It has been a year and a half since we received the official diagnosis about E’s autism. I spent the better part of the first 6 months after the diagnosis denying everything about it; I didn’t even dare breathe the word autism and her name in the same sentence. It was physically painful for me to reconcile the giggly and vibrant 2.5 year old in front of me with the stereotypical image of an autistic child I had in my mind. She was affable, Typical Autistic Child (let’s say TAC) was not. She loved physical touch and attention; TAC did not. She had pretend play and understood how to engage socially to a certain extent; TAC did not. I could go on and on. Friends and family members shared my indignation with me; how dare the doctors misdiagnose my beautiful child with this looming disorder that will follow her for the rest of her life? 

I was 5 months pregnant with D at the time and had other pressing concerns regarding him taking up my attention as well. It felt like too much at once for me to deal with and the only way I figured how to cope was to ignore. Be an ostrich; stick my head in the sand and pretend like nothing is happening. Perhaps I will wake up tomorrow or next week or next month and find that everything has been a giant mistake.

Husband and I put E on an insanely long wait list to see a highly recommended specialist who could give us a second opinion. We rejected suggestions of therapy other than speech therapy since verbal delays were what set this entire thing in motion to being with. We hugged her and kissed her and told her the doctors could shout autism all they wanted at her but we knew better.

We were wrong.

Of course, I always knew we were wrong. Deep inside, I understood that even though she didn’t act and look like a “typical” autistic child (is there even such a thing?), her developmental delays and issues ran deeper than just needing an extra half year to catch up to the rest of her peers. I have experience in early childhood education and even if she fit more on the mild side of the autistic spectrum, I knew in my heart that the doctors were not wrong to have placed her on there. When my head and my heart finally caught up to each other it was devastating. I was at home nursing our newborn and I felt so utterly hopeless. It felt as though I’d been standing on the edge of a steep precipice for months, begging God to please spare me the journey through the valley. I could sense His hand sovereignly guiding our family and saying, “It’s okay; I’ll equip you with everything you’ll need to navigate this, and I’m giving this to you because it’s good for you” and yet I stood there at the edge, unwilling to jump into hole, scared witless and begging, begging, begging him to please, take it away. “If this is the cup you’ve given for us to drink, then blessed be Your name and I know You’ll have a greater purpose for it all, but please… don’t make me drink from it.” 

Once I accepted that indeed, autism and special needs WAS the cup that God was giving to our family, I dealt with a lot of guilt over wasting the precious months that could have been spent on early intervention for her. There were months of therapy that we denied E simply because we were too scared/ashamed/prideful/hurt to imagine a world where we’d be parents of an autistic child. It didn’t jive with what I’d planned for my life when I thought of my future. Of course, God always knows better, doesn’t He? 🙂

2014 was a big year of transitions for our family. We welcomed baby D, started intense therapy sessions for E (everything we could get our hands on), and sold our old house/bought a new one (I say that like it was so simple but the selling/buying process was long and SO PAINFUL!!). All the while I’ve allowed these words and thoughts to marinate in my mind. My hands have been itching to write, to release, but until I was ready to make the time to sit and type, it was going to have to wait. Now that D is 14 months old and sleeping better at night, I feel like I’m ready and wanting to start letting the words flow out again. Already, just a short year and a half into this journey as an autism mommy, I can see the pruning that God is doing in my heart. I would never have chosen this for myself, but I can still confidently say that my God is good. He’s good because He knows the deepest darkest idols of my heart clearer than I do; He cares for the condition of my soul more than He cares for my comfort on this side of eternity. And most importantly, because the Bible promises this and I stand on the truths of the Bible alone, I know that all this will come to my ultimate good in one way or another; God will use our autism story to bring Himself glory. If being used by Him in this manner brings Him more glory than my life ever could have without the autism, then my heart praises Him for loving me enough to do this. I know the condition of my depraved heart well enough to know that without autism, I’d probably be loving this world, this temporary little home, this little vaporous blip of life, more than it deserved to be loved.

These days, it’s still difficult sometimes to talk about E and autism in the same sentence. There are days when the words catch in my throat and my heart sinks a little and my eyes well up. Being a special needs parent is hard, there’s just no sugar coating it. But there are also days, weeks even, when I can talk about it joyfully, knowing that we’re in this precisely because this is where God wants us to be. I can even tell you that there are moments when I get excited because I’m curious to know where God is going to take us through all this and how, ultimately, He will use this to point us and others to HIM. It’s like being in the first chapter of an awesome book by your favorite author, knowing that the story will be amazing but having no idea what the story itself will be. I’m hoping to blog more consistently and regularly now exactly for this reason; to document evidences of God’s grace towards us as we navigate this path. Hopefully at the end of all this (who knows when that will be? 50 years from now?) there will be an amazing testimony of God’s faithfulness, awesomeness, and goodness for us to share and others to be encouraged by.