Brandon's First Day of Autism

The school psychologist said, "Yeah, I think I'm seeing signs of autism," and my whole world collapsed. I forgot to breathe for a few seconds and thought, after a while, that my heart was going to explode. Then there was nothing but this feeling of emptiness. I looked at my beautiful, dark-haired, 5-year old Brandon and tried my best to blink back tears at the thought that none of my dreams for him would come true.

All my dreams of him having friends, school field trips, high school functions, college, girlfriends, all of it went up in smoke. Instead, I envisioned my grade school days where they put all the "different" kids in a special classroom on the second floor. If you had Down syndrome, you went there. ADHD? You went there, if you were a little on the slow side, you went there.

If there was nothing cognitively wrong with you but you had a funny walk or needed a wheelchair, you went there. All the "normal" kids called all of those kids "Retarded" and they weren't shy about it. Those kids went through hell. Would that be my Brandon's life? My head filled with questions while my eyes filled with tears. What the heck was autism anyway? What did that mean? I knew it wasn't good. Did it mean that he was stupid or mentally ill?

Surely he wasn't stupid. I mean, after all, at the age of 18 months he was tinkering with my mom's computer, re-naming all of the icons on the desktop from practical names like "My Folders" and "Recycle Bin" into gibberish like "aoruoejhnao."

When my mom figured out that it was him and not some fluke result of her cats' need to rest on her keyboard, she put a password on her screensaver and anytime she walked away she clicked the commands to prompt it. (This was before the days of separate desktops with passwords for each.) Now, when someone moved the mouse, a command prompt would appear demanding a password and denying access to the desktop. This made Brandon very angry.

He was a patient little bugger and observed. Three days later, he was tinkering around on my mom's desktop again, despite the screensaver password. My mom was taken aback. She put the screensaver back up and watched what he did.

Brandon moved the mouse, saw the prompt for the password, toddled over to the CPU and shut down the computer by pressing the power button! He waited a few seconds to make sure the thing had turned off and then pressed the power button again to turn it back on. The computer went through its regular routine of startup processes and then presented Brandon with his coveted desktop and he commenced to happily turning all of the icons into gibberish again.

He was not even 2-years old yet! My mom thought he was exceptionally intelligent. But when you asked him a simple question such as "Who is your mommy," he would completely ignore you and play with your watch or pull on your shiny earrings. He almost never answered a question.

Back at the psychologist's examination room, I began to blame myself. What have I done? I didn't get prenatal care with Brandon until I was 6 months pregnant, is that why this happened? Oh my God, what have I done? How could I have prevented this? After all, it MUST be MY fault, I'm his mother, and I must've damaged him somehow!

Should I have put him in daycare instead of letting my mom watch him while I was at work? Should I have spent more time with him, used flash cards or educational programs, had him in pre-school? What am I going to do now? What happens next? More questions appeared but I couldn't find any of the answers yet.