How awkward it is to fall in love again at my stage of life. And how humbling to learn how families struggle bravely through extended catastrophes. I can cope with personal disaster. Raised to be a pessimist, I expect no less.

But the sufferings of children? They unhinge me.

Then I met Tennyson Quance and her family. “Tenny” is four and a half years old. She would not have come into my life had her mother, a beautiful woman named Michelle Quance, not been photographing me for a book I wrote last year. And, as happens with women, the conversation got around to thorns that need plucking from the skin. Tennyson is autistic.

There are various forms of autism, all notoriously difficult to diagnose. I am not talking about cutesy American film travesties like Rain Man or Forrest Gump. Neither do I mean Asperger syndrome, which is another matter.

Autism is treatable, but not curable. It is Tennyson’s fate. And she has been treated with heartless disdain, as autistic children are in almost all of Canada. There is a way to help her. It is called “writing a cheque” on an account that has been set aside for autistic children under 6. The Ontario government won’t do it, despite the pleas of parents.

Once more, I note with mystification that North Americans really do not appear to like children much.

Tennyson’s parents, Michelle and her husband, Brett, had a busy life in Toronto with two healthy children and Tennyson, who at two was becoming strangely off-kilter. They did research, saw doctors, heard diagnoses and found that the best treatment possible had to be done fast. Toddlerhood is the time of greatest malleability, your best shot at teaching life skills.

Those skills are things like looking people in the eye, reading social signals, dressing yourself, eating with a fork and then remembering to put the fork down — tiny, crucial things that will make Tennyson seem less odd to other children. She has to be gently guided, and rewarded with big smiles, a cheerful voice and “Good job, Tenny!” for hours on end. She has to sit up in a chair rather than slump and slide off it.

It’s both painful and humbling to watch on her treatment videos: The therapist works as unsparingly as a surgeon reconnecting veins, hundreds of veins, until even a four-year-old itching with energy will tire. I can immediately see why treatment is so costly. Very few people would have the skill or patience to learn it.

Tennyson’s intensive therapy takes place at a private agency. While bureaucrats dither over misallocated funds, the minister responsible admitted, when Michelle and Tennyson visited the Ontario Legislature two weeks ago, that there aren’t enough teachers. Tennyson was on a waiting list for public care, but even her parents, with the help of a good MPP, Michael Prue, couldn’t discover her place on the list.

So they pay $6,680 a month — $80,160 a year on their line of credit — and are driving themselves into bankruptcy.

Governments have time. Tennyson doesn’t. Friends threw a fundraiser in my neighbourhood and collected $54,000. It will pay for only seven months of help, but will give Tenny a fighting chance at acquiring the social skills she’ll need to fit in, and not be sneered at as she was recently for screeching as she watched her brother at the ice rink. Another hockey mom asked viciously that Tenny be removed. Yes, you can always rely on the cruelty of strangers. It wasn’t until an older man stepped in and gently asked Michelle if she needed help that Michelle began weeping.

Tennyson, who has huge magical eyes as blue as Jude Law’s, and a face so lovely she could make even a child-hating woman lactate, is going to have an appalling life without this help.

Treatment varies across Canada, even though some experts say autism is now more common than Down syndrome, childhood cancer and cystic fibrosis. Brushing them aside is shortsighted, a false economy. Taxes will have to support autistic adults for life. A big gulp of help early would save us all so much grief.

Tennyson’s father says his daughter was at one time in such a bad state that she spent six months staring at closets and clocks, while rubbing her hands together.

As I watch her videos from that time, her eyes scare me. They are distant and tired, like a child losing interest in life. Thus, when I met Tennyson in person, I was expecting a numbed, distracted little girl. Instead, the most extraordinary thing happened.

She walked up to me, stared deeply into my eyes, and kissed me on the mouth. Children have their own style of kisses. My little stepdaughter would give me something resembling the brush of a butterfly’s wing. Tenny’s was a funny kiss, confident, firm, something wonderful conferred. Nothing in this world has given me greater delight, no, not even my Nobel for physics.

What the Quances and other families need is publicly paid autism therapy or money (back pay and current pay) for the private therapy they obtain by begging and borrowing, until age 6 when another battle begins with school boards for classroom help.

Here’s what you can do for autistic kids. Ask your MPP and your premier to hand over the autism money now. It was an election promise.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, after whom she is named, was the one who wrote, “To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.” That’s my promise to little Tennyson. How does that old rhyme go? Say I’m weary, say I’m sad, say that health and wealth have missed me. Say I’m growing old, but add — Tenny kissed me!