Dear Stranger
Your son's autistic, just like mine.
by Amy Lutz
September 13, 2007
At first, I thought he was just excited to be there.
He ran right into the middle of the circle, beaming, as if to announce: now the music class may begin. And we, the adults waiting with our babies and our toddlers for the teachers to start the "Hello" song, couldn't help but smile back.
It wasn't my usual music class. Because we had missed a session, my sister Keri and I had decided to take my year-old twins and her sixteen-month-old son to a make-up class on a different day. We didn't know any of the families. But of course we cooed at the babies, and clapped for them when they proudly put their sticks away without help, as they were all starting to do.
Except for Ben, the boy from the beginning of class. He wasn't following along with the teachers like the other children. Instead, he spun wildly to the music, or ran in happy circles around the room. Sometimes he would drop into his mother's lap for a hug, but he wouldn't come when she called him. I recognized this pattern of behaviors immediately: I recognized this pattern of behaviors immediately: Ben was autistic. And his mother didn't know yet. Ben was autistic. And what was also apparent was that his mother didn't know yet.
My eight-year-old son, Jonah, the oldest of my five children, is also autistic. Watching Ben was like watching Jonah at music class when he was two, when I still thought he spent most of the class playing with the window blinds because he just wasn't as interested in music as my friend's daughter. I knew nothing about autism then. But after six years with Jonah, even my sister recognized the signs; when Ben started vocalizing in a consonant-free, almost shrieky way, she leaned over and whispered, "Spectrum?," a shorthand way of asking if I thought he was on the autistic spectrum.
"Definitely," I whispered back. Then, "Do you think I should say something?"
"No," Keri said emphatically. Maybe, she added, the mother already knew.
But I was positive the mother didn't know. I had overheard one of the music teachers observing that Ben reminded him of his grown son, who had ADHD as a boy. "Don't say that," Ben's mother said, laughing nervously. That's why I was so sure. To mothers of autistic children, an ADHD diagnosis would be nothing, a minor bump in the developmental road they would swap for in a heartbeat.
Keri was so alarmed by the possibility I might approach Ben's mother that I didn't say anything. Ben was twenty months old. He would be back to the doctor for his two-year checkup in four months. Surely his pediatrician would notice such a classic constellation of symptoms and refer his mother to a specialist for an evaluation.
©2007 Amy Lutz and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Amy S.F. Lutz's work has appeared in dozens of
literary journals, including Cream City Review, The American
Poetry Review, Puerto del Sol, and Mid-American Review. She and
her husband have five children. She and her sister chronicle their two-family household in the blog whoelsewantstoliveinmyhouse.com |
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