Our Journey - Part I

My daughter was born in 2001. She was a happy and easy baby, sleeping through the night by three months.

In her development, she was late in rolling over, sitting up, getting her first tooth and walking. When she did reach a milestone though, it was as if she'd been practicing when no one was looking so that she could do it perfectly right from the start. Our pediatrician often remarked that Hannah was developing fine, just on her own timetable and decided we might as well throw out the developmental charts.

At about 12 months, people started bugging her to talk and bugging me with their constant "why isn't she talking yet" commentaries. I started teaching Hannah sign language so she could communicate a want or need. She picked up simple signs very quickly and was able to tell me if she wanted to eat or needed more of something.

I started reading to Hannah right after she was born, and she clearly had favorite stories. I began having small pangs of concern when she wasn't saying any of the words in her stories (dog, cat ... no words ... plenty of jabbering and squeals of joy, but no words). My mom and Hannah's pediatrician fortunately took the "Hannah is Hannah" approach and did not lead me to panic, but reminded me to enjoy my little girl.

At 18 months, there was still no meaningful language. There was a family at our church with an autistic daughter that was a bit older than Hannah and they kept telling me how much Hannah was just like their daughter. This was disconcerting to me as I had known this child for some time, and she was classic autism: anti-social, violent outbursts, repetitive behaviors that she could not be distracted from, and these things did not fit my little social butterfly at all. I spent a lot of time agonizing and trying to analyze if I was just so far in denial that I totally did not see my daughter realistically, or if other people were just being too quick (and unqualified) to stick a diagnosis on my child. After total strangers in grocery stores started "diagnosing" my daughter as being autistic simply on the basis of her language difficulties, I decided that I needed to learn everything about the "new autism" and why the word was being tossed about so casually to stick on every kid that didn't fall into the middle of the developmental bell curve.

It didn't take long on the internet to see that the diagnosis du jour had switched from ADD/ADHD to autism, and that the definition of autism was much broader and so far removed from Kanner's definition that I decided that under these new guidelines, I could now be labeled autistic. I liken the autism spectrum to putting near-sighted people on a "blindness spectrum". I wrote more about this over-diagnosis of autism HERE and HERE.

In Part II of this post, I will talk about how the internet led me to Nashville, Tennessee and discovering a new world (new to me) of language disorders. What I found in Nashville also empowered me to stand up to those pushing autism on my child.

OneMom