I'm sitting in a room at a little square table with three other adults. The room is small, the table is small, but the chairs are big and it makes the whole scene slightly comical but this is a serious meeting so I'm not supposed to giggle. There are two therapists and a case manager...the kinds of people who have a lot of letters after their names...and we're there to discuss my son, Nate, who has autism. He had an assessment the week before and these are the results. They've prepared these graphs for me to look at and a report that explains the graphs to me and shows the areas Nate will work on and his first set of goals. It's overwhelming. I don't even know what some of these phrases mean but I'm just nodding along and smiling at everyone like I read these reports in my sleep because I'm afraid if I stop and take a moment and really THINK about what all of this means I'll ruin my mascara. All I'm seeing is that there are three levels that they use to sort kids' abilities into. Level one is from 0-18 months, Level two is 18-30 months, and Level three is 30-48 months. And my child, who is 39 months, the majority of his skills lie in Level one. I'm confused because I thought he was really progressing. He's been starting to speak more and he'll mimic just about anything you say (swanky term: echoic ability), and he can point to a bunch of body parts when prompted. And yet this chart is telling me that he's still at least a year behind. But the caseworker and the therapist are smiling and telling me how great this is and what a good job he did at the assessment. I'm not sure if it's because he really did do a great job or they're trying to help me along in my quest to not ruin my makeup. Either way, the word 'overwhelming' is a bit underwhelming in its ability to describe how I'm currently feeling. It's taken over two years to get to this point of knowing what's going on with Nate and how to help him. We've seen ENTs, audiologists, speech pathologists, pediatricians, Early On workers, started him in a special ed preschool, and had him tested every which way before everyone finally agreed that Nate's autistic. Then we fought our insurance company for a few months and sat on the wait list for the therapy place for even longer.
And so now we're here, at the last step before he officially starts ABA in two weeks and I'm freaking out. Nate's scheduled for ABA therapy five days a week. FIVE DAYS A WEEK! And Wednesdays he'll be there for a full seven hours so we can get the extra hours in since he also has preschool. So until school gets out in a few weeks he'll have sixteen hours of preschool and nineteen hours of therapy. Plus travel. When you add it all up my three year old is going to be putting in close to a forty hour week. How is this okay? How am I supposed to just let him go and sit in a room with these technicians and hang with them instead of me? Is this really necessary?
But I know it's necessary because when your kid walks into a room an immediately points out any light that isn't on or burned out and tells you it's broken and you need a new light...you might have an autistic child. And if he then has to scan the room to see what your outlets look like and if you have any toys he can swing or spin...well, then you might have MY autistic child :)
So this will be our life now. Nate will be there five days a week and my husband, our four other kids, and I will be shuttling him around and finding fun things to do locally while he's receiving therapy. Or, as our nine year old puts it, 'learning to become more human like us.' Ahhh, life.
