The last four months

Some of you may have noticed a change in the frequency and the tone of my recent posts, and a lot of you already know what's been going on with us the last four months. Even though I try to stay positive - at least when I'm "on the record" - we have been going through a super-challenging time with Jack. I haven't wanted to put it out there for everyone to see, because I felt I had no perspective while I was in the thick of it. But we are working through it, and I'm ready to record what we've been up to.

Jack has always been what I would call a high maintenance child. He can go from wildly happy to inconsolably upset in a matter of seconds, although I was always glad that at least he does have the wildly happy side. As he's gotten older, he's definitely become more particular and vocal about what he wants. If he doesn't get it, look out. He pitches the most terrible tantrums, full on flailing, banging his head on the ground, and shrieking at the top of his lungs. I know that a lot of this is normal for his age. It isn't called the "terrible twos" for nothing. But with Jack, it's always just seemed more: more intense, more frequent, more long lasting. I recognize a lot of me in him, and I figured that it was part of his personality.

Then one week in April, we had three spectacularly disastrous playdates in a row. Jack completely flipped out whenever another child or a baby came too near him. If he even saw one running toward him, he would scream as if he had been set on fire. If the screaming didn't work to make the kids back off, he would shove them. His behavior that week was the first time I thought to myself, "What if there is something really wrong with him?"

After talking it over with some friends, I e-mailed our pediatrician about my concerns. Jack's doctor is typically really laidback, and I expected (hoped) he would say, "That's totally normal!" Instead, he responded that Jack's behavior was a little more intense than he was used to seeing for his age and that he recommended that we have him tested at the San Diego Regional Center.

At the Regional Center, they put Jack through a series of tests, and they concluded there was something there that needed further investigation. Based on the quality of his answers and our own self-report of his behaviors, they said they couldn't say either way that there wasn't something wrong. They recommended he see a child psychologist.

The child psychologist's assessment was pretty much the same sort of thing. She said that Jack was very advanced in certain respects, but that the social anxiety, intensity of his tantrums, and inflexibility to change were points of concern. She felt she could rule out a diagnosis of classic autism, but she thought there was a possibility that he had an autism spectrum disorder, like Asperger's.

Now, throughout this entire process, Asperger's was the one diagnosis that I feared most, because I felt it was the most likely. It's such an awful feeling of helplessness, guilt, and fear for the future when you contemplate that something could be truly wrong with your child. I went through the entire gamut of "Did something I do cause this?" to "What's going to happen to him now?"

At this point, a course of therapy was recommended that includes speech therapy to deal with an auditory processing delay, occupational therapy to help with sensory integration and low muscle tone (see my previous post), and behavioral therapy to help with the tantrums, anxiety, and behavioral rigidity. We started the entire therapy regimen a few weeks ago.

So far, the best thing that has come out of the therapy is that the behavioral therapist has completely ruled out any diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder in Jack. This, of course, is a huge relief. Part of the reason I hadn't been writing about this was because I didn't want others to prejudge him, to start thinking of him as a "special needs" child, even though at one point I almost started thinking of him that way myself. I know there are still challenges ahead, but knowing that they are mostly due to facets of his personality that can hopefully be harnessed and redirected rather than an incurable developmental disorder makes it all seem much less daunting.

But it's definitely been a lot to process and sometimes it's overwhelming. Among other things, we are setting in place a new disciplinary system, integrating occupational therapy exercises into our day, and possibly starting Jack in preschool in the next couple of weeks. I'm sure I'll be writing about all of these at some point.

When I first started this blog, I wanted it to be a record of Jack's milestones, my personal journey as his mother, and our family's collective experience of watching Jack grow. It was always my intention to some day print out all my entries into a scrapbook of some sort to keep for Jack when he's older. As such, I hoped to keep my posts positive and light. I never want Jack to think that I feel anything less than incredibly blessed and grateful to have him in my life. But that doesn't change the fact that parenthood can be tough. What I hope he always knows, though, is that if he exasperates, exhausts, frustrates, and infuriates me more than I ever thought possible, he has also inspired a love, a joy, and a pride that is beyond anything I ever imagined.