spectrumom

"I peed the bed last night." Now why should those words make me happy and hopeful? For several reasons. The overarching reason is they came from Nathan. Nathan who says few words anyway, and when he uses them they often seem like a stim--something he repeats to himself for self-entertainment purposes only. These would be unusual stim words for him. A quick sniff of his dry pants told me they were not idle words. Nathan who rarely talks about present events and almost never about past events. I think I could count on one hand how many times he has talked about a past event. The past and future are topics hard to grasp for most people with autism. Even though he said them in the bathroom and I was outside the room, they were meant to communicate an idea to me. Something had happened to him. When I had sent him back into his room at 4am(without checking, although I admit I did try to make him pee--I cop an excuse of sleep deprivation after only 4 hours of sleep,) somethi

I read once that becoming a parent was allowing a piece of your heart to walk around outside of your body. I think becoming a parent of a child with autism is having huge chunks of your heart routinely gouged out and hung on a spit over a roaring fire. It just doesn't appear as dramatic as it sounds. But, trust me, we parents are experts at hiding that kind of trauma. We have lots of practice. One of the things a parent loves to hear is "I love you too mommy." And it is one of the things that a parent of a minimally verbal autistic child craves. When we had Isaac, our 3rd and fairly normally developing (if extremely ornery at times) child, we were astounded to watch him do things that the other two never did or did profoundly late. Having him potty train at 3 was not early, unless you compare it to the 7 years it took the other 2. Man, 3 years worth of diapers and diaper changes avoided, priceless. Throwing a tantrum in WalMart because he wanted a toy? Excellent.