She is sitting across from me with smug eyes, telling me that she can no longer watch my son, and I want to punch her because I have known for weeks that our relationship is crumbling. And even before that, I knew she held herself far above not-yet-divorced, new-in-town, disgraced little me. Every day when I arrive to pick up my 2-year-old son, Kaden, I can see from her crumpled face that today has not been a good day. “This daycare,” she says, “is for…well, how do I say this politely….more mild-mannered children. Your son’s personality is just a little too intense, and he doesn’t fit in. We think he might need something a little more structured. Maybe a daycare for kids with more special needs.” She is saying this in a syrupy sweet voice, like she is doing me a favor. Like she is not ripping my heart out or tearing down the modicum of stability I have managed to build into our unsteady lives.
Being too tired to argue, I tell her half-heartedly that my mom and sister have volunteered to come visit for the weekend and take Kaden back to Billings with them for the following week. Seizing her opportunity, she chimes in, again with the syrupy helpful voice, “Well then, let’s just consider this your two-weeks’ notice. I’m sure you can use this time without him to find a new daycare.” She says this as she walks to the computer, punches a few keys, and grabs a solitary sheet off the printer and hands it to me. A bill. Four hundred fifty dollars for daycare services rendered. One half of that for two weeks’ notice.
While this conversation is taking place, Kaden is on the floor, lying contently on his stomach with his chubby cheek pressed to the carpet, wheeling a toy truck back and forth, back and forth. He draws it up in two hands and rolls onto his back. Examining the truck closely, he methodically spins the wheels, over and over again. Spinning, spinning, spinning. This is one of the weird things he does. One of many things on a long list of weird things, and I don’t know why. It’s all part of the something that is off about Kaden, but I just can’t put my finger on exactly what it is.
I found the answer, sooner than later. On one of those lonely nights he was gone with my mother and sister, I found myself thinking about him relentlessly. I was taking survey of our brief, but eventful life together: his frightening birth in Oklahoma City and our 3,500 mile move to Anacortes, Washington, three weeks later; my severe post-partum depression and recovery; my husband’s Navy deployment to the Philippines while I was with my family in Billings; the twelve hours we spent together after deployment before he announced his engagement to a 19-year-old Filipina woman named Mylene (to whom he is now married, living God-Knows-Where). Through all this time, it had been me and Kaden. Just the two of us. He had always been different, high-strung from birth, and then taking up strange behaviors, like spinning objects compulsively or not calling me “mom,” from a young age. I had been a stay-at-home-mom those first few years, but I had tried a short stint at work. It only lasted a month, because the daycare provider told me, distraught after one of Kaden’s bad days, that she couldn’t do it any longer. And now, here we were again…x-listed from another daycare.
In the lonely silence of the apartment I had rented when I moved to Ronan, Montana, for no other reason than I had no place else to go, I booted up my computer and sat in front of the blue screen. One of my colleagues at the high school where I had started teaching had asked me if Kaden was autistic when I joked with her about his zeal for spinning objects. I queued up Google, typed “symptoms of Autism,” and selected the first link that popped up.
Problems developing social skills. Well, sort of. I mean, he talked, but it was mostly stuff he had seen on TV or heard on his music CD’s.
Fails to make eye contact. Never.
Resists physical affection. Never. What was I worried about?
Repetitive language. Often “echolalia” or repeats previously-heard phrases. Oh.
Stereotypical behaviors like body rocking or flapping hands. Shit.
Unusual focus on pieces of toys rather than the item itself. May spin objects. Double shit.
I continued down the list, desperately trying to separate “autistic behavior” from “two-year-old behavior.” But by the end of that night, I knew. Strangely, I wasn’t sad. I think I may have cried (I don’t remember, because it’s been a long time), but I remember feeling relieved. Like maybe if I had a name for this strange behavior, I could explain it and prevent people from thinking that my son was simply bad. “He has autism,” I would explain with a wave of my hand at his glass-shattering shriek in the grocery store. Suddenly, the word autism was going to rescue me from the fear that I was simply the worst mother who ever lived.
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