The circle

Week four, day four and things are going great! Besides the usual pinching and scratching incidents, Cams is doing extrememly well at camp! And since nothing monumental has happened in the last 48 hours, I decided to go retro today and take you through the early years in more detail. I briefly wrote about it when I first started blogging to catch everybody up to present day, but there was so much left out that I really just want to revisit it and fill in some blanks. Maybe someone reading this may even be going through new diagnosis of Autism or suspect Autism with their child and maybe, just maybe,reading this may help.
Okay, so I guess I'll start about five years before I met Brad and the idea of having a child of any sort was far, far from my mind. I was eighteen, still living at home and working at the mall. College? Sometimes. I would go for a semester, take two off, yes I was a real go-getter! ;) Hey I'm a writer, what can I say?  Bored with my mall job, I heard about  a position opening up at the elementary school I had gone to as a kid. It was for a teacher assistant working in a VE pre-k classroom, which for those of you not fluent in special education lingo, VE stands for Varying Exceptionalities, which means there could be a child with Cerebral Palsy, a child with Speech delay and a child with epilepsy all in the same classroom. And this particular unit was "Reverse Mainstream". Which again, for those of you going "Huh?" means that there were also regular ed kids mixed in as well. When you put a special ed child in a regular ed classroom it's referred to as "mainstreaming", so when you put regular ed students in with special ed students it's the reverse, hence the name. Anyway, now that we have the translations out of the way, it was a pretty cool setup. The whole idea was to teach "normal" kids acceptance of those with disabilities and studies over the years have shown that it has been highly successful. So, I was very interested in this position as I loved kids, had a soft spot for the elderly and disabled and so happy to be at my old school. I got the job and my intro to the world of special education began. Diseases, syndromes, disorders I had never even heard of! I had no idea all of this was out there! And these innocent little babies, shuffling through the door in their leg braces and walkers, some being wheeled off the buses by their personal nurses, tubes in their noses, ports in their chests, heartbreaking! Others ran free, and to the casual observer looked like a "normal" kid, but when you sat down to talk with them, you realized your words were in vain, as they stared past you, focused on something only they could know. And of course there were the regular ed kids, bouncing through the door, talking about this cartoon and that new toy, piecing together farm animal puzzles and stacking wooden blocks. Fourteen children, so different, but yet so the same, all mine for seven hours of the day and I loved it!! Oh there was fear at first. The little boy with CP, so bent and frail in his wheelchair, what if I break him when I put him on the toilet? The girl who has seizures, what do I do if she has one in the room? The girl  with spina bifida, the boy with Williams syndrome, the child with Autism. Eventually I learned what each childs challenges and strengths were and each day I was less afraid. I grew to love each and every child and actually dreaded Christmas break because I missed them so much! I know, crazy right?
 I remember one little boy in particular. Dylan, a beautiful little guy with blonde hair, fair skin sprinked with light freckles and big blue eyes peering out from behind red spactacles. He had an obsession with Big Bird, he had an obseesion with riding the bus and he had Fragile X, a spectrum disorder. Everyday, every day, he would get off the bus, Big Bird puppet on his hand, flapping his arms wild with excitement. "I ride the cool bus (school bus)" he would say with sheer delight. He loved it! With a great big smile, he would walk in the classroom, his laugh a little like Herman Munsters and just crack up at....well nobody really knew and I just got the biggest kick out of him. And most of the time he was happy and funny and adorable, but sometimes... not so much. And you know that  little girl with the little curl right there in the middle of her forehead? Well, he was her male couterpart. When something happened that Dylan didn't like, Dylan didn't hesitate to let you know and boy did he. He would scream, cry, thrash around. Those were the days when you could still make physical contact with a child without fear of being sued for all your worth, and often times I would have to restrain him, coming at him from behind, wrapping my arms and legs around his and just letting him scream, but not be able to hurt himself or anybody else in the process.  I remember  one day in particular. It was nap time and Dylan did not want to stay on his cot. He started one of his meltdowns and I got behind him, wrapped myself around him and rocked back and forth like a human rocking chair, shusshing him, his tears soaking my forearms. I wished I knew what he was thinking and how to get through to him. I loved him and I felt for him and for his parents. And it never,h ever crossed my mind that one day I could be holding him again, only he would be a girl and his name would be Camryn and he would be mine. And thank God it never did. That's the beautiful thing about naievete. It really is so blissful, so beautiful. Because if it did ever cross my mind that one day I could bear a child that was like this, that would present these challenges that made me feel sad and helpless, I don't know that I would have taken the chance. And although I would have been sure to have dodged that very scary bullet, I would also have robbed myself of the amazing love and joy that all my girls have brought me. So, in all my sweet ignorance, I kept on working with these kids. I worked with them for three more years in fact. Loving each and every one of them, and each day learning more and more about stints and shunts and therapies and meds. I saw kids get better and I saw children die. It was intense for someone as  young as I was. But looking back now, it was so necessary.
Dylan would have to be about twenty one now. I have no idea where he is or how he turned out. He may still be at home needing assistance in daily life, or he may be very high functioning, possibly able to live on his own. And I'm sure he has no recolllection of "Miss Eve" or preschool at all for that matter.  But that little boy made an impression on me long before I ever knew how deep it would be. And right now my daughter ,who is obsessed with Oobi and also riding the school bus, is at a camp where teenagers are the assistants. And the odds of one of those fourteen teens growing up and having a child with Autism, or any special need for that matter, are scary high. And so the story goes.......