"Your child has autism"

I don't know why that statement is so traumatic. You'd think, being the 3rd time around and having suspected for about a year now that that was the case, we'd just be glad to finally get a diagnosis so we could move on and try new things. And that was partially true, but Monday, when the doctor said those words to me, a part of me died, yet again. Maybe its because with an autism diagnosis comes the loss of a dream. When you find out there's a sweet little baby living inside your body, and you hear the reassuring heartbeat, when you get the ultrasound that verifies that your children do NOT have the same kidney disease as their older brother, you feel like everything is fine, and you imagine great things for their life, a life that does NOT include autism.

But now 3 of my children's lives DO include autism, and with Asher, its not aspergers, a more highly functioning form of autism, but regular old autism, hand flapping, non-verbal autism. I wondered, will he always be obsessed with airplanes and knocking down chairs? Will he ALWAYS run to an open door and slam it shut? Will he ever be able to relate to a woman, and fall in love? Clearly the chances of me finding a babysitter are slim to none. What does this mean for him, for me, for all of us. Maybe it is selfish, but in the last 6 months, i've given up everything that makes me ME. I ditched weight watchers, exercising, scrapping, just about everything that was just for me, to try to keep my family together. I just about lost it the other day when dh thought I was ignoring him. I guess you can say that i've been a bit obsessive on the whole research and autism quest.

Monday when i found out, i cried nearly all day and was up till nearly 1 am crying, praying, trying to find peace with the whole situation. I think I did. I really feel like God has taken this off my chest as far as the burden of the whole situation. I'm now just working on myself to try to constantly give it up when I start feeling like i need to do yet another thing to try to figure him out. Or Annabeth for that matter, whom we know something is horribly wrong with, but we don't know what. If i carried that weight, i'd collapse in days. My constant prayer is that i'll fight my own instinct to do that and turn it over to the one who created me, to the one who created my beautiful ashie, and let HIM guide us, lead us and carry the burden that's way too heavy for me to handle.

I was telling dh the other day that if the statistic i read that 80% of couples with an autistic child get divorced then we have about a 240% chance of divorce. We both laughed knowing we are way beyond that point. (probably the odds are more like 500% when you consider all the other crap we deal with on a daily basis, money issues, twins, school and homeschooling, etc) But God is bigger than people's stupid statistics. Thank goodness for that.

HOPING my next post will be about something fun and homeschooly we have done- believe it or not, there have actually been quite a few i've not posted about! Thanks for reading, and for your prayers, they mean a lot to us. Now more than ever, its clear that we are not standing on our own strength.