Here it comes.
It's only been a year.
...and here it comes. The blog I've been afraid to write for months. The one that has been on my finger tips, written on the pieces of my heart and tearing me apart.
OK. Here it comes. Heart pounding, already crying.
My son is most likely going to receive a diagnosis soon.
And the name of that diagnosis is Autism.
I know what you're thinking. Wait, I don't. I'm not sure I want to know.
Let's start from the beginning.
This hurts.
This has probably been the most lonely, isolating year of my life. Elliot has always been a little...different. Silly and quirky and constantly speaking his own adorable language. He lived and breathed his own language, made a rhythm of his own that didn't exist before and danced to that rhythm hard. He's been 1000% from the moment he was born. I love this about him.
There are too many small details to recall so let's just pick up where the screaming started. They were just screams at first. I got the token, "He is just discovering what his voice can do!" "This is normal." "My kid did this too."
And then...it was more than screaming. It was constant. It was mountain shaking tantrums. It was a tidal wave of red over my entire life, every moment of my day. We stopped feeling comfortable going places. It was emotional. "It" became a presence almost separate from Elliot, a monster that had taken his form and torched everything around it unexpectedly. I'm not sure if I was holding it together at that point or not. We went through the motions of our lives but nothing felt real. I read blogs and talked to mothers of children much younger than Elliot who seemed to just "get it." Elliot wasn't getting it. I never spoke of this because I wanted to believe that I was overreacting to that feeling in my gut that said, "Why doesn't he do some of these things?" Why didn't he know what animals are what and the sounds they make? Why doesn't he say ANYTHING. Why does EVERYONE have to point this out? "He sounds like he's speaking Chinese." God, if you said that to me. I really hated people for awhile. I really hated the way people made me feel without realizing it. I hated walking around with that subtle lump in my throat that I could feel but couldn't explain.
We left well check ups with nothing but "he's doing FABULOUS!"
We screened for Autism at every one of those checkups.
We asked about his speech and were told he was fine. We read articles about the tantrums. We lost our minds trying to figure out what we were doing "wrong." We spanked with a vengeance. I could write volumes on how those spankings didn't work. It seemed that whatever these tantrums were, they weren't the result of a little boy intentionally acting out.
The realization that what we were doing just wasn't working prompted me to look into some methods that were not in my originally planned parenting arsenal. I found some things that I tried and actually seemed to be helping. After endless hours in endless days, I started to see some improvement. I started recognizing how much he was struggling with his lack of communication. I stopped seeing red and started seeing Elliot. I stopped seeing tantrums and saw frustration and anger and wanting/needing something with no way to express it. I saw my aching 2 year old still experiencing teething pain that most 1 year old children have left behind them.
I'm going to skip to finally arriving at "baby clinic." We were there to have him evaluated for speech. At this point I had filed away my concerns under "I must have been wrong but..." Then baby clinic pulled that file and started pushing page after page into my chest with some serious intent.
Let me just say that I think baby clinic was bogus but...it's not worth the paragraph (or seven) to explain why. Bogus, yes, but relevant.
And now skip to being fast tracked to FACES. Fast forward to some wonderful people falling into our lives that put a bandaid on the baby clinic wound, picked up the pages of that file and gave me a big hug.
FACES is a team based through a program called Bright Starts that specifically works with children displaying autistic tendencies. I didn't like the idea of this at first. A stranger in my home every day telling me how to raise my son? A stranger addressing these difficulties with me in the room? No. NO NO NO.
I think I had the wrong idea of who these people are and what they do. It's nothing like that. It's Liz coming twice a month and Wendy coming every morning, both of them with so much love in their heart for Elliot. It's Elliot having his own team of awesome cheerleaders that celebrate his successes and challenge him to do better every day. They challenge him to break out of those behaviors that have so long kept him from succeeding and are now becoming shadows instead of mountains. They are now becoming beautiful words and smiles that paint our home and hearts with rainbows instead of red. That monster? He's not so bad these days.
But...I am just full of "buts" right now. Here we are approaching his 3rd birthday. Approaching that day when he will be evaluated and diagnosed. Those words have built a prison around the tired heart inside of me.
These words are a drop in the bucket. I could fill a thousand buckets with all of the words, the aches and worries and stress and fear that have been produced these last few months.
I never knew being a mom could hurt so much. I never knew I would feel so raw or such vivid pain. I never knew I would hold my sleeping son and cry, knowing that there is something broken inside of him that I can't fix. And IT HURTS. And I don't have words for it.
And I guess I don't really have a way to wrap this up. I could say so much more, I could but I don't even know where I am going with all of this.
My son is most likely Autistic. I never thought I would be here. I never saw any of this coming.
You think life is as simple as "I want to be a mom, I want to have a child." You prepare yourself for everything but what you get. You think you know what will make you happy. You think you know what it feels to hurt...and then you have that second tiny heart that is just an extension of your own, beating wildly and freely and struggling to succeed.
And he will. Just saying some of that makes it seem smaller than it feels inside me.
I don't have an autistic child named Elliot.
I have a beautiful son named Elliot. He might be autistic. He is delayed. He is magical though. He is perfect. My heart swells when I look at him. My eyes fill with tears with each new thing he learns, conquers, becomes.
My heart breaks open wide when he grabs my hand and says "Mama? You ok? I love you!"
The hardest part of this past year has been staying silent. I have been afraid to say all of these things and I'm not sure I can really define that fear for you. I just know that tonight I felt like it was time to release all of this from it's prison. I needed to cry and listen to those songs that make me appreciate my vulnerability and maybe I just needed to sit in this dark room and see what would happen.
...here it comes.
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