Hope, Faith and Asperger Syndrome

It all started at the kitchen sink, I know it’s not a very dramatic opening to a story, but look, this is real life and this is where it began. I had been feeling very low, my two children were at school, the house was silent, oppressively so and I felt quite alone, but I put on a music tape and I was singing and praying at the kitchen sink and my spirit began to lift within me. I know I’d been praying and singing for quite a while when I suddenly had a real conviction that God was saying you need to get a job. This does sound mad especially when you consider my circumstances. My son Samuel had recently been diagnosed with Aspergers. I expect you’ve never heard of it, I hadn’t until recently. (They tell me it’s a social /communication disorder.) If you saw my son, you wouldn’t immediately see any difference between him and many little boys of his age.(He was four then ) So what is it? Well at that time, Samuel took longer to make relationships with other people, he is now a very affectionate boy, but then he often seemed more interested in things than people. Another aspect of his behaviour is he has less awareness about conforming. As a toddler he didn’t want to sit still for a moment even to eat his food…..may be that’s not unusual but there was something else, when we went out for a walk in the park, he would run away into the distance with no concern about how far way he was. I used to get very cross with him, but he really had no idea why I was so cross. It was like having a little wild animal. The final straw came at nursery. It was the Christmas outing. All the children went to the theatre to see a play especially for under fives, Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Little chairs were set out in rows for the children to sit on, the props table, chair, bowls etc were arranged ready for the play. Samuel would not sit down like the other children, he wanted to play with the props. When I carried him away to explain, he just cried and wouldn’t listen to anything I said. He just would not sit down. I ended up walking up and down the corridor with him, David my husband and Annie my daughter stayed to watch the little play. I felt devastated. It should have been a joyful and magical event but it was completely ruined. I was very cross with Samuel, but worse still was the awful conviction that there was something wrong with my child, my beautiful blond-haired boy. I was also upset with God. Why us? What’s going on here Lord? Have we done something wrong? Was it our fault? Had we failed as Christians? We had both struggled with our faith through some difficult times. We’d found it very hard to keep going regularly to church particularly with Samuel (all he wanted to do was run around.) We were very ordinary flawed people, but we had made a commitment to Jesus and we had tried to keep it. Had we failed? Was God punishing us? Well that was it, the final straw. After Christmas I saw the health visitor and I also spoke to the lady who ran the nursery Chris. She was lovely, caring, sympathetic, but also very practical. She shared some of my concerns, which, strange though it may seem, was a relief. I wasn’t being paranoid after all. She contacted various people and this led eventually to a two-week assessment at the Child Development Centre.