Rachel Webb Turner shares how bringing a dog into her home enabled her son Wesley, who has autism, to connect with the world around him.
Read Rachel's inspiring story from the October 2019 issue of Guideposts!
I’m a talker—I have a habit of talking to every person I see—but that afternoon in March 2015, I sat beside my husband, Andy, on the 45-minute drive home from the Marcus Autism Center in Atlanta without saying a word. It was the most deafening silence of our 11-year marriage. We were both so overwhelmed, we didn’t know what to say.
I glanced back at our two-and-a-half-year- old son, Wesley, asleep in his car seat. We’d had him checked out because of his continuing obsession with letters, numbers and counting things, and his seeming indifference to communicating with people, even though he had an enormous vocabulary. Wesley had spent the day being assessed by a team of specialists. They’d diagnosed him with autism spectrum disorder.
A stress migraine pounded my temples. Could I be that mom? The one who could educate myself, advocate for our son, intervene when necessary. I am not your girl, God, I kept thinking. I can’t be the mom Wesley needs. He deserves someone better, someone more capable.
I’d been given pamphlets and instructions and suggestions and told to sign up for classes that I knew we could never afford. The full written report on Wesley wouldn’t arrive for a few weeks, and already I was failing him. Out of everything the specialists had said, the only words I could remember were socialization and involvement—key for Wesley to develop social skills. In the car, I desperately brainstormed ways to make his world more social.
The weirdest, most off-the-wall idea came to mind, so weird that I blurted it out. “We need a dog!”
Andy looked at me as if I were crazy. “What are you talking about, Rachel? You don’t even really like dogs, and I’m allergic.”
That was true. I’d had bad experiences with dogs growing up, not exactly a Lassie kind of childhood.
“And how on earth are we going to afford a dog right now?”
I sighed. “You’re right, but…”
He shook his head. “I can’t believe with all the talk we had thrown at us today about therapy, speech intervention and preschool classes, your one takeaway is that we need a dog.” But somehow I couldn’t shake the idea. Maybe I was cracking under the stress already.
A couple weeks later, I was outside playing with Wesley and Sam, our older son, when a woman with a medium-size, black curly-coated dog walked by. Must be a new neighbor. Like I said, I talk to everyone I see. “Hi!” I called and introduced myself.
She stopped. “Hi, my name is Rachel too and this is Oliver,” she said. “I can tell Oliver would love to play with your kids. Would that be okay?”
I nodded. The dog frisked between the boys. He was so gentle; he didn’t jump on people the way I’d seen a lot of dogs do. I watched, amazed. It was as if he knew exactly how careful to be with each of them. “What breed is he?” I asked.
“He’s an Aussiedoodle,” the other Rachel said proudly. “A mix of an Australian shepherd and a poodle.” Then she continued, “He was bred by a woman who has three autistic sons. She found that Aussiedoodles work perfectly as service and therapy dogs. Plus, they’re hypoallergenic.”
Was this for real? “We need an Oliver, stat!” I said. It turned out that the breeder lived in Blairsville, just two hours away in the mountains.
I couldn’t believe it. What I do believe in are divinely orchestrated situations—I just knew that God was setting this up for our family. Wait until I told Andy!
The next day, I called the breeder, Robin, at Big Doodle Dreams. We spoke for more than an hour. She told me how much people with autism could benefit from service dogs; I’d had no idea. Everything was coming together, I thought.
But a few days later, before I could get Andy on board, Wesley fell and broke his femur, the thigh bone, in his right leg. He ended up in a body cast for eight weeks. He couldn’t move. Couldn’t go to speech therapy or to school. Couldn’t socialize, even if he wanted to. Or play with a dog.
I read up on neurodiversity and how Wesley’s unique way of thinking, learning and relating should be embraced. Although he struggled to answer simple yes-or-no questions, he had already taught himself to read. At two! He could spell words like lopsided and pumpkin in Scrabble tiles. So what if he got his pronouns confused?
Finally the body cast came off. It took three more weeks to help Wesley walk again. Only one obstacle remained to getting our family’s dream dog: money. Then out of the blue, my sister said she wanted to buy us the dog.
Now the decision was up to Andy. I explained to him that Aussiedoodles tend to be hypoallergenic. They also tend not to shed, so no worries on that front.
“Do you really think a dog will help Wesley that much?” he asked.
“Yes!” I told him everything the breeder had told me.
“Okay, then. Get the dog.”
I called Robin right away, but by then she had only one puppy left, which she’d planned to keep her for herself. “Please,” I begged. “My son needs this dog. We can drive out to Blairsville and get her right away.”
There was a pause, only for a few seconds but seemingly endless, as if everything hung in the balance. “Okay,” Robin said. Boy, when God is ready, get out of the way!
We brought Josie home the third week in December, an early Christmas present for the boys. A black, curly-haired ball of energy, she pranced between them. Sam immediately petted her, but Wesley hung back—which wasn’t surprising because he always has to be the one to initiate any contact. He busied himself lining up the votive candles and counting them.
Christmas, then New Year’s, came and went. I worried that Wesley wasn’t bonding with Josie. He just didn’t seem that interested in her, no matter how adorable she was. But then I began to catch Wesley petting her when he thought no one was looking, usually in the back seat of the car.
Four months after we’d gotten Josie, I took the two of them out for a long play session. By the end, they were both exhausted. As soon as I put Wesley in his car seat, he fell asleep. He slept the whole way home, with Josie leaning her head on his shoulder. That’s when I knew they had finally bonded. One of our biggest challenges was that Wesley had no sense of danger and didn’t understand to “look both ways.” He would dart out into the street without warning. I was terrified he’d get hit by a car. Josie solved that problem. We tethered Wesley to her by tying the leash around his midsection. Josie was able to keep him safely on the sidewalk with us whenever we went out.
We didn’t formally train Josie as a service dog. But she has proven to be exactly what Wesley needs. When he sits on the stairs, crying, because he’s having a hard day or is in timeout, she sits quietly next to him, watching him with her soulful dark eyes. If he wants to reach out and hug her, he can. If not, Josie gives him his space; she instinctively knows she can jump in everyone’s lap in the house except his. Once or twice, when Wesley was having a meltdown, Josie lay down on him, effectively a weighted blanket—something children with autism find very calming.
The best thing about having a dog is that kids come to you. Even the daily walk to the bus stop provides a fantastic opportunity for Wesley to socialize with other children. Kids pepper him with questions about Josie—How old is she? Can I pet her?—and we practice his answers at home so he’s more comfortable talking in public.
Wesley and Josie share an aversion to loud noises, and fireworks are the absolute worst. Josie actually goes into hiding. One evening two summers ago, Andy wasn’t home from work yet, and Sam wanted to watch our neighbors’ Fourth of July fireworks. I ran back and forth between Sam in the yard and Wesley crying on the couch. Suddenly I saw Josie. She’d crept out of her hiding place and bravely planted herself beside Wesley. When Andy got home and I was finally able to stay with Wesley, Josie went back upstairs to hide for the rest of the fireworks. What an incredible comfort it was to know that she would never abandon Wesley when he was upset.
The first year of handling my son’s autism diagnosis was a year of grief and desperation and uncertainty. I felt as if God had given Wesley the wrong mom—how could I help him when I always felt like a mess myself? Josie showed me that I was capable of making good decisions for Wesley and for our family. I learned how to make peace with autism while also fighting it. How to celebrate Wesley’s gifts while finding ways he can overcome his challenges. Helping my son become the person God designed him to be—as I’ve become the mom God designed me to be.
She feared she was not up to raising a special-needs child, but a heaven-sent Aussiedoodle puppy stepped up to lend a hand.
Hi, Guideposts viewers. My name is Rachel Turner and I live in Woodstock, Georgia. My story is about bringing a dog into our family to help with my son who's on the autism spectrum.
I chose to get a dog for Wesley because, right after he was diagnosed, my one goal was to get through to him. He was spending a lot of time closing out the rest of the world, and really I was just trying to find ways to get his attention, and my first thought was, "Who doesn't love a dog?"
Whether or not you get a dog as a pet or you get a service dog, I feel like introducing a dog into your home when you have a child on the spectrum is just a great part of their ultimate therapy package.
It took Wesley a while to bond with Josie. The rest of us bonded with her in about eight seconds, but it was about four months of him pushing her away and not really wanting her near him before we were driving home from the park one day, and I looked in the back seat and Wesley had fallen asleep with his head tilted to the side and Josie was sitting in the seat right next to him, and she had also tilted her head to the side to where she was almost touching his forearm.
Not only did it show me that Wesley and Josie were going to bond because Wesley was going to bond with Josie, but also, after four months have been pushed away from this little boy, it was Josie reassuring me that she was there and she was going to be there for us, and specifically for Wesley.
Initially, Josie helped us with Wesley because he was doing things like darting into traffic when we were on walks. He wouldn't look and he would run into the street, or he wouldn't answer me in the house. I would be looking for him and it would be just terrifying.
So we initially did things like put an extra leash on her and sometimes we would tether Wesley to the leash, or sometimes we would just hand him the leash and say, you know, "You have to walk Josie, that's your job," and it would keep him really focused.
I could also say to Josie, "Where's Wesley?" And she would sort of help me locate him sometimes. Now, you know, Wesley's grown out of a lot of his behaviors and so she's really a social tool. She brings other children into our environment, so that Wesley's forced to communicate with his peers. So, she's contributed in so many great ways to our family, and specifically to Wesley.
My faith was a huge part of this journey. Right after Wesley was diagnosed, I remember driving home that day in the car, and just crying out to God and feeling like I was so inadequate as a mom and I wasn't type A enough.
When someone hands you an autism diagnosis, it's so hard to understand how that's going to manifest in your future. It's a social disorder that shows up in so many different ways, in every different kid that you see.
So I didn't really know what all we were going to be dealing with now, or in the future, and there are so many schools of thought on how to address it as a parent, and how to address it with therapies, and I know God was a huge part of transforming me, as a mother, into somebody that made confident decisions, and understood that, you know, I can only make the best decisions I can make at the time with the information that I have. And a lot of those decisions that my husband and I made turned out to be good ones and it just transformed my confidence in myself as a mom.
Around the Fourth of July, Josie doesn't particularly like loud noises and she actually has that in common with Wesley. When the Fourth of July fireworks started to go off, both Josie and my son were really overwhelmed by the experience, but my oldest son wanted to be outside. Our neighbors were setting off fireworks and, as a mom, I was going back and forth.
Josie usually hides when there's something loud going on, and Wesley was sitting on the couch, and so I was trying to come back and forth and watch my other son and soothe Wesley and I finally realized that Josie was sitting on the couch next to Wesley, which she would have never done. She would have been upstairs under her bed. I've realized that she was sitting there and he had his hand on her fur, and that they were just sitting together.
About 10 minutes later, my husband got home, and he came in the house. I said, "Good." I said, "You go outside with Sam. "I need to go inside with Wesley." And the minute I came inside and Josie understood that we were all home, she ran upstairs and got under the bed. But she was so intuitive, that she understood he was freaked out. She was freaked out, but she wasn't doing her dog instinct thing of going and hiding like dogs typically do.
But the moment she realized we were all home and that we could spread our attention between the two boys, she disappeared. And, it really just made me feel great about, just the decision, about having her. Wesley was calm. He was sitting there with her. He didn't feel alone. But she makes herself available, which is what I think is really special about her.
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