Kim’s Story, The Dawn of Our Autism Journey
We’ve shared about Autism Spectrum Disorder before, here, here and here, but we’ve never told Kim’s birth story, the dawn of our journey onto the spectrum.
It’s almost impossible to know how to tell the story of her birth and before
because we didn’t know that anything about the pregnancy and birth was spectrum related.
And we still don’t know.
We can suspect it was, but no doctor has ever agreed that any detail of her birth was strictly related to the disorder
and could have predicted a future diagnosis.
So we’ll just tell the story the way we lived it.
This could turn into a rather long story,
so this will be the first installment of a series.
Because it’s not easy looking back at the real-hard-life moments and tell it all at once.
Before Birth
In this post, we talked a little about the miracle of expecting our baby girl.
We had two of the sweetest boys ever, age 6 and 4,
when we found out we would be having a girl.
We were not only expecting our first girl,
but the first girl grandchild in my husband’s family!
So it was a big deal for all of us.
I don’t think that euphoric joy of looking forward to having a baby girl in my arms ever left me the whole 9 months. I know you’ll raise your eyebrows, but I knew from the moment I discovered we were going to have a baby that it was going to be a girl. I believe it was a revelation from God, even though science does corroborate some of my reasons for knowing. I get a lot of quizzical looks when I share that knowing with people. But I knew. I just did. And here’s why I think God gave me that knowing: because He knew I would need that feeling later. He knew I would need to remember His presence in that first knowing, so that later I would believe without a doubt that He sent this child, to us, on purpose.
We’ll get back to that thought later in the story.
The Dawn of Our Autism Journey
Everything about those nine months was good. I felt good physically, after the first few weeks of morning sickness. Which was never as bad as with the boys.
And I felt good emotionally. Even when the doctor tsk-tsk-ed about the baby’s small size, and wanted sonogram after sonogram. The many sonograms that always came back without a trace of anything wrong.
Until the eighth month. Doctor Deason heard a stressful heartbeat and it concerned her. She didn’t know why the baby would be under stress, because the sonograms always came back showing nothing amiss.
The doctor began to ask me to come in twice a week for check ups, instead of just once a week the way it was with the boys. I didn’t like it. It wasn’t fun clambering up onto those uncomfortable tables and lying on my back hooked up to a fetal heart monitor for half an hour. Not only did I feel like a beached whale, I felt like a breathless beached whale. It’s hard to breathe when you have a 5+ pound bump pressing on your diaphragm!
Doctor Deason said she would know when it was time for our baby to be born. The heartbeats would tell her when the stress was more important to address than leaving the baby in the womb for as long as possible.
And then, there was still that worrisome small size.
God was still with me.
But here’s where we go back to that God-with-me feeling. I had no fear. I had no indication that anything could go wrong or be wrong. Was I naïve? Was I ignorant? Probably. But mostly, I was likely ignoring the bad stuff so it would just go away.
Because our baby girl was coming and it was loads of fun dreaming up names and preparing for her. We didn’t have room to have a designated nursery, but that didn’t stop me making cute crib bedding and a new lacy cover for the bassinet and matching receiving blankets and burp cloths. Anything I could think of I made. Bringing this girl into the world was the most important thing in my life at that time, so it was easy doing all the stuff and taking care of our little family.
B was in first grade, and T was a quiet and self-entertaining guy. I looked forward to the afternoon, when B came home from school, and all four (2 boys, their unborn sister and I) of us snuggled into our big waterbed and read stories and napped for awhile. Then we’d get up and make supper together, the boys would set the table and pick up their toys, and then Daddy came home from work. We ate supper, cleaned up the meal, had Bible Stories and bedtime prayers, and we were another day closer to welcoming Baby Sister!
There just wasn’t any room for worry in that idyllic little scenario.
We didn’t know we needed to read books to prepare for a life with a special baby,
but if we had, these are some we can now recommend (these are affiliate links):
The Autistic Brain by Temple Grandin
Start Here: A Guide for Parents
My Little Nurse to the rescue.
I had a young friend, twenty-ish, who was going to nursing classes. She often came over, because our city wasn’t home to her, and she missed her parents. When she discovered Doctor Deason’s concerns, she began to stop in oftener. She was into full nurse-nurture mode. And I appreciated her caring.
The last two weeks before Baby Girl came I was instructed to lay down quietly and listen for fetal heartbeats.
And every time the heartbeats were there. Steady. Beating, beating, beating. My strong little girl, fighting against the odds. No one knew what the odds were. It baffled my doctor and the doctors she consulted with.
So when Doctor Deason wanted me to come in and start labor, I was ready. I still felt amazingly good and I was still confident everything would turn out fine. But I was ready to start life with baby and forget about doctor visits and counting heartbeats.
Come back in a month to read about
The Birth of Our Baby Girl,
the real Dawn of Our Autism Journey!
