I’m still at the Brown Center so much they’re probably tired of me by now. I’ve already worn out the average “new parent” jitters time. I don’t have the “jitters” anymore, but I like being there and watching how they do what they do.
When I see it, it all looks like play. But at home it translates into something magical. Jaden is having conversations with me. Actual conversations. There’s still language barriers and misused words, still some drive-me-up-the-wall echolalia. But the gap is closing.
Last year I would have sold everything l had to know what was going on inside of my son’s precious head. His intelligent eyes made it impossible not to believe that whatever he was trying to communicate to me in his completely alien babble was something interesting, poignant, even amazing. And I was missing it.
Harder than my own loss, it was obvious to him that he was unable to communicate. His struggles were a thing of great admiration and heartbreak. He never gave up. In the past year I and many other wonderful people have worked hard to help Jaden achieve what he wanted so badly. But I believe the crux of his success is founded in the fact that he is the most stubborn, strong-willed, ambitious, determined person I’ve ever known. While this makes for some interesting challenges in parenthood, I wouldn’t change him for the world.
But I digress. In truth one of my fears with sending Jaden to ABA based therapy was that I didn’t want them to change him. I didn’t want a little automaton who said and did the right things at the right times like a well-trained dog, and in that losing himself somewhere.
But what’s happening instead is a transformation. It’s like a static television that his therapy team is helping to fine-tune, or a rubiks cube that they gently match the colors in the right place. All the pieces of life were there for him, he just didn’t know how to make it come together in his head.
I watch, I listen, I learn, but to me it still looks like magic.