Health & Living / Women/ Parenting

Being a mom is life altering; no wonder tradition calls it a rebirth of sorts. But being mom to a kid with any kind of LD (learning disability), now that’s a roller coaster ride to hell and back. The toughest part of this journey, for me, has not been all the assessments, therapy or the work needed to bring up my boy. Its been the journey I’ve needed to take within my own head. Moving from saying, “my baby is not normal, therefore he’s abnormal” to finally reaching a point where I can say, “my kid is not ordinary, therefore he is extraordinary”. This has been my trip…..
Rewind to August 2002. Married for about 2 years. Holidaying in Mauritius. Started drinking on the flight to and stopped on the flight back. One never-ending party. And one slip up. No fears, I mean, hey, only in Eastmancolour hindi films do women get knocked up after ek pal ki bhool. But what do you know, we were gonna be parents. And, surprises never end, we were thrilled to boot. Our son happened with alarming ease…well….if one could discount 18 hours of labor. But whattheheck!!! He was worth all of it n more. All the expected problems happened….. colds and loosies and pukes. All of it stressed us out, but we were ‘prepared’. Funny how life screws our best laid beliefs.

A few things about my son did seem unnerving very early on, we just kept justifying things and saying ‘baccha hai’. He was obsessed with fans, circling objects. He’d wave his arms about. Today I know the term used is ‘hand flapping’ but boss, it just seemed like an excited wave then. Well, we are an excitable family. He’d not respond when we called him at times….we assumed he was a focused little fellow, couldn’t be distracted. Not like his mom you know. By the time he was 18 months or so he could recognize all the letters of the alphabet. A couple of months more and he knew his numbers and plenty of colours. Well, most smart kids do right? But what was weird was that most of it he picked up on his own, watching some DVD. Soon he could recognize flags of about 40 odd countries. Same DVD. What seemed odd was a kid who showed a lot of intelligence should have developed in an ‘all round’ manner. But here was my son, he’d learn 10 new words a day, but had no idea how to string them together and make sense. He’d repeat every thing said to him, entire phrases in the same cadence/tone it was said, but seem unable to use them in conversation. Technically websites said two word sentences were enough. Well, he formed 5 or 10 word sentences but they made no sense. Ex: me - baby, do you want biscuits? He - do you want biscuits? (vigorously nodding or shaking his head in denial). He could not even use yes or no. Incidentally this kind of repetitive conversation is called ‘echolalia’.
He turned two and we left to join my husband on ship. I’ve always believed life gives us signals about directions we need to look at, paths we must go on, but we tend to ignore them. All the ‘educated’ officers on board found our boy so endearing. His hand waving was a source of much laughter, but no one thought it was odd. One day this ‘uneducated’ crewman came up to me and said, “maam this thing your son does with his hands, have you shown it to any doc?” man, did I bristle at his impertinence. I mean hey, what could he know. he said, “maam im only telling you as my son has just recovered from stomach cancer and what we thought was regular indigestion was cancer…”. Signal 1. Soon after that we got a Readers Digest on board which listed possible symptoms of autism. My boy fitted a lot. Signal 2.

We got home and spoke to our pediatrician. Read up on the net. If anyone’s interested, go through the DSM IV criteria for autism. One thing that seemed clear after reading up was that he was not Autistic, but there were definitely issues. Finally, we made an appointment with the psychologist and took him for what was going to be our first step towards his future…