The light of day

As I have reached a place of acceptance with Griff’s autism the depth and breadth of my vision of the world has expanded a great deal. Not only can I see more I am able to take more information in. Avoidance and fear were taking up so much room…taking up so much of my energy…I had no idea. I thought I was protecting my self. I thought I was giving myself a chance to heal. Well perhaps I was. My first thought was that I was avoiding life and that is somehow a bad thing. I had the belief that my withdrawing from the world was a position of weakness…I was avoiding something and not holding up my end and in turn letting someone else, my son, down. But in doing it I have arrived at where I am now…a truly liberated and powerful place. Living in the bubble has allowed me to process all that I have had going on….the loss, the fear, the anger, the love…all of it. I would periodically step out in to the world to see if I was ready but would often find I was not…the onslaught of information and questions was enough to drive me back inside. Its not as if I wanted to stay exclusive it’s just that I felt, though riddled with guilt, it was serving a purpose. Now that I no longer need to do this I am quickly becoming aware that I will have to deal with a world that will not always share my vision of hope and belief in the recovery of my son. Opinions and thoughtless comments that would have once crush my fragile resolve now seem to bounce off or actually they lay suspended in front of me…where I can examine them taking what is valuable and discarding the rest. The flood of information and stimulus on autism that I once feared and avoided no longer holds the power over me it once did…I can see the value in it and now it makes me stronger. I will be a model for hope, love, and acceptance. My experience is what my boy has been going through. I need only look to myself to understand what he has experiencing. This knowledge has given me a strong sense of compassion and empathy for him…I’m in awe of him…his strength.
I have been thinking lately a lot about my exclusive behavior in relation to Griffen’s: seeking solace and calm by withdrawing inside ourselves and being exclusive. I don’t do it to the extent he has done, or experience the extreme sensitivities to stimulus but the desire to escape has always been strong in me. I think this has become so apparent to me lately because Griffen has grown so rapidly into a social being that he is shining a spot light on my desire to withdraw in the face of overstimulation. He will be playing in the other room and I will go into my office to do something …I will hear him call me “Da!” I’ll acknowledge him but if I don’t come right away he will come into the office, pry his way between me and the key board looking right into my eyes and say "Da!”, Grab my hand and pull me in to the other room. Our roles have reversed! What an opportunity this is giving me to understand not only where he is but where he came from. I have been trying to draw him out to our world…to engage us. For years we have been doing this looking for a glimmer of recognition and once getting it we tried to build on it. All that work, pain, sorrow, joy is paying off. All of a sudden Griff in engaging us more and more and it has left me a little unprepared. I have learned to spend 10 -12 hour days with my non verbal, exclusive boy. I have had hours and hours of one sided conversations. When ever I am out in the world and see someone’s pet I start talking to it like I do Griffen…like they know what I’m saying and want to respond but can’t find the words.
The more I understand my son and his autism the less I fear it…the more accepting of him I become…seeing more and more the value and strength in him. The autism is part of that…a part of him. The closer I get to that point of complete acceptance of who he is…truly living in the moment the closer we will get to recovery. The greater the acceptance the tighter the bond will become between us. I can see it now…the two of us showing each other the way out…stepping into the light together.