In the beginning

This blog is about my life as mother to two sons, one with Asperger's Syndrome, and how this has affected us; the joys, frustrations and quirks. Here goes....



Fin, my oldest son, is six years old. He is tiny, weighing in at just 32 lbs, slightly less than his 4 year old brother. Blond hair and blue eyes that must be from some recessive genes and face as sweet as honey. He is the reason I am writing this blog. He has recently been given the diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome, although we have known for quite some time that something was amiss. He was born after a normal pregnancy, if being near 4o years old and pregnant can be construed in any way as normal. I married late in life, so late in fact, my mother had resigned herself to believing I was gay rather than to believe I was just plain un-marriable. I met David when I showed up for group bike ride at a local bicycle shop in Tucson. I was training for a 2 day endurance race (more about my compulsive behaviors later) and needed to learn the etiquette of riding in a group. David, who had worked at the bike shop as a mechanic during college, was leading the ride. One saddle sore and fifty miles later I had learned that he was incredibly kind, intelligent, and quick-witted. I also learned that I knew his mother. In fact I loved his mother! Unfortunately she was someone who I considered, if not a peer, then an older sister. Certainly not a woman I thought of as old enough to be mother to someone I could date.
David is 10 years my junior and he was as persistent and passionate as only the young can be. I, on the other hand, was cautious, reluctant and acutely aware of every treacherous grey hair, purple vein and wrinkle that I had accrued. His persitence won out. A year later we were married in a small simple ceremony that suited our minimalistic sensibilities. Of course, after the wedding, David surprised me not with a limousine, but with a bike buggy on which he towed me around the streets of Tucson, decked out with old plastic bike bottles, streamers and a “just married” sign. Since we chose to marry on April fool’s Day, people honked and waved and complimented us on our ambitious joke.
I wanted to start a family as soon as possible, before my chances of dying in a plane crash outweighed my chances of conceiving. David was not as thrilled as I to be jumping into parenthood without, say, 10 years of married bliss under our belts. He dreamed of long summers biking through France, and lounging in bed reading the Sunday paper long into the afternoon, and I dreamed of slow walks around the block with a baby strapped into a front carrier, reading Goodnight Moon, and Is Your Mama a Llama, the three of us all cuddled in bed. David worried about how a baby would impact our relationship. I let him in on a little secret pact my sisters had made with their husbands, then concerned fathers-to-be. I promised him it would be “us against the baby”. My sister's had explained how this assuaged males' fears about bieng pushed into second place position by a newborn baby. No matter how alluring or adorable that baby was, I promised, it would always be us against him. David innocently accepted this arrangement.
Since I was near 40, we visited a fertility specialist. He recommended daily intercourse. David was very willing to comply. After 2 weeks, he concluded that nothing that resulted from these daily encounters could be all that bad. Could it? A month later I was pregnant. Previous to this, I had what might be described by some as an obsessive personality. When I first became interested in running, for instance, I wasn’t satisfied with running a mere 5 or 10 miles, it was Marathons for me, despite the fact that I was slow, with feeble knees. I kept at it compulsively. I ate, drank and slept running. I took ibuprofen by the handfuls. When I took up knitting, in just 5 months I had spent hundreds of dollars on needles, yarn, and book, and knitted obsessively at the expense of all other interest, even school, which I postponed for a semester to knit. So, when at 38 years old, I first saw that auspicious double line on the home pregnancy test, done 3 days before I even missed my period, it was if my entire world had been whittled down to a small clump of dividing cells. I was the most overjoyed, over informed, pregnant woman in the entire history of making babies. I spent every spare moment reading about the stages the developing embryo was undergoing. I went on-line for daily reports of what expectant mothers should or should not be doing. When NPR did a report on the increasing incidence of Asperger's diagnosis, I was relieved to think that at least that couldn't happen to me. I am not sure what talisman I believed I protected me, but I was relieved non-the-less. I asked my sister, who is an adolescent therapist, what she knew about the diagnosis. She went on to describe some bizarre behavior from a 14 year old client of hers, who refused to use a public bathroom, and would actually apply diapers in a restroom and proceed to do his bodily functions standing directly in front of a sink, his preferred location. He is very good at math though, she said, as if this could somehow make up for the pooping- in-a-diaper routine. Horrified, I could not get that image out of my mind for days. Eventually, though, I assured myself that depression, alcoholism, and quite possibly schizophrenia runs in my family, but thankfully, no poopers-in-diapers!