Date: April 4, 2004
With my boy on my hip, I took a big breath and opened the door. Inside were the dark tan waiting room chairs, brown wood paneled walls, a basket of toys in the corner, and a counter with a paper on it to sign in. I walked to the counter, wrote my boy's name on the sheet, and sat down by the toys.
I put my boy on the floor facing the toys. At two and a half, that should have been what would entertain him while we waited to hear his name called in my opinion at the time. Instead he laid his head down and began looking at the labels on the bottom of the chairs.
I sat watching him, knowing we were a little early for our appointment. I thought of the discussions that I had had recently with several trusted friends. I had known that something was different about my boy for a while, and at least someone agreed with me because we had speech therapists at our house twice a week. One of my friends pointed out some characteristics that made her think of the "a" word. I had been told that it probably wasn't that a couple of times by his pediatrician and one of the speech therapists working with him. Other friends told me that boys are just slower to speak than girls, a fact proven true in my house, since my 8 month old girl was picking up quite a bit from her brother's therapy and was speaking far more than he was...and far more than any other 8 month old I had ever encountered. These friends told me that there wasn't anything wrong and I should just wait for him to grow out of this phase.
Another boy came in the room, right around my boy's age and he walked up to the toys and began to play. The other mom was talking with the receptionist, apparently disagreeing about the outcome of her son's lack of diagnosis. I wanted to scream at her. Her son was fine! He was playing and talking to the toys. He turned to me and looked at me straight in the eye and said "catch?" I would kill for that kind of interaction with my son!
Thankfully, before I said or did something in my anger, I heard my boy's na
me being called. My son didn't look away from the labels he was so facinated with, so I picked him up and took him to the lady who called his name.
We were taken to another room with more toys and waited to be seen. Apparently someone had to calm down the angry mom in the waiting room. My boy walked up to the toy cars, took them out one by one, and lined them up in a straight line like a parking lot. I talked to him the entire time as the speech therapists had told me to. Having recently given up on eye contact, I just described what he was doing and that it looked like a parking lot to me.
When he had taken out all the cars, he laid down on his back and stared at the ceiling, flapping his hand in front of his face.
This was the scene where the psycologist walked in. She smiled at me and introduced herself. She explained what she was going to do and how and what each of the tests were as if I had any idea about what any of it meant. Over the course of the next several years, these words would become another language that I would learn, but at this point it could have been Chinese and I wouldn't have known the difference.
The rest of that visit is a blur to me. She observed, asked a ton of questions, tried to speak with my boy, and in the end walked away to input some things into a computer. It took several minutes, but she cam back with a paper that said "diagnosis: autism." It said a bunch of other things that I would later learn and know meant that he was fairly severe, but I didn't understand nor care about all that yet.
I had a weird feeling of relief then, which later I would feel guilty about. Still, for me this was validation. I was not crazy, something was different about my kid. Everyone who told me that I was just paranoid was wrong and I had proof. I smiled at the psychologist and walked out of the room with my head held high. I wasn't crazy.
I went home, picked up my baby girl with far more confidence than I had had her entire life. I fed her knowing that I wasn't a failure as a parent.
When Tony read the paper, his reaction was so very different. He cried. I was in a whole different place, but I still understood. He was thinking that his son would not grow up playing baseball and video games with him. He didn't know if he would ever have a real conversation with his son. There was so much grief and uncertainty in him. It was the death of a dream for his boy.
We know now that my boy plays baseball on an awesome challenger team and has for many years, but back then it wasn't something that we could have known. We know now that my boy is crazy about graphic novels and video games, draws out what he is thinking so you can get a glimpse if you try, and likes to write poetry best because it is richer to him than normal prose.
We know that he loves winning, and running is just one of those amazing things that he is able to do for long periods of time tirelessly, so he loves a good 5k (and would love to do a marathon, but I'm not ready for that yet).
We know now that he enjoys vlogging, but he doesn't want to do it every day as originally planned. He just doesn't want to talk that much, and vlogging takes a lot of unnecessary speech.
We also know now that somewhere in the middle of everything that we taught him he fell in love with Jesus and has a real relationship with Him. This goes beyond our understanding, but we are limited like that.
Autism has played a role in our lives, but my son does not feel that the word defines him anymore. If you ask him, he will tell you, "I don’t have autism, I have awesomeism." He told me once that autism is what people can't do. Awesomeism is all the things that he can do better than people who, in his opinion talk too much. He once quoted to me from James (a book of the Bible he dearly loves) "Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry." God is still working on him for the third part, but he has the first two down.