{"id":1455,"date":"2006-01-13T06:04:00","date_gmt":"2006-01-13T06:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog2\/2006\/01\/chosen\/"},"modified":"2006-01-13T06:04:00","modified_gmt":"2006-01-13T06:04:00","slug":"chosen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/2006\/01\/chosen\/","title":{"rendered":"Chosen"},"content":{"rendered":"

Contrary to the popular bits of wisdom floating around the special needs world<\/a>, I have come to believe that my son’s autism is not some Blessed Journey I have been chosen for or Sent on — not that there’s anything wrong with it, as Jerry Seinfeld would say. I am writing this with a big sigh and a full heart, because I certainly have thought all those things, and glommed onto them at one time or another in my hour of need.<\/p>\n

But coming to terms with Nat’s differences (the most obvious one of which is his fairly severe degree of autism) is a moving target. When he was little, the coming to terms was about finding out what the heck was making my child unable to enter new places, or play with toys in a conventional way. When he was seven, we grappled with his waking up every other night laughing hysterically, unable to get back to sleep. When he was ten, the coming to terms was about figuring out why he was aggressive seemingly out of the blue at times. When he hit puberty, I found myself dealing with teaching a teenage boy the rules of privacy.<\/p>\n

But here’s a bit of perspective that has recently occurred to me: it has taken me much longer coming to terms with my own quirks and issues. I have been struggling for twenty years with certain discouraging tendencies in my personality, and have had to learn the hard way what my life’s lessons might be. That’s a lot longer than anything I’ve had to deal with regarding Nat. So given the logic that maybe I was “chosen” to be Nat’s parent so that I could give him an allegedly good life or so that I could learn things that perhaps my soul needed to learn — wouldn’t it then also be true that I was chosen to occupy this particularly challenging mind of mine? Yet no one thinks to say that to me. <\/p>\n

Last night Nat and I were reading together<\/a>, and it was very enjoyable. It is not always this way for me, because of the way Nat struggles over words that I thought he knew already and he spaces out and it takes a really long time to get through a Level 2 story. But last night I had a lot of time, nothing pressing to do, and I relaxed, which was easy because Nat was smiling as we began Peter Pan. He was pretty animated (for him) as he read, and nice and loud (sometimes he will only whisper the words). As I looked at him, my mind traveled back to a vision of Toddler Nat, and how delightfully cute he was, and how often we read together back then. Suddenly my mind melded the two images of Nat, and just connecting them together, I felt supremely happy. I realized that at that moment, it did not matter at all that Nat and I have a lot of challenges to get through, together and alone. All that mattered was that he was still Nat, the same boy that I loved so easily when he was patently adorable, before I knew about autism. He is the same boy, and that is all the Life Lessons I really needed last night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Contrary to the popular bits of wisdom floating around the special needs world, I have come to believe that my son’s autism is not some Blessed Journey I have been chosen for or Sent on — not that there’s anything wrong with it, as Jerry Seinfeld would say. I am writing this with a big […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/sSTth-chosen","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1455\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}