I'm Not A Doctor in meh...

…but I probably could have been a great one. That’s my problem. I am a person who doesn’t know how to encourage herself. Well, part of my problem. The other part is that I wasn’t guided toward anything other than to stay home and take care of my mother.

But that’s not what this is about.

There’s been a new commercial on tv, I’d say for about a few weeks now. A little boy talking about how he was in a world by himself until other people came to help him. An autism commercial. My son and I were watching it and he was listening intently and when it was over he asked, “Do I have Asperger’s” or maybe “Am I autistic?” I said perhaps you are. Thing is, I’d been wondering about my son as of late.

As he was growing up I had no idea about autism. Then as he got older, the only form you saw on tv was that children didn’t want to be touched or they screamed when you got into their personal space and they didn’t look at you. My son always looked at me, he loved to hug and cuddle and still does with me. I just thought he was so freaking smart for a little boy. He made some friends, but as he got older they waned. He is an outgoing kid. He is a depressed kid. He has this strong sense of things that should be fair, but he also has a knack for trying to judge how other people think while being totally off the mark. He makes judgments that inevitably make things harder on himself. He never asks for help in school because “the teacher doesn’t have time because all the other kids are rowdy.” Or the usual kid standbys: the teacher doesn’t like me, etc.

At his latest IEP meeting, one of the diagnosis was that his “processor is slow”. My son is not a forward thinker. He is the quintessential definition of living in the here and now. He is a big picture thinker, but when it comes to mapping out the route to the big picture he gets frustrated. I’ve told him everything he does will require work. You can’t get something for nothing. So now here we are.

I talked to him yesterday because I was thinking about his friends. The one guy that’s been his friend for the longest, D, is actually a jerk. He had a friend, JB, stay the weekend with us. D came over and all was cool that night. Now it’s always hard to get D to come over to hang out these days because he is always just so busy with working out and school work and wrestling, which is understandable when it’s not a weekend. But now that JB was over, he was all over my house. Well, this past Sunday, my son was in the living room playing one game system, JB was in son’s room playing his own. D came over and hung out in son’s room with JB. Okay. Then son went upstairs and was treated like a stranger in his own house. Then he came back downstairs with me and I noticed the change in his demeanor. I was pissed, but I have to let him handle his own shit because he is a young man now. We talked about it after JB left. I told him, that we are the last of a dying breed when it comes to how we treat our friends vs. how our friends treat us. I then told him that the down side to this is that we inevitably will end up in a competition of who does what for the other in some kind of way and it’s actually exhausting, but it is nice to have SOME kind of reciprocity. Everyone is not considerate. Sometimes they don’t know they are being inconsiderate because they haven’t been taught that. I told him I wasn’t really taught to be considerate, but a lot of the way I am is because I know how I want to be treated so I treat people the right way whether or not they return the love.

But anyway, I want to call his doctor to ask about how to get a diagnosis for Asperger’s. Up to now I just thought he was the best kid/momma’s boy ever. Now I think he is the best kid/momma’s boy that may have Asperger’s. It will never change my deep rooted love for him.

And on that note, be kind to one another just because. :-)

Kindest regards,
Sister