It seems like yesterday that #1 came into our lives. Unbelievably, he's close to 9 years old and in the 3rd grade.
#1 is an extraordinarily intelligent little guy, but he's always had difficulty dealing with life on a social level. At 3, we noticed that he became fixated on certain things and couldn't stop talking about them -- trains, space shuttles, railroad crossings -- and simply couldn't grasp the meaning of our facial expressions. I viewed this as a cute idiosyncracy that he'd outgrow (although it did get a tad frustrating that he'd laugh when I'd scream at him not to use our CDs as skates on the hardwood floors). My wife Pretty did not.
Over my objections, she arranged for a 3-hour evaluation of #1 conducted by a team of Child Psychiatrists. After studying his play & thinking patterns, they arrived at a diagnosis: Aspergers Syndrome, a mild form of infantile autism.
They handed us various psychiatric abstracts describing this condition: "Average to superior intelligence... Disinhibited in social situations... Profound difficulties understanding abstract concepts, etc." Yep, that was him.
However, they also provided lists of therapists and instructional booklets on how to secure additional government funding for his "Special Education" needs. WHOA there, Nellie! No f'ing way was my kid going to ride on the short bus right out of the chute! I envisioned some Matt Dillon-like teacher putting him in a cage and calling him "Mongo" while the students pelted him with rotting fruit and poked him with sticks...
We were two years away from kindergarten so I agreed to enroll him into a very supportive school in Minneapolis. Pretty quit her job to focus on this bump in the road, and within a year, he was much better able to cope with the world around him.
After a huge battle with our public school system who damn near kidnapped him to secure their extra cash (subject for another post), we placed him in the local Catholic school.
He's had his ups and downs, I'm sure just like any young pup, and to this day he displays minor difficulties in reading social situations. However, he has surrounded himself with a nice core of good boys and last week was invited to his first slumber party. This morning he couldn't stay in his skin, excitedly jabbering about all the junk food he was going to eat and the video games he was going to play.
Have fun, #1. If you get lonely, I'll be sleeping by the phone.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
#1's a good guy. I'll come play an obsessed game of roknbok with him any day. Kind of reminds me of my dad when he sits me down for a thirty minute statistical analysis of who's going to win the Breeders Cup. My eyes start to cross after 15 minutes, but its all good.
Tonight is just the start. Before you know it, #1 will find a family that will take him in, let him sleep over all the time and feed him as much as he wants. Kind of like how your family did with me. Hopefully, it will not culminate with him pilfering bottles of Johnny Walker from the pantry.
Aspergers is the great catch-all Syndrome. Its funny that when you read about it, the experts say that everyone with Aspergers is different. In fact the list of symptoms are so long that pretty much anyone interested in a hobby for more than 5 minutes "suffers" from Aspergers. We don't say that about other things. People who have the flu generally have the same few symptoms. Same with people who have the mumps. Yet with Aspergers, these rules do not apply. Instead Aspergers is used to identify personality traits that are thought unusual from the norm... the same personality traits that usually distinguish greatness from mediocre. I am sure that Alexander the Great's tendency to not to lose his nerve in the face of insurmountable odds is... yes, somewhat inhuman and therefore a symptom of Aspergers.
Just as all the slaves stood up and pronouced that they were Spartacus, so too should we all stand up and proclaim that we all have Aspergers.
Sloanasaurus, I'm thinking of inviting you to guest post on this endeavor. Hilarious.
Fact of the matter is #1 displays the identical anti-social traits as my engineer father, who will disappear into his hole for 3 days to work on some combustional analysis of NO2... My dad loves that #1's only black mark on his report cards are "Does not work well in groups".
MM - It is all good. See comment to Sloanasaurus.
Eric - You forgot mucking up the dashboard with muddy feet. And as for the booze, we can now blame that on Bush, right?
Post a Comment