Here Comes The Flood (part 2 of 3)
For part one of this blog series please clicky click right HERE
*************************************************************************************
August 1st, 1985
It has always been my experience that I am allowed a few moments of reflection right before everything goes to absolute hell. It is like that one final deep drag of an air that a death row inmate must take before their sentence is carried out. It is the last moment of calm. Of normalcy. It is the split second right before everything changes.
As I sat in my parents basement in 1985 listening to our basement windows groan and creak under the weight of the large amounts of rainwater that was pressing up against them. I had been sitting cross-legged in the middle of the room watching the rushing water fill our window wells up like a bucket. For a while it was pretty exciting to watch. Each of the windows looked like murky aquariums. I am pretty sure I spent some time pretending that my basement had transformed into a submarine and we had begun our descent to the floor of the ocean.
The problem was the water never stopped coming and I could soon tell by the look of my parents face that they were growing more and more concerned. It had been raining heavy for three hours and in my short time on Earth I had never seen anything like it. My older brother (who had snuck upstairs to scout) had reported to me that our entire lawn was under a flowing river of water that was laced with tree branches and hail. . My dad began to fashion a plan that would require us to grab as much as we could if the water started coming in through the windows. We would start with the pictures and book and then move onto the electronics. We had been forced to the basement because of the various tornado warnings that had accompanied this monster storm, but if the water came we would have no choice but to return to the main level. We would have to change plans and adapt or we would be swallowed by the water.
In hindsight I know that my father already knew that the windows were not going to hold. They were going to break. He just did not want to worry us yet. He allowed my mother to cling to the hope that perhaps everything was going to be ok. He later told me that he had seen evidence of them cracking long before they ever gave in. That was a fact that he never passed on to us in the moment because he needed us to remain calm.
"Do you think the windows will hold Andy?" my mother asked my dad while she sat on our flower-patterned couch that was indeed a product of the 70's. She was clutching hold of her rosary and staring out into the same window that I had been fixated on. My mom is a wonderful woman, but like all of us she has her breaking points. Being involved in something like this was not a situation she excelled in. Some people are built for crisis. My mother is not....and in all fairness neither am I. My mom simply wanted a promise that everything was going to be fine. She was not going to get it.
"They should." he replied. Even at ten years old I found his response pretty unconvincing because as he said it he was organizing his old boxes of papers he had written and stacking up his vast collection of favorite books. These were not the actions of a man who thought that the windows were going to hold. These were the actions of a man who knew that eventually the house would not be able to keep back the storm.
I was a fairly dim child, so if I noticed that my dad's words were incongruent to his actions, than my mom surly did. Like me, she is not know for her patience so she questioned him further? His answer of "they should" was not enough information for her, so she pressed further.
"Will they or won't they?" she asked with her knuckles white from squeezing the white beads of the rosasry so hard.
He didn't answer. He just kept trying to prepare for the water by putting all our families treasurers into boxes. I was, at first sure that my dad had not actually heard her question because he was so focused on the task at hand. My mom repeated her question about 10 times without my responding to her, he did not even look up at her.
My father's lack of communication sent my mom into a full on rage. She had enough so she stood up from that damned flowered couch and barked "Andy! What the hell is going to happen?? For Christsakes! Answer me! What are we going to do?? What are we going to do Andy??"
My dad snapped. He shouted while staring down into his box of papers "Damnit! How can I possibly know that? I have no idea!! The windows will either will break or they won't! If they do, we run like hell!" I had never seen my dad talk to any of us like this. Which meant only one thing. Things were bad. Really bad.
He looked up from his box that he was packing and I could see that the look on his face did not match the anger in his voice. He was scared. "I'm sorry." he said in a much softer tone. "I am not sure what is going to happen." My dad walked over to my mom and helped her sit down on the couch. I remember very vividly he stood beside her with his hand resting tenderly on her shoulder as she tried her level best to not cry.
For the next few minutes we just sat there listening to the soundtrack that was the sound of my mothers hushed weeping and the noise of the waters continued assault against the walls and windows of our home. We just sat there waiting for something to happen. Either the windows would give in or they wouldn't. Either we were going to be flooded or we wouldn't be. The only thing we could do is sit and prepare for either outcome.
After a while the sound of creaking from the windows began to give way to a much more sinister one. It went from sounding like a deep groan to the a very soft and distinct squeaking sound. It sounded like the air was being let out of a balloon. My dad left my moms side and approached the biggest window in our basement and notified us that there was in fact a little water coming in the sides and that he should think about heading up stair. Almost immediately after saying that the soft squeaking sound built into a scream that sounded like it came from the mother of all teapots. The noise was horrible and it was coming from all the windows around us.
"Grab what you can and get out of here!" my dad commanded.
The rest of us stood there watching the flood rejoice that it had finally found it's way into our home. I stood still and watched the first wave of water sweep under my dad's writing desk and lift it up off of the ground.
None of us were ready for what we were seeing....except for my dad who must have recognized our shock and screamed "Move it!!!"
I stood up and took helped my brother begin to carry our families seemingly 400 pound VCR toward the staircase. As I walked the loud high pitched screams from the all the windows ceased almost immediately as if their invisible conductor gave them the order to be silent. I thought that perhaps the water was not going to come afterall.
I was wrong. A second or two after the whistling sound stopped there was a loud crashing sound. It came from our guest bedroom. That window was the first of many to give up it's unwinable fight against the water. It only took a short moment for the water to come rolling out of the bedroom and across the main lobby of the basement. It poured over my bare feet and I remember reeling from it because of how cold it was. The only other thing I remember about the water was how profoundly dirty it was.
I was stuck in the moment. Instead of moving I was frozen in place watching the water begin to engulf my basement. I kept thinking how things were never going to be the same again...and how comfortable I had just been a very moments ago.
"Go! Now!" my dad shouted over the sound of the other basement windows that were now caving in.
We carried what we had in our hands up our staircase as the rushing water came roaring into the basement that I had just a few moments earlier been sitting comfortably in. The sound of the water taking over our home lives vividly in my memory. It was the sound of a train that was passing under my feet. It was terrible. Even today the experience of the water chasing me up the stairs still feels like it happened to somebody else. It was as surreal of an experience as I have ever had or care to ever have again.
By the time we reached the top of the stairs we turned right back around to salvage more items from the basement. It was too late. My dad was already down there and the water was already to his waist and he told us to go back stairs. It was over. Our basement was lost. We needed to prepare ourselves for what would happen if their was enough water for it to rise up from our basement and into our main level.
I remember my dad started talking about eventually having to find a way to our roof if the water kept rising. We were going to have to tear through the ceiling in order to get up there.
We stood together in our kitchen listening to the water rise underneath us. We spent the night wondering if the rain would ever stop. Wondering what was going to happen if the water continued to move it's way up the stair and into our main level. I was a mix of both terrified and excited about what I had just been through. I was scared because I had never seen anything like that wall of water that swept through our basement. The wall felt and looked like it was alive and hell bent on finding little children like me to swallow it up in it's cold dark waters. It felt that it was coming to get me. Even as I stood on the floor above the rising water I could hear it lashing against the walls as it struggled to climb the stairs to find me nd carry me away.
The strange thing was that I was almost just as excited as I was scared. I was excited because I had never seen anything like this. This was a moment that happened to people in movies or on TV. It very much felt like I was in the middle of a life or death situation...and that was a feeling that seemed to be mirrored in my parents faces as they discussed what steps we would take if the water did not stop it's climb upward toward us.
Everything felt like it changed when the water came into our house. I had my first taste of how it felt to have your security ripped away and replaced with the real fear of the unknown.
At this point my mom dad not have the courage to ask my father what was going to happen next anymore. He had no idea. With the water rising rapidly below us the only thing that was certain was that we had no way of knowing what was going to happen to us.
How could we know? We were at the mercy of the flood. The only thing we could do was pray, which is what we did. It was all we could do. As the water began to spurt up of stairs I was started to prepare to swim...
What could we do now? Survive the flood of 1985.
to be continued......
***********************************************************************************************************
Summer 2003
Everything had gone to hell. All the dreams I had for my family and for myself came crashing to the ground with one cold sentence spoken by a pleasant woman in a white doctors coat:
"Their is no doubt that Noah has Autism."
Immediately I was drowning in my own self-misery. I could not move because I did not believe it was happening. I was sinking to the bottom because I refused to kick up my legs. I was not fighting back because I did not believe in myself..I was dying. I was going to be a passive witness to my own destruction.
Everything felt different. ALl the security I had in my life had been ripped away and replaced with the fear of the unknown.
There was no question anymore. He was autistic. The doc told us that there was no escaping it anymore. There would be no "wishing it away". It was here and we needed to act quickly if we were going to save him. They said if Noah was going to have a chance we were going to have to step up and be prepared for a lot of hard work. They said that Noah was going to depend on us for perhaps his whole life to do everything for him. They said that his road was destined to be filled with struggle and a difficulties. They read our future and they gave us some dire predictions.
That was when the water started to rise around me....
After we received Noah's Autism diagnosis in Denver our drive back to Cheyenne was spent in deep uncomfortable silence. My wife and I would break the silence every ten minutes or so with a statement or brief monologue. Jennifer would talk about all the things we would need to change in our life in order to accommodate all the work Noah was going to need. She spoke of the myriad of calls we would have to make when we got home to get our son's treatments and therapies all set up. She was making plans for what was going to happen if the doctors were right in their prognosis for Noah, that he would possibly need a lifetime full of support.
I was not making plans. I was stuck in the moment still. I was frozen in my own selfish little bubble. The only things I offered to the conversation on our drive back home was how bad things were now. Everything was so overwhelming to me. I was wondering how I was going to be able to survive this. Yes, thats right....in the moments directly after my son was labeled with Autism I was enveloped in my own issues, Which of course means that I was acting like one of the biggest self-centered scholbs on the planet. Later that year I received an award from the Self-Centered Schlob Association for being their "Schlob of the year". I had just beaten out David Hasselhoff, Paris Hilton, and a teenanger named "Chip Richybottoms" for the award.
I kept wondering how I was going to hold up. How could I manage to raise a child with special needs when I am who I am. I had never been very comfortable around people who had lived with a disability. Not because I was some monster who felt superior, but rather, because I felt inadequate around them. I was scared of people living with special needs due to the fact that they represented a universal truth that I always tried to ignore....that life was so very fragile.
I kept wondering how was I going to hold back the tide that was coming my way. How was I going to be okay. Me, me, me, me....sigh. I look back and I am embarrassed about how I allowed myself to feel after the diagnosis came. I was so concerned about how this was going to affect me. I was so very worried about how such a weak man like myself was going to survive the years of struggle and hardship that I believed awaited us once we got home.
My wife and I had our suspicions that Noah was going to be autistic for a few months before his actual diagnosis. During that time my wife was planning and preparing. Jennifer had known this storm was coming and had prepared herself. In the days before his diagnosis she had been planning for what would happened if our worst fears were proven to be our new reality. I was sitting and hoping...which then led me to a period of time where I lied to myself about his condition. I would stare at Noah and his behaviors and explain them away.
"He will be fine..he is not autistic....He will be fine....he is not autistic. He will be fine". That was my mantra. Besides I had once believed the cute Hallmark saying of "God only gives us what we can handle" Well God knows me, and he knows that I can barely handle making Ramen Noodles so he will know that I would not be able to handle being the daddy of a little boy who had special needs. I can't be trusted to fill a car up with gas so there is no way I could be trusted with the care of a child who needed so much help. I was too flawed and broken of a man to have this put before me.
I suppose that a lot of other parents who have had their child diagnosed with something terrible have allowed themselves moments of self-pity. I am sure that their drive home from the doctor is spent in realization that the life you had planned out for your family was not going to work out. I imagine, however, that by the time these other parents came home and looked into their child's eyes they snapped out of their melodramatic trance and started moving forward.
That was my problem. I did not snap out of it. Not for a long while...I stayed inside my own world for a long time.
Once we got at home I immediately allowed myself to become taken in by the depression. My son was going to need so much help just to function at a basic level. Noah was going to need a series of miracles to find himself with any kind of self-awareness. I started thinking about all the birthday parties he would never be invited to. I let myself fret over the people who would judge him because of his atypical behaviors. I succumbed to the worry of all the future obstacles we were going to face. I was heartbroken because I believed that there was no way I was going to be the father for the job.
Things like this happened to people in the movies or on TV. It happened to heros. Not to chumps like me. If Noah was ever going to have a chance to find his way through the maze of Autism he needed to have a better father. He deserved better.
The first few months after his diagnosis were the absolute most difficult. We had to implement new strategies at home to help him interact with the world in a different way. Noah hated it and demonstrated that feeling on a minute by minute basis. He was so miserable as we forced him to start speech, occupational, and cognitive therapy. It was so hard on him...
The waters of worry and stress were rising all around me. Here I was a father of a 3 year old with Autism and a 1 year old who I was terrified would end up being autistic as well. My son's treatments were so expensive and I was always under the weight of trying to find the dollars to pay for this months therapy bills. Every day there was a new crisis or new concern that manifested in my sons battle with Autism. Instead of trying to escape the flood of dark thoughts that I was becoming quickly consumed by I just let them rise around me. I was lost and angry. I was hopeless. My survival felt very much in question...
I did not want to help, I did not want to participate because I was still wondering how this happened to us. How the storm of Autism arrived at our house....I was still stuck in the moment between inaction and action.
God only gives us what we can handle? I call bologna on that.
How was my family not going to be destroyed by this? I had no idea. How were we going to be able to survive the seemingly endless stream of worries and problems that flowed over us? I had no clue. We were at the mercy of the flood.
The water was rising up all around us and I was starting to recognize that sooner than later I had to start swimming or sink to the bottom.
Sink or Swim Johnny...sink or swim....
to be continued.....
*************************************************************************************
August 1st, 1985
It has always been my experience that I am allowed a few moments of reflection right before everything goes to absolute hell. It is like that one final deep drag of an air that a death row inmate must take before their sentence is carried out. It is the last moment of calm. Of normalcy. It is the split second right before everything changes.
As I sat in my parents basement in 1985 listening to our basement windows groan and creak under the weight of the large amounts of rainwater that was pressing up against them. I had been sitting cross-legged in the middle of the room watching the rushing water fill our window wells up like a bucket. For a while it was pretty exciting to watch. Each of the windows looked like murky aquariums. I am pretty sure I spent some time pretending that my basement had transformed into a submarine and we had begun our descent to the floor of the ocean.
The problem was the water never stopped coming and I could soon tell by the look of my parents face that they were growing more and more concerned. It had been raining heavy for three hours and in my short time on Earth I had never seen anything like it. My older brother (who had snuck upstairs to scout) had reported to me that our entire lawn was under a flowing river of water that was laced with tree branches and hail. . My dad began to fashion a plan that would require us to grab as much as we could if the water started coming in through the windows. We would start with the pictures and book and then move onto the electronics. We had been forced to the basement because of the various tornado warnings that had accompanied this monster storm, but if the water came we would have no choice but to return to the main level. We would have to change plans and adapt or we would be swallowed by the water.
In hindsight I know that my father already knew that the windows were not going to hold. They were going to break. He just did not want to worry us yet. He allowed my mother to cling to the hope that perhaps everything was going to be ok. He later told me that he had seen evidence of them cracking long before they ever gave in. That was a fact that he never passed on to us in the moment because he needed us to remain calm.
"Do you think the windows will hold Andy?" my mother asked my dad while she sat on our flower-patterned couch that was indeed a product of the 70's. She was clutching hold of her rosary and staring out into the same window that I had been fixated on. My mom is a wonderful woman, but like all of us she has her breaking points. Being involved in something like this was not a situation she excelled in. Some people are built for crisis. My mother is not....and in all fairness neither am I. My mom simply wanted a promise that everything was going to be fine. She was not going to get it.
"They should." he replied. Even at ten years old I found his response pretty unconvincing because as he said it he was organizing his old boxes of papers he had written and stacking up his vast collection of favorite books. These were not the actions of a man who thought that the windows were going to hold. These were the actions of a man who knew that eventually the house would not be able to keep back the storm.
I was a fairly dim child, so if I noticed that my dad's words were incongruent to his actions, than my mom surly did. Like me, she is not know for her patience so she questioned him further? His answer of "they should" was not enough information for her, so she pressed further.
"Will they or won't they?" she asked with her knuckles white from squeezing the white beads of the rosasry so hard.
He didn't answer. He just kept trying to prepare for the water by putting all our families treasurers into boxes. I was, at first sure that my dad had not actually heard her question because he was so focused on the task at hand. My mom repeated her question about 10 times without my responding to her, he did not even look up at her.
My father's lack of communication sent my mom into a full on rage. She had enough so she stood up from that damned flowered couch and barked "Andy! What the hell is going to happen?? For Christsakes! Answer me! What are we going to do?? What are we going to do Andy??"
My dad snapped. He shouted while staring down into his box of papers "Damnit! How can I possibly know that? I have no idea!! The windows will either will break or they won't! If they do, we run like hell!" I had never seen my dad talk to any of us like this. Which meant only one thing. Things were bad. Really bad.
He looked up from his box that he was packing and I could see that the look on his face did not match the anger in his voice. He was scared. "I'm sorry." he said in a much softer tone. "I am not sure what is going to happen." My dad walked over to my mom and helped her sit down on the couch. I remember very vividly he stood beside her with his hand resting tenderly on her shoulder as she tried her level best to not cry.
For the next few minutes we just sat there listening to the soundtrack that was the sound of my mothers hushed weeping and the noise of the waters continued assault against the walls and windows of our home. We just sat there waiting for something to happen. Either the windows would give in or they wouldn't. Either we were going to be flooded or we wouldn't be. The only thing we could do is sit and prepare for either outcome.
After a while the sound of creaking from the windows began to give way to a much more sinister one. It went from sounding like a deep groan to the a very soft and distinct squeaking sound. It sounded like the air was being let out of a balloon. My dad left my moms side and approached the biggest window in our basement and notified us that there was in fact a little water coming in the sides and that he should think about heading up stair. Almost immediately after saying that the soft squeaking sound built into a scream that sounded like it came from the mother of all teapots. The noise was horrible and it was coming from all the windows around us.
"Grab what you can and get out of here!" my dad commanded.
The rest of us stood there watching the flood rejoice that it had finally found it's way into our home. I stood still and watched the first wave of water sweep under my dad's writing desk and lift it up off of the ground.
None of us were ready for what we were seeing....except for my dad who must have recognized our shock and screamed "Move it!!!"
I stood up and took helped my brother begin to carry our families seemingly 400 pound VCR toward the staircase. As I walked the loud high pitched screams from the all the windows ceased almost immediately as if their invisible conductor gave them the order to be silent. I thought that perhaps the water was not going to come afterall.
I was wrong. A second or two after the whistling sound stopped there was a loud crashing sound. It came from our guest bedroom. That window was the first of many to give up it's unwinable fight against the water. It only took a short moment for the water to come rolling out of the bedroom and across the main lobby of the basement. It poured over my bare feet and I remember reeling from it because of how cold it was. The only other thing I remember about the water was how profoundly dirty it was.
I was stuck in the moment. Instead of moving I was frozen in place watching the water begin to engulf my basement. I kept thinking how things were never going to be the same again...and how comfortable I had just been a very moments ago.
"Go! Now!" my dad shouted over the sound of the other basement windows that were now caving in.
We carried what we had in our hands up our staircase as the rushing water came roaring into the basement that I had just a few moments earlier been sitting comfortably in. The sound of the water taking over our home lives vividly in my memory. It was the sound of a train that was passing under my feet. It was terrible. Even today the experience of the water chasing me up the stairs still feels like it happened to somebody else. It was as surreal of an experience as I have ever had or care to ever have again.
By the time we reached the top of the stairs we turned right back around to salvage more items from the basement. It was too late. My dad was already down there and the water was already to his waist and he told us to go back stairs. It was over. Our basement was lost. We needed to prepare ourselves for what would happen if their was enough water for it to rise up from our basement and into our main level.
I remember my dad started talking about eventually having to find a way to our roof if the water kept rising. We were going to have to tear through the ceiling in order to get up there.
We stood together in our kitchen listening to the water rise underneath us. We spent the night wondering if the rain would ever stop. Wondering what was going to happen if the water continued to move it's way up the stair and into our main level. I was a mix of both terrified and excited about what I had just been through. I was scared because I had never seen anything like that wall of water that swept through our basement. The wall felt and looked like it was alive and hell bent on finding little children like me to swallow it up in it's cold dark waters. It felt that it was coming to get me. Even as I stood on the floor above the rising water I could hear it lashing against the walls as it struggled to climb the stairs to find me nd carry me away.
The strange thing was that I was almost just as excited as I was scared. I was excited because I had never seen anything like this. This was a moment that happened to people in movies or on TV. It very much felt like I was in the middle of a life or death situation...and that was a feeling that seemed to be mirrored in my parents faces as they discussed what steps we would take if the water did not stop it's climb upward toward us.
Everything felt like it changed when the water came into our house. I had my first taste of how it felt to have your security ripped away and replaced with the real fear of the unknown.
At this point my mom dad not have the courage to ask my father what was going to happen next anymore. He had no idea. With the water rising rapidly below us the only thing that was certain was that we had no way of knowing what was going to happen to us.
How could we know? We were at the mercy of the flood. The only thing we could do was pray, which is what we did. It was all we could do. As the water began to spurt up of stairs I was started to prepare to swim...
What could we do now? Survive the flood of 1985.
to be continued......
***********************************************************************************************************
Summer 2003
Everything had gone to hell. All the dreams I had for my family and for myself came crashing to the ground with one cold sentence spoken by a pleasant woman in a white doctors coat:
"Their is no doubt that Noah has Autism."
Immediately I was drowning in my own self-misery. I could not move because I did not believe it was happening. I was sinking to the bottom because I refused to kick up my legs. I was not fighting back because I did not believe in myself..I was dying. I was going to be a passive witness to my own destruction.
Everything felt different. ALl the security I had in my life had been ripped away and replaced with the fear of the unknown.
There was no question anymore. He was autistic. The doc told us that there was no escaping it anymore. There would be no "wishing it away". It was here and we needed to act quickly if we were going to save him. They said if Noah was going to have a chance we were going to have to step up and be prepared for a lot of hard work. They said that Noah was going to depend on us for perhaps his whole life to do everything for him. They said that his road was destined to be filled with struggle and a difficulties. They read our future and they gave us some dire predictions.
That was when the water started to rise around me....
After we received Noah's Autism diagnosis in Denver our drive back to Cheyenne was spent in deep uncomfortable silence. My wife and I would break the silence every ten minutes or so with a statement or brief monologue. Jennifer would talk about all the things we would need to change in our life in order to accommodate all the work Noah was going to need. She spoke of the myriad of calls we would have to make when we got home to get our son's treatments and therapies all set up. She was making plans for what was going to happen if the doctors were right in their prognosis for Noah, that he would possibly need a lifetime full of support.
I was not making plans. I was stuck in the moment still. I was frozen in my own selfish little bubble. The only things I offered to the conversation on our drive back home was how bad things were now. Everything was so overwhelming to me. I was wondering how I was going to be able to survive this. Yes, thats right....in the moments directly after my son was labeled with Autism I was enveloped in my own issues, Which of course means that I was acting like one of the biggest self-centered scholbs on the planet. Later that year I received an award from the Self-Centered Schlob Association for being their "Schlob of the year". I had just beaten out David Hasselhoff, Paris Hilton, and a teenanger named "Chip Richybottoms" for the award.
I kept wondering how I was going to hold up. How could I manage to raise a child with special needs when I am who I am. I had never been very comfortable around people who had lived with a disability. Not because I was some monster who felt superior, but rather, because I felt inadequate around them. I was scared of people living with special needs due to the fact that they represented a universal truth that I always tried to ignore....that life was so very fragile.
I kept wondering how was I going to hold back the tide that was coming my way. How was I going to be okay. Me, me, me, me....sigh. I look back and I am embarrassed about how I allowed myself to feel after the diagnosis came. I was so concerned about how this was going to affect me. I was so very worried about how such a weak man like myself was going to survive the years of struggle and hardship that I believed awaited us once we got home.
My wife and I had our suspicions that Noah was going to be autistic for a few months before his actual diagnosis. During that time my wife was planning and preparing. Jennifer had known this storm was coming and had prepared herself. In the days before his diagnosis she had been planning for what would happened if our worst fears were proven to be our new reality. I was sitting and hoping...which then led me to a period of time where I lied to myself about his condition. I would stare at Noah and his behaviors and explain them away.
"He will be fine..he is not autistic....He will be fine....he is not autistic. He will be fine". That was my mantra. Besides I had once believed the cute Hallmark saying of "God only gives us what we can handle" Well God knows me, and he knows that I can barely handle making Ramen Noodles so he will know that I would not be able to handle being the daddy of a little boy who had special needs. I can't be trusted to fill a car up with gas so there is no way I could be trusted with the care of a child who needed so much help. I was too flawed and broken of a man to have this put before me.
I suppose that a lot of other parents who have had their child diagnosed with something terrible have allowed themselves moments of self-pity. I am sure that their drive home from the doctor is spent in realization that the life you had planned out for your family was not going to work out. I imagine, however, that by the time these other parents came home and looked into their child's eyes they snapped out of their melodramatic trance and started moving forward.
That was my problem. I did not snap out of it. Not for a long while...I stayed inside my own world for a long time.
Once we got at home I immediately allowed myself to become taken in by the depression. My son was going to need so much help just to function at a basic level. Noah was going to need a series of miracles to find himself with any kind of self-awareness. I started thinking about all the birthday parties he would never be invited to. I let myself fret over the people who would judge him because of his atypical behaviors. I succumbed to the worry of all the future obstacles we were going to face. I was heartbroken because I believed that there was no way I was going to be the father for the job.
Things like this happened to people in the movies or on TV. It happened to heros. Not to chumps like me. If Noah was ever going to have a chance to find his way through the maze of Autism he needed to have a better father. He deserved better.
The first few months after his diagnosis were the absolute most difficult. We had to implement new strategies at home to help him interact with the world in a different way. Noah hated it and demonstrated that feeling on a minute by minute basis. He was so miserable as we forced him to start speech, occupational, and cognitive therapy. It was so hard on him...
The waters of worry and stress were rising all around me. Here I was a father of a 3 year old with Autism and a 1 year old who I was terrified would end up being autistic as well. My son's treatments were so expensive and I was always under the weight of trying to find the dollars to pay for this months therapy bills. Every day there was a new crisis or new concern that manifested in my sons battle with Autism. Instead of trying to escape the flood of dark thoughts that I was becoming quickly consumed by I just let them rise around me. I was lost and angry. I was hopeless. My survival felt very much in question...
I did not want to help, I did not want to participate because I was still wondering how this happened to us. How the storm of Autism arrived at our house....I was still stuck in the moment between inaction and action.
God only gives us what we can handle? I call bologna on that.
How was my family not going to be destroyed by this? I had no idea. How were we going to be able to survive the seemingly endless stream of worries and problems that flowed over us? I had no clue. We were at the mercy of the flood.
The water was rising up all around us and I was starting to recognize that sooner than later I had to start swimming or sink to the bottom.
Sink or Swim Johnny...sink or swim....
to be continued.....
I saw you a couple years ago speak at Barnes and Noble and read your blog for the first time there.
I love them so as my grandbaby is autistic too! Your words sound like the ones my daughter and son in law say. It can be so hard.
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We get it, already. You're talented. Quit rubbing our faces in it.
Work with us and we will get you published!!
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