Awakenings

Oprah calls them "Aha" moments. Dr. Phil refers to them as "defining" moments. I like to call them AWAKENINGS. I call them that because when I have them, I feel like I have woken up. Like I've been sleeping and now I am awake. Wide awake.

When I have an awakening, I can feel it physically. It's really hard to describe, but it's almost a tingly type of feeling. It's as if your soul and your mind and your body are one.

I finally arrived to the Son-Rise Start-Up seminar at 3am after an 18 hour trip. That's a story for another time. My goal was to learn everything I could to help Ross. I had read Son-Rise The Miracle Continues and Happiness is a Choice. I'd watched the videos and webinars. I couldn't soak it up fast enough.

Above and beyond learning techniques to deal with Ross's Autism, I had this distinct feeling that I was going to have an awakening while in Massachusets. It was yet another reason why I felt so strongly about going. I felt like I was getting a handle on my emotional state, but I did not have peace yet with this diagnosis.

Each day was amazing! I was eating up every word of every Son-Rise teacher. I bought every book at the book store. I was learning so much about Autism and about myself. But Wednesday was it. My awakening was about to happen.

We were asked to share with a partner a moment when we felt uncomfortable with our child. My uncomfortable moment was when I would make Ross stop spinning. He rarely does it, but I felt like if I encouraged it, he would do it more and then his autism would be obvious to the world (as if it isn't already!). The Son-Rise teacher asked if anyone wanted to come up and try to "work" on this. He would ask a series of questions to see if you could work through this uncomfortableness. I practically jumped up and down to be chosen.

The teacher asked me a lot of things, but the one question that mattered the most was, "Before the diagnosis of Autism, what did you think your role of a mother was suppose to be?" I told him it was to teach my child. I had never put this into words before so it was interesting that I answered it so quickly and succinctly.

I realized that THAT was my heartache. For quite some time I believed I couldn't teach my child and therefore I was not being the mother I set out to be. That was why I felt so disappointed when Ross wouldn't answer me or talk to me. That is why I felt like this diagnosis...this child...was not what I had wanted.

My awakening was that I now knew, with all of my being, that I could teach this child. Ross was exactly the child I wanted. Exactly. I just didn't know how to do it...until now. It came to me the next morning while I was walking in the snow. All was quiet...and I felt tingly all over. :)

Serendipity

There are five stages to mourning: denial/isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance. When you get the news that your child has autism, you mourn. You mourn the life you thought you were going to have. You mourn the child you thought you were going to raise. You mourn.

Since there is very little room for denial, the first thing that happens is isolation. No matter how many friends know other friends in your situation, you just really don't want to share yourself with anyone. It's just way too painful at first. Isolation carries you through that first tidal wave of pain.

So when one of my friends said she had a friend I should talk to, I just said, "Okay," and left it at that. Several people had "friends" I should talk to. Therapists or other moms, but I just really wasn't interested. Isolation.

But then my friend forwarded an e-mail from this fellow mommy and what was written was sooo what I was feeling that I felt compelled to contact her — so I did. I e-mailed her. It's actually amazing to talk to, be with, other parents in this situation. She asked me if I had heard about the Son-Rise Program®. Serendipity.

I had been reading everything I could in the hopes of finding something I could do for Ross. It was starting to look like I would need a special degree in order to help him, and clearly that would take too long, so I was starting to feel really, really helpless. I immediately looked up Son-Rise and — voila — PARENT-RUN PROGRAM. I started to look at everything on the Son-Rise website and knew that this was what I would do to supplement whatever the school district came up with. I had no idea how much it would actually change my life, but I knew I had to go get the training. I just knew. It was serendipity...as it almost always is.

The Amazing Ross

Ross is amazing. He can say his ABC's backwards without missing a beat. He can count to 100...by 10's. He hears a song twice and he'll have it memorized. He's AMAZING. This particular story is particularly amazing though...

After I heard the words, "he has signs of Autism," I knew exactly where to start with my reading. Jenny McCarthy. I had seen her all over the media and I knew her book would be the perfect place to start. It would be easy to digest and, besides, she's the mommy. Not some therapist or doctor.

So I picked up Ross from school and we made our way to the bookstore. With or without a diagnosis of Autism, I knew this little excursion was iffy all by myself. So as soon as we got in there, I went straight to the little computer to look up where exactly I would find this book. When the book first came out it was everywhere, but it had been a while, so I knew I only had a little window of time to look for it.

Ross watched me look it up and I told him, "this is the book we are looking for." We toodled over the section and we started to look. I looked and looked and looked. No luck. I swear, I still can't figure out how they organize their books: by author, subject, title??!?!

I was starting to get antsy because I knew that Ross only had maybe two more minutes in him and then he would be off and running...so I turned around and to say something to him and he was sitting on the floor reading a book. I thought, "hmmm, that book looks familiar." I got a little closer and I took a look at what he was reading, and it was Jenny McCarthy's, Louder than Words. Ross found it!! I was laughing for days. He found the book for me, now how am I going to get him out of here!

The AMAZING Ross.

THE Diagnosis

On September 14, 2008, I finally spoke with the right person at the school district. The district website didn't make it easy to figure out and, quite frankly, had I not been in education as a profession, I might not have even known that my district would assess Ross for free.

A very nice woman named Monica was going to go observe and assess Ross at his little preschool...get this...on October 24th! Wow. And this was just going to be the "screening"... not even the real assessment. After October 24th, they had 60 working days to do that.

So October 24th came and I got my first taste of an assessment. Five million questions. We have done several more assessments and they are all the same. Question after question after question. By the time she finished with me, Ross was napping so she ended up having to come back a week or so later to do her screening. That was the day Barack Obama was elected into office. I called her that afternoon to see how it went and that is when I heard the word "autism."

It went like this, "Well, he does have some signs."

"So when you say 'signs' what exactly do you mean by that?"

"He has signs of autism. We won't know until after the official assessments. That will probably happen after Christmas."

"Okay, I just want to get this taken care of before Kindergarten." YES...I actually said that. What?!?!?

Anyway, I didn't really pay attention to the election. I got off the phone and cried a little. Autism. Man. Still not sure, though. I'll go to the book store. I'll get that Jenny McCarthy book she talked about on Oprah. No problem. NO PROBLEM. Got it handled.

And, of course, I started reading. And that's when I started to learn what autism really was and that's when I started FREAKING OUT, because I knew Ross had it. He had it. So I e-mailed Ross's pediatrician and begged him to get me an appointment with SOMEONE who could officially diagnose Ross because I couldn't wait until after Christmas.

So we ended up in the fancy shmancy Developmental Doctor's office a couple of days later. He spoke with us and observed Ross play for, maybe, 20 minutes. He gave us the official diagnosis that I had already read about: PDD-NOS. Pervasive Development Disorder - Not Otherwise Specified. Whatever. It basically means Ross has some signs of autism, but not all.

This didn't speed anything up at all. Our first official IEP with the District to determine services wasn't until January 12th. An IEP is code for Individual Educational Plan OR let us tell you what your child needs plan.

The time between THE DIAGNOSIS and the IEP was excrutiatingly painful for me. I had no idea what was best for Ross. I felt completely helpless and pretty hopeless. None of the people we talked to would really say anything about what to expect, good or bad. The only thing that they knew for sure was that Ross would be socially inept and that there really wasn't a lot we could do about that.

I literally would wake up and for just a second I thought maybe I was dreaming it all. And then, of course, I'd realize that it was real and I would cry and cry and cry. I read it would take me two to three years to be okay with Ross's diagnosis. Really??? Ugh...I can't wait to write about how it only took me three months to be "okay" with it. :)