Its April 2nd. Autism Awareness Day. And while I am all for raising awareness concerning this disorder, this whole thing has become more about acceptance and celebration...and I simply cannot get behind that. I refuse to sit back and accept what has happened to my child. And celebrate? No. Absolutely not. I celebrate who he is every day...when he gets excited and flaps his hands, I do it along with him...when he masters a new skill or says a new word, we applaud his enormous efforts to overcome the obstacles that should never have been placed before him. We do celebrate our child and who he is. Heres the thing though...Im pretty sure he would still be the same wonderful child who likes cookies and Elmo and Dinosaur Train even if autism werent part of his life. Celebrate my precious son, YES. His diagnosis, NO! I refuse to allow anyone to make me feel guilty because of this. Fellow parents: when you were pregnant, bonding with your unborn child, did you have hopes and dreams and visions of what parenthood would look like? I did, and for us, those visions are not our reality. Should we celebrate the fact that our child slowly drifted away from us..that he stopped trying to talk..that he went from being excited to see his Daddy or his MiMi to being indifferent to the presence of other people..that he stopped smiling and waving at people in the grocery store..that he suddenly stopped making eye contact with other people..that he began having catastrophic meltdowns and slamming his head on cabinets and shopping carts because he simply cannot deal with his surroundings..that we have never and may never heard the words I love you from the person whom we adore and put all of our resources into? Are we honestly expected to celebrate these things? Are we really bad parents for feeling this way? We are not okay with this. We choose to neither accept nor celebrate it. He IS beautiful and wonderful and amazing..but autism is preventable and treatable, despite what is said by the mainstream medical community.
Posted on: Thu, 03 Apr 2014 01:35:09 +0000
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