It wasn't at a doctor's office or a school. There was no formal proclamation. I didn't receive a ten page written evaluation afterwards. In fact, the word autism was never even used. But all the same, I knew in that moment that Daniel had autism.
It's strange how a sentence spoken by a stranger can rock your world.
Daniel was the child we prayed for. We prayed for two years for him. We prayed through two miscarriages and months of infertility. During those years, Carl was in seminary so we were surrounded by other couples who thought about getting pregnant on Tuesday and then found out they were pregnant on Thursday.
Carl and I, we just kept praying.
We were over-the-moon excited to meet him. He was a good baby. He was long and skinny, with a healthy appetite, and a great sleeper. I was working as a middle school teacher at the time and he was born the day after school got out. Twelve hours of labor and one c-section later, we had a healthy, red-headed baby boy.
He was a smart little guy. By the time he was twenty months, we could hold up any letter or number and he could tell you what it was. He knew his shapes and his colors. And words. So many words. He loved books, and still does, and we read to him constantly. He soaked it all up.
A few months after Daniel turned two, our family moved to the Houston area. At this point, we'd added another little boy to the mix. Carl went off to work each day at the hospital doing his chaplain residency and I stayed home. That's when I started to notice.
It was little things at first. Why does he stand so close to the television? I'd ask myself. Why is he constantly walking on his toes? Why does he like to run back and forth over and over again?
They're just little quirks, I told myself. Look at how smart he is.
But I was concerned about his language. His words were not becoming sentences to communicate with us. I asked our new pediatrician about it. "Does he know 50 words?" he asked.
"He knows thousands of words," I replied.
"He's fine then," the doctor assured me.
But a month later, we spent some time with friends that had a boy just three months older than Daniel. This boy talked constantly about everything. He introduced himself and asked to play. He smiled. He laughed. Daniel stood too close to the television and ignored us all.
I tried not to panic but as soon as we got home, I called the pediatrician and demanded a speech evaluation. He referred us to our local early childhood intervention (ECI) program. The program, through our school district, would come out to our home and evaluate Daniel. The appointment was set for February; it was January.We waited and the evaluation weighed heavily on me. The worry was there and the fear. I wanted it to hurry up and come and never get there all at the same time. At the time, I was pregnant with our third (surprise) baby. Ben, our second, was just about a year old. Daniel's evaluation was to be that Wednesday.
The Sunday before, we went to church as we normally do. I dropped Daniel off in the nursery. We'd only been going to the church about four months so it wasn't uncommon for me to meet someone new. In the nursery that day was a woman named Jennifer. She wasn't supposed to be in there that day; she was covering for someone else. I also didn't know that Jennifer is a diagnostician for our local school district.
I remember excusing myself from the service a couple of times to peek in the nursery. Was he playing with other kids? Did he ask for anything? Was he okay?
After church was over, I headed over to get Daniel and I worked up the courage to ask Jennifer a question. "Daniel is being evaluated on Wednesday for speech," I said. "I just wondered how he was with the other kids? Did he talk with them? Did he play?"Jennifer stared at me for a moment and then let out a huge breath. "I've been praying all morning if I should stay something to you or not," she said.
And I knew.
She told me what she did for a living and she said other things about parallel play and eye contact, about walking on toes and lack of interest in the other kids. I only half listened.
I smiled and nodded appropriately and took Daniel's hand. I was quiet as we drove away from church and I remember pressing my forehead against the passenger window. The tears came; those were silent. I saved the wracking, deep sobs for when I got home and curled up in the fetal position on my bed.`
Everything changed with her words.
Maybe I always knew. Maybe some part of my brain already recognized that Daniel was different from other kids and that the difference was autism. But now, other people knew. They saw his differences too. For the rest of his life, the word autism will always be associated with him in some way. Things, life, will be harder for him because our world won't change for him; he has to change for the world. He'll be told he's wrong because of how he thinks and acts. He'll have to work harder to do things that come naturally to everyone else. People will confuse him because people are confusing. Everything changed.
And yet, nothing changed changed with her words.
Daniel was still Daniel. He was still the quiet boy who preferred books over people. He was still the sweet, smart boy that I loved. That did not change. He was still the child I had prayed for for two years. He was still the child I had longed for with my whole heart. He was still the child God gave us. That did not change. Nothing changed.
This day is seared in my brain, in some ways, life-changing and, in other ways, affirming what I'd probably always known. I don't think it's a coincidence that Jennifer was there in the nursery that day. God made it so. He knew I needed those words. He knew I needed to hear them and understand them, process them and take them into my heart. They weren't poetic or harsh, not beautiful or ugly, but they were important.
With them, everything changed. With them, nothing changed.
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