What it Takes to Win the War

I was in the middle of drafting a long, unfocused, sad post about this little internal war I've been having -- the war between the accepting part of me and the part that wishes I could simply get rid of the autism, as if it were something I could extract like a bad tooth -- but then realized that my heart wasn't in it at all. I'm sick to death of this internal conflict of mine so why belabor it here? Because the fact is that autism is a part of our lives and so I might as well get on with the accepting. I know for certain that Oliver and I are the only casualties of my little war and that scares me 100 times more than the unknowns of autism. Thankfully, I have the wisdom of my fellow travellers to read that so often helps me find the way. Messages like this one and this one inspire me everyday to make my peace. They remind me of what it takes to win the war.

So instead of what I was going to write I'll share a few highlights from the past few days:

Oliver crawled in bed next to me on Sunday morning and said: "ABCDEFG" just like that. Then later when I was counting his fingers to make sure that they were all there after the long night of sleep, I got to five and he continued: "six, seven, eight, nine." All ten fingers were actually there but my guess is that he wanted to leave a bit of dramatic tension in the air. He's got quite a sense of humor, my boy.

Also, yesterday, there were no clean pants for my boy to wear, as we hadn't finished the laundry yet, and so he spent most of the day running around the house in his underwear. Mid-afternoon I saw him dragging the bin of dirty clothes to the playroom but thought little of it -- Oliver likes to dump things and it seemed a harmless way for him to occupy himself as I cooked dinner. About 10 minutes later he came walking into the kitchen wearing RT's (Resident Teenager's) sweatpants. He was struggling to hold up the waist while attempting to walk without tripping on the too long legs. It was the first time he independantly found an article of clothing and put it on. He looked so delicious standing there that I wanted to eat him.

We had a good 4 day run of no toileting accidents. We've spent a LOT of time in the bathroom since November and it's been a long road.

But I think we are almost there.