the signs

It's funny, how there is really not one particular sign. No matter how much information you read, look at on billboards or see on television. There is not one thing that tells you my son is autistic. It is a collection of signs. Many of those signs may seem insignificant by themselves, but when you add them all up, they mean something else. There is not one autistic child that is the same.

Last summer, while I was attending a class, a fellow student of mine was having a rough evening. How the whole conversation started, I cannot remember now, but she was seeing signs in her preschool son. I told her about what we went through only a year before. I remember not realizing till that moment how long it had been. I am sure that night I seemed like a pro. I was calm and confident. I was ok. She wanted to know every step we had taken. Every doctor we had seen. What was said. How we handled it. How Ollie is now. My fellow student was a preschool teacher herself and was aware of many of the things I was talking about, but it all seemed new to her too, or a little unreal maybe. She was describing the signs that her son was showing to me. All I could tell her was that Ollie didn't have any of those signs and of course her son didn't have any of Ollie's signs. What I did do was explain to her how everything happened. What to expect. How many doctors we had seen and from what she told me, she was on the same track and doctors that we saw. I think I helped her a little that night. She seemed a little more at ease when we were leaving. I hope I did help her a little. I could only remember how confusing that time had been for me. In some ways that time was a short time ago, and in other ways it had seemed a very long time indeed. Oh, and yes, her son did have autism to.