Okay, so he's an adult now, but he's still autistic. And I can tell you that from the day he was born -- and quite frankly, looking back on it, from before he was born -- he was different. I had the good fortune to belong to a support group of brand new first time parents. There were twelve couples in the group who were having babies, along with two sets of parent mentors who already had children. The group formed when we were all around six months pregnant, and stayed together for two years. It was wonderful, because it gave every parent in the group a good and realistic view of parenthood and babies, and normal child development.
While all children truly are unique and special, my son was simply not quite like the others. But the differences were subtle enough that it was not possible to put a name to it in the early years. All I could tell was that he was different, mostly in subtle ways. He didn't cry as much as normal babies, which was nice. He didn't startle as readily. He focussed on things intently in a way that most babies did not. He learned to talk pretty much on schedule. He was a trifle behind the curve, but only a trifle. Plus, he was a boy, and boys typically talk a little later than girls. He crawled at seven months which is a bit early. He took his first steps at twelve months, and walked consistently on his own at fourteen months, both totally average.
But still, he was different. He didn't wave bye-bye. He didn't point at things. I learned to tell him, "Follow my finger" when I pointed at something.
I was a middle-class stay at home mom, so he got lots of attention from me. I enrolled him in a pre-school program when he was 18 months old because we lived in a town house community where there were no other children around during the daytime, and I wanted him to socialize with other kids. He did well in the program, but with an asterisk. Like when the teacher would read stories to the kids, after a while all of the others would drift away to do something else and he'd still be sitting there, totally entranced. He NEVER was any kind of a discipline problem. Never. He got along with the other kids just fine.
Fast forward to high school. We'd moved him from an excellent public school to an even better private school (which we thankfully could afford) because of social issues in the public school. He'd become socially isolated, had no friends, was shunned in the cafeteria at lunch time. I'll skip over the details of the decision to move him to the private school and just say that he did incredibly well there. At the private school academics were valued even more than sports. He was always small for his age, so sports were just not his thing. But academics, especially science, were. He did knowledge bowl starting in 7th grade, and always got some sort of medal. In 9th grade he added science bowl, and at the local competition, far and away the largest in the country, the team he was on always placed in the top 8. Freshman year his team (the D or fourth team from his school) was in 8th place. Sophomore year he was on the C team, and they came in 4th. Keep in mind this is out of more than fifty local teams. Junior year he's on the A team and they go to National Science Bowl in Washington DC. Same thing his senior year.
But he's always different, never quite like the other kids. Somewhere at the beginning of his senior year of high school, in a conversation with another mom, who happened to have two severely autistic children, she said, "Sheila, I think your son may have Asperger's. You should research it." I went online and it was as if they'd studied him before writing the DSM about Asperger's.
I want to emphasize that there was NEVER a sudden change in his behavior, just the more or less typical evolution over time, as a kid grows. He was ALWAYS different, from the day he was born. I get so angry at those who suggest it was vaccinations that I can barely contain myself. Look, if you decide not to vaccinate your kid because you think vaccines aren't necessary, then fine. Don't vaccinate. But trust me, either your kid is autistic or your kid is not autistic, and it has NOTHING to do with the vaccinations.
As a side note, this son also has alopcia areata, an auto-immune disorder that causes hair loss. When he was four years old all his hair fell out, and he's been totally bald ever since. He actually has the most extreme form, alopcia areata totalis which means he has no hair whatsoever: no hair on his head, no eyebrows, no body hair, nada. He's never had to shave. Which means from a very early age he looked quite different from other children, which is one of the reasons it took us so long to figure out he is profoundly different from others. But vaccinations had nothing to do with it.
Oh, and don't tell me it's okay if my little kid is totally bald because so many grown men shave their heads. Those men can always stop shaving and the hair will grow back. My son's hair will never grow back.
And another thing. My bald, autistic son has a younger brother. Younger brother is one of the most sociable human beings on the planet, and he had all his vaccinations. Although he did also lose his hair to alopecia areat only at age ten, not age four like his older brother. Although he does also have the universalis form. Isn't genetics amazing?
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