Hopeward
A memoir by Esther Cruz
Coming soon in 2027
Chapter One:
Cracked Open
It all started with a couple who weren't sure they wanted a kid. Our lives were full. We traveled the world and we slept in on Saturdays.
We decided to try to have kids. And if it didn’t happen, we’d get a dog.
Then River was born. He was a pandemic baby who walked into his first grocery store at age two, took one look at the fluorescent lights, and bolted. Pandemic kids are quirky, we told ourselves.
At eighteen months old, River missed his speech milestone. A friend who happened to be a child psychologist tilted her head and said, "Speech delays can be an early sign of autism. Have you thought about getting him evaluated?"
That sentence cracked everything open.
Hi, I'm Esther
I spent over a decade working in finance and tech, where success came with charts that went up and to the right. Then I became an autism mom, where progress looked like "he made eye contact today" and we celebrated like we just closed a billion-dollar deal.
I wrote Hopeward because it's the book I wish someone had handed me when my son got his diagnosis. It also became a time capsule to help our son make sense of his childhood – proof that underneath all the therapies, school transfers, and discipline mistakes we made, he was never hard to love.