No Thanks

I feel like over the past four years since Owen's diagnosis, I've gone through the fear and anger and all the standard emotions, and I've arrived at a place where it's just part of our lives and usually it doesn't bother me that much. I don't curse autism daily for making my baby's life harder than it needs to be. He's healthy and happy and we're lucky for that.

So I was a little caught off guard this week when we got called into a meeting where the school informed us that even though Owen is smart - really, really smart - they think that his difficulty with expressing himself through writing (and the subsequent meltdowns it causes) will pose too much of a challenge for him to enter into the gifted program next year.

The truth is that we had the same reservations and hadn't even submitted his application to the program until we got his phenomenal test scores back. And yet...having the school tell me that put me on the defensive. It's not fair. His amazing mind is in there working away, but he just can't write a paragraph about it. (Well, he maybe could, but it's hard enough that he doesn't want to and will tell you so.)

And it made me mad, like something was being taken away from him. Like autism is taking something away from him. And I haven't felt that way for a long time.

And then I felt a little bit greedy because I know how lucky we are. Like the me from four years would be telling me to be grateful because it could be so much worse. I should be happy that he is doing so well. I should be happy that we're even talking about the gifted program. And I am.

But should I really feel grateful? Grateful that this mysterious disorder hasn't taken more from him? Like it's some penance and he's getting off easy? No.

I've come a long way, but I'm not ready to thank autism for anything.

Baby, I'm Amazed

At the risk of being totally annoying and bragging about how smart my kids are, I wanted to share this image.

It's the math assessment Owen brought home the other day. You can see that he was supposed to write the fraction for each part of the hexagon, which was divided into thirds by the dotted line.

He got it wrong, writing 1/6, when the answer was 1/3.

His teacher noted: "1/3 but I can see how he thought of it as a 3D shape - so I didn't count as wrong."

He got it wrong because he assumed it was a 3D drawing of a cube and indicated that each side would therefore be 1/6 of its surface area. I'm pretty sure they don't teach that in first grade.

When I went into full-blown labor at 26 weeks 5 days gestation, the nurse in the antepartum ward -- seeing how frantic I became when told that I would be delivering that morning -- told me that her neighbor had her daughter early, too, and now that kid was grown up and graduating from high school. "And that kid is smart!" she insisted, presumably to reassure me that my preemies weren't doomed to fail in life (had I been in my right mind, I might have explained that my children's future intelligence was not my most pressing concern at that moment).

So when I get these little demonstrations of how smart they really are - added to the fact that their recent standardized test scores indicate that they're not just smart, but good test takers, to boot - it makes me more than proud. It amazes me. They amaze me. And I am so excited about where those big brains will take them.