Early Detection of Autism
My friend Mama over at The Elmo Wallpaper wrote a post a while back about the feeling that she is holding her breath waiting for the MMR shot to be over and for everything to be ok. I remember that same feeling. I had seen the scary stories and videos on daytime talk shows about children who were "normal" (whatever that means, right?) and happy one day, and then just disappeared into autism after receiving their MMR vaccine. I remember waiting in the days and weeks after that vaccine, watching my son to make sure he wasn't suddenly showing signs of autism.
Eventually, I breathed a sigh of relief and forgot about it, because there was no change at all after the vaccine. My son was still smiling and loving, like autistic people clearly weren't. My son was not autistic. When professionals started suggesting my son was autistic, I thought, "Well, that can't be right. He's happy. He's loving. He's engaged in the world around him." Autistic people never smile and don't get enjoyment from anything. I've seen the videos! Happy, smiling, engaged baby=normal. Unhappy, tantruming, oblivious baby=autistic.
You are all encouraged to laugh now, both at the irony of me looking for signs of change that would indicate that an autistic child had come down with autism and at my ignorance of what autism really means. It makes me laugh big loud belly laughs every time I think of it.
And it does, I'll admit, leave me wondering about those children who "disappear." My son, like all children, has changed as he has grown, but he's never shifted in an unrecognizable way; he has simply, gradually, become more himself. That means I have had a different experience, and a (what?) friendlier, I suppose you'd say, relationship with autism, than parents who have seen a radical change. Autism has never been an enemy, some interloper who stole away the child I love; it's an inseparable part of the child I love, and it always has been.
I wonder, as I look back through the lens of my own experience, if those children show signs that are hard to detect: perhaps even harder to spot than the things I detected in retrospect. Or if they really were like my daughter, who has led me to exclaim almost constantly from the moment she was born, "Ah, this is what most people's experience with children is like!" In particular, I'm thinking of two articles I read at DrGreene.com: one on lack of early childhood gestures, such as pointing, in children with autism and the other on how children with Asperger's align their heads relative to their bodies as babies. In addition, the eye movements of autistic babies and toddlers show they look at faces differently, and the degree to which they do this can indicate the severity of their disability. We all notice if our children are walking and talking on time, but I know I had to go back and try to reconstruct what age my son first pointed (definitely not before age one) after I read articles like these, and I have to admit I have no idea what he would have done as a baby if I had tilted his body at a 45 degree angle and I don't really know what his eye movements looked like. Are there more subtle signs that we parents pick up on, or don't?
I've never had a worry in the world about my daughter's development, in spite of the fact that she had a mild speech delay of her own. Was I picking up on subtle signs? Or was I just reassured by the lack of all the (retrospectively) obvious ones my son showed? I don't know. But I'm grateful to have two kids who are both wholly themselves and always have been.
This has nothing to do with autism, but while I'm linking to Dr. Greene, I learned from him that dark chocolate really does cure what ails you: including coughs and diarrhea. Given that children's cough medicines have been shown to do more harm than good, that means my kids get chocolate when they're sick, and so do I. Who's the best mama?
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