A Careful Sort of Hope


Sorry we haven’t posted in a while. I have been down in Texas this week with the laptop. But I’m back home with the fam again, and I wanted to throw this in before I let Sara out of the kitchen (Oh come one, it’s a joke! But she really is in the kitchen…)

Jack’s waves of progress and regress have numbed me a little over the past year. He learns new words. We get excited. People tell us “Yah! He’s getting better! God is healing him!” And I smile politely. Maybe. I hope they’re right. But they don’t understand that the downs always follow the ups. If the pattern serves, he will lose those words in a week or two, and we’ll wonder where he has gone again. It’s happened so many times, my expectations now oscillate a safe distance between jadedness and denial. For better or for worse, that’s the way it is.

Don’t get me wrong: I haven’t lost hope. I just don’t want to get emotionally caught up in short term analysis. You can afford to do that with some illnesses where a little bit of progress indicates healing. Not with autism. Not unless you want to walk around in permanent disappointment.

So I say this with a measure of guarded, Vulcanian objectivity: My son is making very real progress.

One year ago (see, this is a long-term observation), Jackson lived in his private world, and it was hard to make him come out. He wasn’t very interested in engaging Sara or me, and he didn’t even acknowledge his siblings. But those things simply aren’t true anymore. Even in his downturns, Jack runs to us, climbs all over us, takes our hands, follows basic instructions, tells us in some way what he wants, plays games with us, looks us in the eye (more than before, anyway), and even gives hugs and kisses. In the past weeks, I have even gotten him to throw the football back and forth! In short, he wants to be with us.

Of course, he still stims all the time, and prefers to play alone and chatter to himself. But it is no longer difficult to pull him out of that world, because he likes ours, too.

This is a testament to alot of prayer, changes in diet, professional therapy, and patience. I realize he’s going to need more and more of these because we have only begun to walk this journey. Barring Divine Intervention–which we are not, by the way–there will still be downturns. But without doubt, Jack is trending upward.

And that is a good reason for hope.