A night of So You Think You Can Dance on TV, without simultaneously editing photos. A shower…without my daughter sharing it with me. Why am I babbling on about this, you may wonder?īecause I actually wanted to give myself a nice night off. : )Ĭell Phone Self Portrait of a Photographer (who was too lazy to get her camera and take an artful shot of her feet) Perhaps this kid’s animals and lines are my son’s cords/strings/long skinny things! Maybe we’ll be able to comfort some other desperate parents one day and tell them that our son once had this silly obsession, and isn’t that funny – ha ha ha – but now look at him! You have NOTHING to worry about!Īnyhow, not feeling too bad today, so I’m just going to post some pics of my son that don’t suck. (On his way to community college in two months, this kid was now sitting at the table with all of us helpfully and obediently answering questions about what he could remember about being young and autistic – not much.)īut the thing that I cling to most now is the fact that this kid once obsessed over animals and lining objects up in rows, and now has no recollection of that period in his life or hobby. We heard comforting facts from his mom, that her son didn’t acknowledge his colors until he was seven, and didn’t speak in complete sentences until he was 5.
And ya know what? Other than some occasional quirky head movements and a deep concentration on eating his food, he was the model of “different but functional” that we hope to mold our son into. Oh, and on a recent trip down to North Carolina to visit my parents in Hippyville, we got the chance to have lunch with an 18 year old man-boy who is also autistic. I’m still demanding that he puts an “I want” in front of the nouns he grunts at me when he wants something (Grandma thinks that we are torturing him when we do this – she doesn’t understand the importance of FUNCTIONALITY IN NORMAL SOCIETY). We have one tired kid who’s falling asleep in his lunch because he can’t catch up on his sleep (usual story with all of us “Autism Parents”).
MY CHILD IS MAKING AN EVERYDAY, NORMAL REQUEST OF ME! I feel just a little more normal myself, in fact, like one of those moms whose son ever-so-casually asks you to get something for him while you’re reading Us! magazine, and you every so casually grab it and then go back to your gossip page because hey, it’s no big deal. I’m just sayin’ that HE’S TALKING! SO MUCH MORE! It’s awesome! It even startles me a bit, when I hear his 3.75 year old voice saying stuff so….normally.
I’m not saying that he has achieved that magical state of Jenny McCarthy “recovery”. See that oh-so-symbolic “veil of autism” that he’s trapped behind (otherwise known as a shot I took a few weekends ago when he was on a moonbounce – and yes, I know that I’m reusing images from a previous post, but I’m busy, yo?)? Well, my son has decided to stick his fingers through it and get a taste of the way the rest of us communicate. Like he walked around a corner this past weekend and decided that “yup, I’ve had enough of this being trapped inside my head thing and listening to Mommy and Daddy with their stupid demands to ‘say “I want cookies”‘ when it’s really obvious that I want the damn cookie’.
And he is starting to talk more and more. See this boy? The beautiful one? With the magical eyes? That’s my son.