I realized today I am approaching this all wrong.

Sure the information is great, as parents of autistic children we search for that autism symptom checklist. We look for every little piece of information, that every grasp of hope that our child, our wonderful precious child will outgrow this thing, this thing that consumes their very being.

We read all the books and try all the meds, we go to all the specialists I think just hoping and wishing and praying someone will come along and tell us what we thought is all wrong, that our child is not autistic. In the end comes the pain and heartache in knowing your child may never reach their full potential, in knowing your child may never have a friend or playmate, in knowing our child is trapped within a box they can`t escape and can`t open up to let us in.

So here`s the beginning of my own story in raising an autistic child.

Right from the day I brought him home he was different. He didn`t react to the world around him the same way that other children did. He was quiet and calm and seemed so content in his own little world. Nothing seemed to bother him, perhaps I realize now that was because very little got through to him. In the start I blamed myself. I had a rough pregnancy, maybe that was why…or maybe it was because my water had broken so early and I spent so long in that hospital bed that I couldn`t take another day of it and signed myself out….the blame went on as he grew. Maybe if I had done things differently he would be different now.

I love my special guy with all my heart but raising him has been far from easy. He didn`t start crawling till he was 11 months old. By then the older two children were walking. Specialists said he had attachment issues. They made me feel guilty and hurt. They made me feel even more like it was my fault. Like he was the way he was cause I wasn`t loving him. But I loved him more then I could. I try to hug him and hold him but he never seemed there. I missed his first steps…the long awaited milestone passed without me being there. I missed a lot of his firsts because they thought something was wrong with my parenting, that he was acting like this because I wasn`t raising him right. Too many times I believed them, too many times I thought perhaps there right. But never did I give up. I am his mother.

After a long hard fight he was back home with us. It only got harder from there. He was distant and delayed, barely spoke at all. He grunted and growled, I wondered what I did wrong. It took a long time to see I wasn`t doing anything wrong, he was just living in his autistic world.