Our Journey to Noah’s Autism Diagnosis….
October 2014: I look at this photo and all I remember is the fight Noah had given us because I made him wear jeans and that button up shirt.
When I first felt the desire to possibly start a blog, it was when I was going through our struggles with Noah. I would sit for hours on my phone googling different possibilities for what was going on with our youngest son. I felt lost, alone, defeated and scared, it was as if I was drowning. I was searching, trying to help make sense of what was going on in our lives.
To be honest, I didn’t find much. I wanted to read about other moms who literally felt like they were failing every single day. Moms, that if they were being honest, felt like running away some days. But I didn’t really find that. I also couldn’t say those things out loud, right? The one thing I had wanted my entire life was to be a wife and a mother. Now that I was a mother, I hated it. I hated the mom I had become. I hated how out of control I felt. But I couldn’t actually say those things to anyone.
This is why I started this blog, and this is why I will start to share our story today. I now know that there are others who have gone through very similar experiences, and felt exactly the same way I have. So I write this today to hopefully encourage at least one person.
We started noticing something was different with Noah when he was around 18 months old. Nothing huge that set off red flags, but just little things that seemed like huge deals to him. For example, whenever I would dress him in jeans or shirts with collars, he would fight me. He would try to pull them off, scream, bite at his jeans, pull at his clothing, etc. I thought it was just a phase he was going through and would get over it. (Spoiler alert- he didn’t. The kid is now almost 10 and still won’t wear jeans or shirts with collars! Lol.)
The next big thing we noticed was his sensitivity to smells. There were certain smells that he absolutely HATED. If I made oatmeal, I had to eat it in a different room. The worst seemed to be gum. It got to the point where we couldn’t chew gum anywhere in our house, because he would smell it and go off. I can remember numerous times I had gotten in the car with gum in my mouth. Noah would smell it from his car seat in the back seat, and immediately freak out. I remember he had these John Deer cowboy boots. He would take them off and throw them at me as hard as he could, while I was driving. I can’t even count the amount of times I had goose egg knots on the back of my head from those boots.
Noah here with my mom wearing those famous boots.
The list of things that triggered Noah to go off became longer and longer. And it seemed like the triggers became sillier and sillier. I will never forget the morning that Mark cut Noah’s toast a different way than I usually do. Little 3 year old Noah proceeded to throw his plate across the room and then throw his chair. The tantrums were out of control. No kind of discipline worked, and we were literally walking on eggshells every time we left the house. It became normal for us to drive two vehicles everywhere we went, in case one of us had to leave with Noah. Everywhere we went, it seemed we were making a scene. I could feel the stares of people in the midst of these outbreaks, as if they were thinking, “Why can’t this mother control her own child?”
I would love to pretend that I handled this with grace every day. But I absolutely did not. I would scream, cry, spank, yell, and do everything possible to get him to understand this wasn’t appropriate behavior. We tried time outs, he would never stay. Someone recommended time out in his room, which resulted in holes in his bedroom walls. Spanking did nothing. I had marks all over my arms from where he would pinch and scratch me when he was upset. I felt like I was literally drowning in motherhood.
To be continued…