My dad is a writer. I am not. Yet, here I am starting a blog. My decision to start a blog was twofold. One, to get my therapist off my back, who is always talking about me needing to journal. Two, to talk about the good, the ugly, and the bad about autism.

I remember a time years ago when the word autistic in my brain registered as a punchline for quirky behavior or a word that induced sympathy for the less fortunate. I grew up with what I would consider a special sort of sympathy for children with disabilities (despite my reference to stupid jokes above). But I never wanted a child with autism. It feels icky to write but I challenge you to find a pregnant woman who is praying that her unborn baby will be diagnosed with autism.

My son Max is just shy of 3 years old and was diagnosed with level 3 autism when he was just 15 months old. I always knew. People thought I was crazy or that my logic was due to struggling with a rough bout of post-partum depression, but I knew. The signs of him being different showed up early on as not making eye contact, not babbling, always upset, having motor planning issues, and the worst of all, not smiling.

He was so unhappy as a baby. He wouldn’t sleep for more than thirty minutes at a time. He learned to roll over and then lost the ability. He never crawled. He didn’t even blow raspberries. However, the true gut punch was that he wouldn’t smile. I didn’t even ask God for a laugh; I asked him for my child to smile for me.

Eventually, Max smiled for me. The relief of finally getting a smile, eye contact, or a babble from my child was short-lived. I took Max to CHOA for a PT appointment when he was close to 9 months old because he couldn’t crawl and had trouble rolling to the left.

The therapist asked me the regular intake questions and took copious notes while observing him. I blurted out “I think he is autistic”. I expected her to brush me off and tell me that there is no way to see signs of autism this early. The opposite happened. She confirmed that she too thought he was showing some early signs of autism and pulled strings to get us enrolled in a trial study at the Marcus Autism Institute.

We started speech, occupational therapy, and physical therapy while waiting for our formal autism evaluation at 16 months. Science tells us that at 16 months a clinician can diagnose autism correctly 86% of the time. I went into that evaluation hoping for an autism diagnosis so we could remove some of the insurance caps for services, but I didn’t really want him to be autistic. I wanted him to be in 14% of kids that diagnosis was incorrect but it wasn’t.

In the long run, things will be okay.