her down. What we heard was a kid who has lost some aspects of a normal childhood and will tell you so, and found things she didn't know she was missing. We asked whether she'd rather move into a house today or keep traveling another five years. She didn't pause. "I probably want to travel for another five years," she said.

The change we were most afraid of turned out to be the best thing for her. She stopped needing friends around to be okay, and started building a life of her own. She found out she could paint, that she could read for hours, that she liked who she was even in a quiet room with nobody around. None of that was there in the old life. It took pulling everything up by the roots, and a brother whose needs left us no choice but to slow down.

She builds dollhouses now. She paints, and reads out in the desert with no one around. She still wakes up to Hyrum slapping his head against the bed frame, and she gets up and goes and plays with him anyway. By any measure, she's okay. Better than okay.

May there be a road.