Sophia
was diagnosed with autism just a month after her third birthday. Diagnosed as
“non-verbal, low functioning” Autism. The parents didn’t know what to expect.
Today, Sophia is a beautiful girl of nine and in the third grade. In class she
spends a good portion of the time with her peers, reading books, and writing.
She recently started doing double digit math and subtraction. Every day is a
bit of a miracle and a lot of resilience.
“Being
home during the summer meant being somewhere so familiar that I had long since
acclimated to the sensory data of the surroundings. The lighting, sounds,
tactile variations…my mind was used to it all and did not have to work as hard
to process the never-ending stream of incoming data.”
The
familiar is peaceful. Change is the opposite. Change means the senses are raw
and exposed and under attack. School was
always that opposite after a summer immersed in the sensory familiarity of home
to Edwin.
A new
school year would mean not just a different setting, but one that included a
huge number of different rooms and activities. The classroom had one set of
sensory experiences (the sound of pencils being sharpened, the peppery scents
they caused, chair legs scraping floors, etc)…the hallway had another set
(rowdy kids, their echoing voices)…the playground had its own range of sensory
experiences, as did the lunchroom, the bathrooms and so on.
It
takes Edwin’s mind quite a while to acclimate to any new environment. And school
is a dozen new environments all rolled into one. He puts up a brave front and
gets on the bus every day. He looks away when his parents wave. He constantly
leaves the comfort of familiar to the awkward and prickly pressures of the new.
I can understand his not wanting to wave now.
-------------------------------------------
“Every
school day I stand by the bus as my twins get buckled into their seats. I wait
and I wave. When Grandma is there she watches me and says something like, ‘Do
they see you?’ or ‘I don’t think they care about waving today’ and I never
answer those statements. I wave goodbye every day until the bus turns left, and
they can’t see me waving,” says Patricia, mom to a set of twins, both on the
spectrum.
“Have
my two autistic daughters ever waved back? No, not yet, but I still keep
waving, because I’m mom, and that’s what moms do. Because one day, my girls
will wave back; one day, “bye-bye” will be part of their social world. Or,
because one day there will be another moment, like when Angel looked directly
into my eyes with recognition and pushed her tiny hand against the bus window
as I waved. She kept her hand on the window until the bus turned left and I
couldn’t see her anymore. So, yes, I wave. I wave every day.”
Today’s
post is my gift to all mothers of children with milestone delays or delayed
development. They strive every day to teach their children, to presume
competence, to hold their expectations high enough, to embrace their child’s
differences and yet carefully recognise the fact that it could take up to 2,000
repetitions for a child with special needs to learn something that a typical
child will likely learn in 200 repetitions. They balance expectations every day
— not too low, not too high and realise that in addition to being Moms, they
get to see miracles at work and play.
