Lessons in Parenting: Autism and Acceptance

So this week, I learned a lot about Autism Speaks (I won’t go into that now).

Hearing what adult people with autism thought of not just Autism Speaks but how they viewed autism really made me think.  They do not want to be “cured”…they agree that there is nothing wrong with them, that they simply function in a different way than other people.

This is something that has been heavy on my mind a lot. I do not see Zoe as someone to cure.  I have started to reject this notion of “curing”.  Indeed, this is something I’ve felt for a long time, since Amelia was very young.

To fully understand this my thinking on this concept, you must first know that my first child, Amelia, has Down syndrome.  More accurately, though, she has Mosaic Down syndrome, so that throws in a wild card.  Now that we know that brain cells can regenerate and since she has a mix of 46 and 47 chromosone cells, can she improve? It’s an idea I never thought I could place any hope in.

My thinking now, though, is that “can she improve” is the wrong question.  The right question is, Who is she?

When I think about Zoe and her autism, it’s the same thing.  And yes, we are considering delving deeper into biomedical treatment, but I think of it in this way: we are not curing or denying the autism. We are clearing up muddied up parts of her brain.

With Amelia, she has made amazing improvements in school since we’ve eliminated chocolate.  This in NO way makes her less Amelia-ish, it just makes her sharper. I feel like she has come out of  a brain fog.  Don’t get me wrong, she still struggles with many things, but I am psyched to see subtraction skills and drawings of simple machines.

Zoe, too, has made great strides, even with so many hiccups for the diet, like her eating the cheese off of our hamburgers.  She has  been speaking a lot more, asking for things appropriately, trying out new words, counting as high as 13, obeying more, and she can even put on her clothes (shirt too) when she wants! She’s been calmer, and had less tantrums and less aggression. Can she accomplish more if we go further with the dieting restrictions? Or is this just a growth spurt?

I do not know. I do not care either.  I look at Zoe and I see how good she is with gadgets, and I glimpse the future engineer she could be.  If this way that her brain works helps her in some way get to an interesting future, what is wrong with that?

I have strong feelings about this, as you can tell.  We are taught, from the time we are so little, in subtle ways, that different is not right.  I’ve always felt there was something wrong with that.  I believe there is something that God  loves about the “different”. In fact, I think He adores the uniqueness in all of us.

I have grown to love the differences in my kids.  In the past, I’ve paid lip service to never wanting to change them. Today, I embrace it with all my heart.  I love them precisely as they are, and I will do everything I can to see that they live a good, happy, and healthy life.