Watching an Autistic Child Regress
The Autism News | English
Terrible pain too often accompanies mother-love (and father-love for that matter). I could not let Megan Liberman’s post from Monday on Emily Rapp’s Notes From a Dragon Mom inch down the screen without flagging another — admittedly far less hopeless — reflection on maternal loss that I read some days ago in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
It’s called Little Boy Lost, and in it Amy Leal, a Syracuse University Romantic scholar, writes unforgettably of the horror of having watched her now-nonverbal 2-year-old son, Julian, lose his just-acquired language skills to autism.
Julian had, she relates, been receiving early-intervention services for three months when he suddenly had a “frightening regression” and “the light in his eyes began to go out.”
“He stopped looking in my eyes, and when I caught his chin in my hand to look in his face, there was nothing there. He was irritable and spun in circles most of the time, and when he did sit down, he kept pushing the same button on a musical toy over and over and couldn’t be engaged. He didn’t even like his beloved books anymore. My son was gone — there was no spark in his face, no sign of life, just dead eyes.”
She continues:
“The worst part was that I knew he sensed it, too. In the same way that I know when he wants vegetable puffs or puréed fruit by the subtle pitch of his cries, I could tell that he also perceived the change — and feared it. At night he was terrified to go to bed, needing to hold my fingers with one hand and touch my face with the other in order to get the few hours of sleep he managed. Every morning he was different. Another word was gone, another moment of eye contact was lost. He began to cry in a way that was untranslatable. The wails were not meant as messages to be decoded; they were terrified expressions of being beyond expression itself.”
And she shares a story that I just can’t get out of my mind:
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lisa h says: i feel your pain (actually wept reading this) as i went through this with my boys. i have twins with autism and i watched the lights go out, right after their 2nd birthday as well. please know that there is hope, after years of tests and therapies they are speaking, reading, and doing math even. i know all cases are different but with determination and a lot of love you can pull him from the abyss. one of my boys still stares into space often and i see that vacant look that scared me so much but he eventually comes back, just keep hope and know people are out there to give you support!
