Is She in Training??

When I had my first pregnancy, it was rough.  As in, so sick that I lost forty five pounds my first trimester, and Doctor Dad told me I’d better eat a stick of butter or I’d lose that baby.  I was on bed rest, and so afraid I’d have a disabled son – not because of him, but because of me.  I was afraid I was just… not enough.  Only great, amazing, self-sacrificing women could be enough to raise a child with a disability.

Beckette was born a happy baby, so smart that he was discussing abstract concepts of space and time with me on our way to McDonalds at the age of four.  He’d already started long division, and was quite a reader.  But we knew something was up with him.

We had behavior problems - as in, no impulse control and an inability to cope with too much noise and stimulation.  Friendships with other kids? Forget it. He didn’t have that because he could not understand how those other kids even worked.  They didn’t like him and wanted nothing to do with my confused, sad little boy.

Educators did not understand. At one school, a lunchtime meltdown included laying on the ground and screaming at the ceiling, resulting in his expulsion from school on the grounds that he frightened other children. I’d asked for an evaluation, and after spending every day for a month refusing to leave the board of education until it was done, he was readmitted.

Eventually, he was diagnosed with Asperger’s.  Like a lot of other people out there, I didn’t know what autism really meant.  I didn’t understand that eventually he’d be able to lead a normal life. .  But this, and a lot of other misconceptions, needed correction.

In our family, autism isn’t a disease.  It’s not really even a disability – at least not for Beckette.  I can’t speak to the experience with a less functioning child, but for us, Autism means the person afflicted just is wired different.  The hardest aspect of autism is the lack of human connection.  For an autistic child, they don’t understand the social cues. They are just as likely to interpret another child wanting to play as wanting to take all their toys.  Where you and I have that bit of information wired in, they have to study behavior before they’ll understand it.

I like to think of autism as just a skill set that needs learning like calculus.  Math and I get along fine now, but there was a day that I just couldn’t do it.  Like Beckette, I was frustrated to the point I did not care. I wanted to smack the very next person who told me it was not that hard – what didn’t I get? My eyes would glaze over as it was explained again just what to do so the x’s and y’s would play nice.

Being autistic means you’re different, but is that really a bad thing?  Adam Young, the founder of Owl City wouldn’t agree.  Neither would Daryl Hannah, or Jerry Newport (Mozart and the Wale was based on his life.)  Some have speculated whether even Einstein was autistic.  Each of these people think very different from the average Joe, and their outside-the-box thinking has impacted our society in positive ways.

Autism is a rollercoaster challenge, but so is calculus, and while we’re at it, so is Statistics (which is currently kicking my grad-student behind.)  These people are not a burden, but a gift.  Their different thinking might be the thing to change our world for the better forever.