My son is six years old, smart as a whip, more stubborn than ten mules, and endearingly, wonderfully different from most children.

Last week we found out why.

After having even more trouble at the start of school this year (last year we thougt it was something he’d just grow out of; a side-effect of never having been in daycare or even babysat by anybody apart from close family)  we arranged for an in-depth evaluation for him, and the results are in.  He has Asperger’s syndrome, which is a mild form of autism.  Prior to August 22nd - the very day of my grandmother’s funeral in fact - we had never even heard of Asperger’s.  It seems like months have passed since then; my days have been so full of conferences at school and appointments with various doctors, counsellors, and specialists.

The people I’ve told so far are quick to point out (trying to comfort me I think, which I *do* appreciate) that Asperger’s is not necessarily crippling.  That in fact many very successful people (like Albert Einstein, for instance, although the condition had not been identified when he was a kid) were also “aspies”.  I know this is true, and I know my son is very smart and has every chance of growing into a contented, productive adult, but just at the moment it’s a little overwhelming for the mom & dad whose job it is to get him there.

Asperger’s, like classic autism, is a condition in which the brain is wired differently from the norm.  This difference in brain wiring makes it very easy for my boy to learn some things (like how to read and how to use a computer), and very difficult for him to learn others.  The biggest difficulty is that aspies don’t just “pick up” all the non-verbal clues which are so important in human communication, the kind of things that neurotypical people learn without ever having to be taught.  He will need special lessons to learn about things like making eye contact and taking turns in conversation or how to tell what someone is feeling by their facial expression or the tone of their voice.  And we will need to learn all this stuff consciously as well (this stuff is completely unconscious for most people), so we can figure out how to teach it to him.

Another difficulty is that aspies tend to fixate on things:  objects, people, places, and even whole areas of study.  This can be a good thing; it’s the trait that allows adult aspies to delve deeply into a subject and make great contributions to the body of human knowledge.  But when you’re six years old and don’t have the skills to communicate what’s going on, getting so upset that you run away because you weren’t allowed to put your lunch garbage in the “right” garbage bin can be very problematic.  We used to dismiss these fixations (after all, who gets THAT upset about using one garbage can rather than another in a row of identical cans?), which led to a lot of unhappiness and struggle for everybody.  Now at least we understand…but we also understand that he could go into an emotional meltdown anytime, anywhere, over things so minor to us that they are tough to identify.  We get to look forward to always being the parents of the screaming child throwing a fit in line at the grocery store, with clueless onlookers giving advice about discipline (often along the lines of “if that was my kid I’d smack him!”).  Advice that’s not only unasked-for, but also downright counterproductive.

I’ve stopped crying about this for now but I’m still reeling a little.  My job of Mommy - which I’d expected to get easier once the kids started school - has just got harder instead, and I have the expectation now that it will get harder still as my aspie boy grows up.  I can only pray that I will have the strength to get us both through the turbulent times.