On our autism journey, I stumbled through three stages of confusion. The first stage was when my son was really little. He couldn’t talk well, but he didn’t have other telltale markers for autism. His pediatrician, Early Intervention, preschool teachers and my mother insisted that he didn’t have autism. Instead, they told me that he had apraxia. Or maybe he was a genius. Perhaps I spoiled him. I’ll be forever grateful to a neurologist that I found when he was five, who gave us the real diagnosis. 

We walked in her office, and he climbed onto the examination table. She didn’t say anything for a while. She just watched him as he fiddled with a water bottle in his hand. He turned the bottle on its side and tried to decode the small print on the label. He was far more interested in the small print on the water label than he was in the doctor. Then she gave him a reading test and found that he was reading two grades above grade level. 

She smile at us, and asked, “has anybody ever said the word ‘autism’ to you before?”

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