Seeing What Is Really There:
Alex Wright’s Story
When Jennifer Zaat-Wright married Michael Wright in 2015, she gained a stepson who came with a significant list of challenges.
Early assessments painted a bleak picture. Because he struggled to communicate, teachers assumed he could not learn.
“I promised to raise him as my own,” Jennifer recalls. And from the beginning, she chose a very different way of seeing him. “When Alex came into my life, it was, ‘We are only going to see him as perfect,’” she says. “And he is perfect right now.”
That conviction—rooted in Jennifer’s lifelong practice of Christian Science—would help change the course of Alex’s life. A later assessment revealed far more ability than earlier evaluations had recognized. “His intellectual capacity has always been there,” Jennifer says.
Alex also entered a Christian Science Sunday School. Even on difficult days, when he sometimes hid under tables and chairs, his teachers never lost sight of the child they knew was really there.
“We knew this behavior is not who he is,” Jennifer recalls. “He is a perfect child of God.” Surrounded by people who assumed ability instead of incapacity, Alex began to show what he could do. The attitude, she says, was: “‘You can do,’ not ‘you can’t do.’ We will give you the opportunity to show us what you can do.”
Christian Science has taken root in Alex, too. He asks Jennifer to read him a section of the weekly Bible Lesson each night before bed, and he loves hymns. She calls him “our little spiritual light in the house.”
Growing Into His Capabilities
When Michael passed in 2020, Jennifer became the sole parent to two teenage sons. Alongside running her financial planning practice, she became Alex’s advocate, conservator, transportation, and caregiver coordinator through an often bewildering network of public services.
In Jennifer’s life, love comes with a great deal of paperwork. Alex’s school-based transition program ends this year, and Jennifer is now lining up what comes next: vocational support, meaningful employment, caregivers, and eventually a living situation that gives Alex greater independence.
And still, Alex keeps growing.
“We knew this behavior is not who he is,” Jennifer recalls. “He is a perfect child of God.” Surrounded by people who assumed ability instead of incapacity, Alex began to show what he could do. The attitude, she says, was: “‘You can do,’ not ‘you can’t do.’ We will give you the opportunity to show us what you can do.”
Christian Science has taken root in Alex, too. He asks Jennifer to read him a section of the weekly Bible Lesson each night before bed, and he loves hymns. She calls him “our little spiritual light in the house.”
Growing Into His Capabilities
When Michael passed in 2020, Jennifer became the sole parent to two teenage sons. Alongside running her financial planning practice, she became Alex’s advocate, conservator, transportation, and caregiver coordinator through an often bewildering network of public services.
In Jennifer’s life, love comes with a great deal of paperwork. Alex’s school-based transition program ends this year, and Jennifer is now lining up what comes next: vocational support, meaningful employment, caregivers, and eventually a living situation that gives Alex greater independence.
And still, Alex keeps growing.
“He Comes Home with More Sentences”
For the past two summers, Alex has worked in CherishAbility’s Vocational Training Program at the A/U Ranches in Buena Vista, Colorado. Jennifer sees something different happen when he is immersed in a real work environment—following a full schedule, finishing the job, working alongside peers and communicating his needs without Mom there to interpret.
He comes home “more spiritual every time.” He shows more initiative. And “he comes home with more sentences.”
The contrast with the boy Jennifer first met is striking. “When I first met him, he couldn’t put three words together,” she says. “Now he has whole conversations.”
Alex especially loves cars. He was gifted a 1964 VW Beetle and enjoys taking it to car shows, where he can tell people about his Bug himself. Cars are one of his “superpowers,” Jennifer says—he can often identify their years at a glance.
Jennifer says Alex has always had “the biggest smile and the biggest heart.” And he is increasingly “focused and directed and capable” of contributing to the world around him.
A Life Raft —and a Future Unfolding
CherishAbility has helped Jennifer, too. She found the organization soon after Michael passed, when carrying everything alone felt especially heavy. What she found was more than programs for Alex. She found other Christian Science families navigating the same unfamiliar territory.
“I needed a life raft,” Jennifer says, “to see that others of us were on the journey and were succeeding—and still striving. Succeeding and striving. Because it’s a journey.”
Now Jennifer is thinking about a future in which Alex has work, friends, spiritual community and a home where he can belong—not simply someone assigned to take care of him. And she is learning to trust that his complete life does not have to depend entirely on her.
Years ago, adults documented what they believed Alex would never be able to do. Jennifer has been asking a different question: What if we give him the opportunity to show us what he can do? The answer is still revealing itself: “He is such an unfoldment,” she says. “Every day, it’s something more, something better.”
And that is what Jennifer continues to trust for his future: “He will continue to unfold as a capable, successful, understood child of God—because that’s all he can be.”