Here We Are

And here we go.

Yes, I expected this. I did. I knew, as most mothers and parents might. The little voice in your mind tells you this is so.

But to see the confirmation in handwriting.

Diagnosis: Autism.

To hear it spoken in words and acronyms we don’t understand and then broken down into spoon-fed bites. I am still choking on these words.

This is my son. This is my little boy. And his path is uncertain. Maybe it will change and the path will be less cumbersome.

He plays happily. He loves generously. He learns slowly. He cries heartily.

Loving him is easy. Teaching him is frustrating.

We have to be honest with ourselves and know that we can do many things for our children, for ourselves. But we cannot subtract the things we do not like about life. We cannot take away the difficult.

I can stand here alone or gather my people around me and let them love all of us collectively and individually. We can admire the boy that is within our midst instead of looking for the boy we never had from the start. We can all roll our sleeves up and get to work.

Deep in the heart, we are given challenges. Suffering. We are not just given what we can handle, sometimes it is greater pain than we can bear, whatever that challenge may be for each of us. Words become tears. Tears release us into peaceful acceptance and courage helps us take the first steps along a path we didn’t choose for ourselves. Here is where we are today. And here we go.

-I actually wrote the above on the day of the diagnosis. Today is two weeks later-hoping the therapies will begin soon. My husband asked me why I didn’t write about Connor on the blog sooner, instead of alluding to something wrong for weeks. The truth is I didn’t want Connor to be a poster child for delays or autism. I didn’t know how personal I wanted to go with this. And all along, I was writing and grasping at the bigger picture without sharing. The only reader was me.

The self-prompting came along once I realized how many blogs I had read by parents whose children have autism. I read and read and read some more. Looking for how they managed, what their lives are like and trying to gain my own footing on this. We spoke to many parents who were willing to share the good, the bad and the worse with fierce honesty.

And it dawned on me that my son is in an extremely rare category-he was diagnosed very, very early. He is only 18 months old. Many children are not considered until they are age 2 or 3, some even later than that. We have an amazing chance to grab this autism early and give it the best fight we can. It takes strength, it takes consistency, it takes all we have to give, plus some. And if there is some parent out there wondering about those little things that don’t seem quite right—trust your instincts. We almost chalked it up to “he’s a late talker” or “maybe he doesn’t hear well”. Instead, we hauled ourselves into the pediatrician for a hearing check and came out with the word autism swirling around us. And here we are. Not where we wanted to be, but my son has a tremendous gift of time that some children do not get.

I realized that the power of our individual stories give all of us comfort, validity and friends to walk alongside. So, if our story brings any of these needs to someone else, then I cannot be afraid to share it.

For now, I’ll leave it here. And a book that I loved is called the Zen of Parenting, which gives simple (and surprisingly difficult!) tools for us to consider how to accept challenges. This is the one that I am working on for the rest of this year. It’s never felt more appropriate and fits a million situations.

Tool 1: Let go of expectations and unfulfilled dreams. The past is gone. Try to keep it out of the present.