As a new parent to the world of autism, to begin with I was unprepared and resisted understanding. With limited information, lot of questions and this phase made me a vulnerable and uncertain person while I was always considered myself confident and bold person. My resistance outpoured with grief and anger.
During the resistance phase I would always think could the doctors be wrong? Vivan will outgrow ASD soon? Vivan is just slow and will catch up? How can my child be on the spectrum? No one in my family or my husband’s family are on the spectrum. Why me? Did I cause this for my child? What will people think of my child? It was becoming difficult for me to side-step resistance with many unanswered questions.
Then the realization hit that ASD is not a linear journey. Then the lightbulb moment happened and realized I need to remove all the roadblocks and push forward treatment for my child. I was able to communicate better with therapists for Vivan’s treatment, ensure his goals are aligned and became an advocate among people looking for therapies for ASD.
I was able to come out of my grief much sooner than my partner Vinod. For him he felt that the world around him collapsed and he could not cope with the diagnosis for a few years. Finally, he started getting involved and researching for other therapies we could explore for Vivan.
The following are some learnings from my journey so far: autistic children are neuro diverse and are different to neurotypical children. Every child in the spectrum is unique and no two kids in the spectrum are the same. Each parent and ASD child face very different obstacles to overcome and different battles to be fought. The journey is never easy to understand-life will pull and push parents in a thousand different ways. There will be numerous questions with very little or no answers.
There will be ups and downs. But there will be joy, laughter and loads of love.
