Year

Who loves the '90s? Chris Farley time: Remember the musical, "Rent?" And that song that went "525,600 minutes?" That was awesome. All right, the song was okay. But whatever, you know it, right?

Anyway, we were driving to Indianapolis today to visit family when we passed a billboard for Peyton Manning Children's Hospital. It made me go, huh.

Hey, I remember those guys. I tried to get William diagnosed there. I can't tell you how many times I called that number, right there on the billboard. Geez, that was last summer. That means...holy crap. That whole thing was a year ago.

When I continued to think about it, I realized it wasn't just the process of getting diagnosed that I was messing with that summer. As it turns out, a year ago this very week, we chucked gluten and dairy out of our house and saw the first signs of our little boy coming back to us.

You just get tossed around with all this stuff, you know? Having a special needs child sometimes feels like owning a car not much younger than you--it's just one crisis after another, and to fix it, it's either expensive or requires a complete calendar wipe (or both). Okay, so having a special needs child actually does have its rewards, while owning a beater doesn't, really, so my analogies tonight are officially flimsy and a little offensive. It's late. Stay with me. :)

Anyway, when it's just one crisis backed up against the next, you forget to think about how miraculous it is that you have this child. I feel like I'm fighting for his life every day of the year, and I hardly ever notice where the year's actually taken us. And then, I remembered.

Last year, he didn't respond to anyone who tried to talk to him. He wouldn't repeat anything unless it just so happened that's exactly what he felt like doing in the moment. He was in a constant fog. He could say "Mama" and "Dada," but they sounded like syllables instead of the word (he repeated them or made the sounds the wrong number of times, e.g., "MaaaaaaMa. Dadada). He didn't really have any other words. He was almost always frantic, running in circles and smacking his ears.

Two days ago, George and I met with an administrator and William's program manager at his ABA school, and they handed over a four-columned, two-paged list. Grab a tissue and listen to this: those columns are filled top to bottom with words that William now uses appropriately. Some of them are phrases: "go outside," "open, please," "Hi, Josh," "want to go," and my personal fave, "Love you." His stimming is much the same, and actually a bit more intense, but this month we're going to be working on doing a lot more swinging (a good half hour of swinging increases his focus astronomically and drastically drops down his stimming) and distraction programs (when he starts flapping his hands, the therapist says, "William, where's your head? Touch your nose! Clap your hands!").

And just today, he was walking down the stairs with me and said, "poop." Of course, the way he communicates, it's not exactly attention-grabbing, so it's easy to miss. And I almost did, but I realized a second later what he'd said, and the evidence was in his diaper. He didn't even just tell me "diaper." He properly described exactly what was in there. Gross, right? I'm usually rather a prissy girl, but you can be damn sure that was the highest point of my day.

I keep thinking that someday this will all be over and we'll look back on it in such a way that makes healthy, functional children a bigger deal to us than most. And maybe I'm only fooling myself, I don't know. Maybe it will never be over. But when my child, who was mostly nonverbal a year ago, has learned over a hundred words, and can tell me he loves me and that there's poop in his diaper, I think I might have good reason to believe in the best.

I don't know how you'd measure a year, but I'm gonna call mine a healthy portion of miracle.