My story begins like so many others, with a perfect, beautiful baby boy. I used to call him my angel baby because we were both so happy, I loved my maternity leave with him, we enjoyed every minute and every bath time, every hug was just so joyous an experience for both of us. Sean was affectionate from the start and also very inquisitive. I used to marvel at how he approached the world with wonderment, trying to work it all out.
In the bath he would look at the tiles with such intensity and then run his fingers along them, like he was assessing a construction job that needed to be done! We thought he was amazing. He also used to use his index finger to touch things, feel their texture, everything had to be touched and experienced, it was like he was filling it all away to access at will. A very clever little fellow with an adventurous spirit and a joie de vivre that made me feel very proud to be his mum.
He went on to fall in love with trains, how incredible he was, he would watch the train go around the track from every angle, he would rest his head parallel to the track and look out the side of his eye as it whizzed past, he would look at it from above, he would even turn his back to the track and look over his shoulder! What a little engineer, we would say, enthralled by his fascination with the mechanics of it all. He would look to the mechanics of how something worked and focus on that, the wheels of the train, the chain of a swing. Always quietly analyzing everything.
I am a very independent spirit so I was so thrilled with myself that I was bringing up this independent little fellow. He was never clingy and rejoiced in contact with everyone and anyone. We never had an issue with a babysitter, he would be delighted when someone new arrived to play with.
There were many things, looking back on it now, that I quietly noticed, he was slow to crawl, then he was slow to say his first words. When his first words were Thomas and Percy instead of mummy or daddy, I knew there was something up. Everyone has advice for you when you are a young mum and it was hard to filter out the – “he is such a boy – that is so normal”. I suppose people who did have their suspicions didn’t feel it was their place to pull me aside. From age 2 to 3 was very hard on my family and on Sean. Life just became such a trauma for him. Holidays were disasterous, he would scream and scream when he got upset and bang his head against the wall and Fergal and I would just be devastated. We were deliriously happy and then all of a sudden it all went wrong and our little boy was miserable. We tried to make him happy, we built a new world around him and at home he was the same wonderful boy he had always been, but going out was a huge strain.
Public places inevitably triggered a meltdown, even my parents house ended up being a stressful visit that would sometimes have to be cut short prematurely to avoid upset. He would also be very picky about who he would interact with, he would look through some people as if they didn’t exist, which was excruciatingly embarrassing as it could be a close friend or relative that he would do this too.
I tried to work with him but failed miserably, I just could not figure him out. His speech was delayed so we went to our GP who referred him for speech therapy. Six months later at our first assessment, the speech therapist said she believed, from Sean’s behaviour, that he was on the Autistic spectrum. Sean would not sit to do the assessment and ran to another room that was dark and paced up and down in there.
Within 4 weeks I had Sean privately diagnosed and our journey into the world of autism had begun.
