The labeling and hope

Today my son was officially labeled by medical specialists as autistic. Not so shocking news. The evaluation was surprisingly fun for Adrian. He went into a room and played with four strangers. His favorite stranger was the speech pathologist, the only man on the panel. Adrian surprised me with how social he became with them in such a short amount of time. He started climbing on the speech pathologist, and even fed him some Gerber puffs :) He let the psychologist swing him around in the air. He did very well. The four medical staff had fun with him. They said he was much more responsive and fun than the kid they had in there in the morning. So now Adrian has the official label. They gave us lots of information. They also gave us hope. They made me feel like a better mom, and that I've done a great job with him so far because he has began to reach out for social interactions with other people. They said, with the right therapy and the right intervention, he should do well. There are many things I'm going to have to do in the near future, such as food therapy and genetic testing to rule out such things as Fragile X syndrome. But there is still hope there that he will learn to talk, and hopefully have a pretty normal life. It is the best thing in the world for a mother to hear that her child has a chance at an average life. There are mothers out there that want their children to be gifted, to be smarter than all the other children just so they can feel like they're the best and most special mom in the world. There are mothers out there that want something to be wrong with their child, either an illness or a disability (whether physical or mental) so they can get attention and sympathy from people. But, there are mothers out there like me, who could care less about their child being gifted or disabled... I just want an average life for my son. The last thing I want is either sympathy or attention for this. Average is what I want. Nothing more, nothing less. So for today, I attach my heart to hope.