"Why I Turk," by Hyway Wolf (most places my username is hywaywolf, don't know why I dropped it here)
I used to be an avid backpacker and dreamed of thruhiking the appalachian trail. I also have a son with autism and down syndrome. When he was very young I had visions of thruhiking with him, but as he grew older it was readily apparent that that wasn't going to happen. In 2009, in the same week, I watched a National Geographic documentary on thru hiking the AT and a documentary about an adult male with down syndrome. I noticed during that show that the dad did practically everything with the boy while the mother did very little. I assume that this is because, like with our family, the wife just couldn't handle him when he was being obstinate and everything eventually fell to the dad.
Putting these two shows together I realized that unless I did it right then, and it might have already been too late, there would never come a time that i could be away from my son for a week much less the 6 months it takes to hike the appalachian trail. So long story short, and after weighing a lot of other facts and consequences, I quit my good paying Professional Engineering job and attempted the AT. My wife couldn't handle the load and everything went to shit, so when i came home I spent a long time getting shit put back in its place.
By then I had been out of work for almost 2 years. When I put my hat back into the job market I discovered that no one wanted a 50 year old engineer with a year long gap on his resume. So I did a little of this and a little of that, before finding Mturk.
