Reflections on Fatherhood.
There are many things in life that I am learning not only by being a father but just by virtue of getting older. None of these are new to anybody but me yet they still have a profound impact on me. It's a strange thing that I was a more jaded cyincal man when I was younger. Perhaps it was some sort of defense mechanism or a misguided attempt at being mature or worldly. Maybe both. I used to think that people with any sort of sentiment were rubes and yokels who didn't really understand how the real world worked. Some sort of Hobbsian nightmare. To some extent I chalk that up to spending a lot of time in New York City. It's a hard place to live. You need to be a competitor not just a participant to keep your head above water. Getting on and off the subway during rush hour is a lesson in assertiveness. You need to muscle past those getting on when you're getting off. You need to be on guard all the time. It's not easy to keep your center from hardening in such a climate. Now that I'm a father (three times over) and a given world events in the last 3.5 years, I have changed more in that time than any other that I can remember. I am more taken with self-reflection and am more conscious of my attempts to improve myself as a person. I still have virtually no patience but that is improving now that I have kids. You can't lose your patience with a 4 month old who has painful gas that wakes him up a night. Or a 15 month old with an ear infection and teething pains that puts him in a foul mood. He can't express himself except for crying. Sure I get upset and it strains my patience to the breaking point but I'm not angry with them, just frustrated. I feel like my inability to soothe my kids when they're upset is a reflection on my abilities as a father. I wasn't given a manual on how this was done. I didn't take any courses to prepare me for this. I have only my own experience with my parents as a guide. It is an excellent one to be sure but I wasn't taking notes at the time and most of this just feels like flying by the seat of my pants.
One of the more difficult pressures I'm facing has to do with my eldest. He is developmentally delayed. He's been diagnosed with Pervasive Developmental Delay (PDD). That how Developmental Pediatricians say that he's not meeting his developmental milestones. While he is on par or above for his gross and fine motor skills, he's behind his peers in speech. He does not speak and he's already 2.5 years old. No "Mama", no "Dada". Nothing. He used to say both of those but not in reference to anything. He would just babble. He vocalizes extensively but does not babble like he's speaking in his own language. He does however, use specific sounds for certain things. When he's upset he hums. There's an elephant on one of the Baby Einstein videos that makes a tick-tock sound as it moves across the screen. Now he uses a hard T sound to denote elephants. No matter that they don't make that sound, that's what they're called. When the elephant shows up on the screen he will make a hard T sound and then run over to me and look me in the eye. He expects me to say something like, "Yes, that's an elephant. Elephant." If I don't respond in a timely manner, he will touch my mouth to encourage me to speak. I've been reading as much as I can about PDD and by all accounts it is a huge black hole on the Autism spectrum that sucks in kids of a wide range. The PDD spectrum includes kids who in another era would have been dismissed as "late talkers" to kids who have Asperger's syndrome. There is one category called PDD - NOS. NOS stands for Not Otherwise Specified. That is the catch-all for kids who defy further classification. That's where my son is. There is some disagreement about whether PDD is a form of autism or distinctly different from it. It is widely agreed they are "on the same axis". Which essentially means that PDD is a mild(er) form of autism. There is no known cause for PDD/autism. Some speculate it has to do with the way the body sythesizes glutens. In some children their inability to process glutens leads to a narcotic affect on the brain, effectively shutting down development. Some parents report miraculous results by switching to a gluten-free diet. Other theories point to Thermisol which is a perservative used for vaccinations and claim it has an effect similar to mercury poisoning. Thus there is a small but steadfast group of parents who refuse to have their children vaccinated. (Side note: my physician claims that vaccinations are optional. Technically this is true but good luck getting your kid into a school, public or private or even into daycare or organized sports. Ain't gonna happen.) Still others believe it is related to a traumatic event resulting from an unknown upper respiratory infection that has an adverse affect on the kids. Lastly, there are the curmudgeons who insist these kids are simply late talkers. Thomas Sowell wrote a book called "Late Talking Children" detailing his own experiences as well as that of his readers. He admits the data is anecdotal but that does not make it any less surprising. He talks about his frustration in having his child labeled either retarded or autistic when he was convinced he was neither of these things. He talks about how bright his son was and the only thing that was missing was the fact that he did not talk. He could look at a child safety lock for a moment and then simply remove it once he had studied it. This mirrors my own experience in that, my son too, finds ingenious ways to thwart my efforts to keep things away from him. Does that mean I don't agree with the diagnosis of PDD? Maybe. I was initially uncomfortable with the label because it meant my son was something less than the perfect child I believed him to be. Later, I realized I didn't care what they called him so long as they had services available to help him learn to speak. Call him a martian, I don't care, just get him what he needs. That's where we are now. He is making great strides (imnho) since he began going to "school" (really therapy) and by having an OT (occupational therapist) come to the house to work with him. It is amazing to me how fast he picks up on some things and how he makes up games for me to play with him or remembers the ones that I made up in the spur of the moment but they stick with him and he loves them.
I have no doubt that he will catch up to (and eventually pass) his peers. He is a very bright boy who is very affectionate and a quick learner. None of these are present in autistic children. All autistic children have some level of mental retardation and are neither affectionate nor do they make eye contact. I know that someday I'll tell him about how worried we were that he would never speak and how now it's hard to make him stop. Maybe I'm wrong but I've always been an optimist. Even if he never speaks a word, I know he'll be fine on his own as he is very bright and understands most of what I say to him. My father was taken aback when I said it doesn't really matter to me if he never learns to speak because he is my son and I love him more than I could ever express in words. I'm sure he knows I love him, i just hope he knows how much.
Most of what a put forth here, Dear Reader, is admittedly, navel grazing. What I write here is really for me and me alone. I've never told anyone of this site, nor do I think I ever will. For me this exercise in self-reflection and mental masteurbation is my feeble attempt at writing and there is something cathartic about putting one's thoughts in print. It forces me to examine my thoughts more deeply than I would otherwise and that helps me center myself and clear out the clutter of unformed arguements and beliefs that are ungrounded or unexamined. If you have somehow found this blog, welcome. I may not have expected visitors, but I hope you find enough interesting tidbits here that make it worth reading.
There are many things in life that I am learning not only by being a father but just by virtue of getting older. None of these are new to anybody but me yet they still have a profound impact on me. It's a strange thing that I was a more jaded cyincal man when I was younger. Perhaps it was some sort of defense mechanism or a misguided attempt at being mature or worldly. Maybe both. I used to think that people with any sort of sentiment were rubes and yokels who didn't really understand how the real world worked. Some sort of Hobbsian nightmare. To some extent I chalk that up to spending a lot of time in New York City. It's a hard place to live. You need to be a competitor not just a participant to keep your head above water. Getting on and off the subway during rush hour is a lesson in assertiveness. You need to muscle past those getting on when you're getting off. You need to be on guard all the time. It's not easy to keep your center from hardening in such a climate. Now that I'm a father (three times over) and a given world events in the last 3.5 years, I have changed more in that time than any other that I can remember. I am more taken with self-reflection and am more conscious of my attempts to improve myself as a person. I still have virtually no patience but that is improving now that I have kids. You can't lose your patience with a 4 month old who has painful gas that wakes him up a night. Or a 15 month old with an ear infection and teething pains that puts him in a foul mood. He can't express himself except for crying. Sure I get upset and it strains my patience to the breaking point but I'm not angry with them, just frustrated. I feel like my inability to soothe my kids when they're upset is a reflection on my abilities as a father. I wasn't given a manual on how this was done. I didn't take any courses to prepare me for this. I have only my own experience with my parents as a guide. It is an excellent one to be sure but I wasn't taking notes at the time and most of this just feels like flying by the seat of my pants.
One of the more difficult pressures I'm facing has to do with my eldest. He is developmentally delayed. He's been diagnosed with Pervasive Developmental Delay (PDD). That how Developmental Pediatricians say that he's not meeting his developmental milestones. While he is on par or above for his gross and fine motor skills, he's behind his peers in speech. He does not speak and he's already 2.5 years old. No "Mama", no "Dada". Nothing. He used to say both of those but not in reference to anything. He would just babble. He vocalizes extensively but does not babble like he's speaking in his own language. He does however, use specific sounds for certain things. When he's upset he hums. There's an elephant on one of the Baby Einstein videos that makes a tick-tock sound as it moves across the screen. Now he uses a hard T sound to denote elephants. No matter that they don't make that sound, that's what they're called. When the elephant shows up on the screen he will make a hard T sound and then run over to me and look me in the eye. He expects me to say something like, "Yes, that's an elephant. Elephant." If I don't respond in a timely manner, he will touch my mouth to encourage me to speak. I've been reading as much as I can about PDD and by all accounts it is a huge black hole on the Autism spectrum that sucks in kids of a wide range. The PDD spectrum includes kids who in another era would have been dismissed as "late talkers" to kids who have Asperger's syndrome. There is one category called PDD - NOS. NOS stands for Not Otherwise Specified. That is the catch-all for kids who defy further classification. That's where my son is. There is some disagreement about whether PDD is a form of autism or distinctly different from it. It is widely agreed they are "on the same axis". Which essentially means that PDD is a mild(er) form of autism. There is no known cause for PDD/autism. Some speculate it has to do with the way the body sythesizes glutens. In some children their inability to process glutens leads to a narcotic affect on the brain, effectively shutting down development. Some parents report miraculous results by switching to a gluten-free diet. Other theories point to Thermisol which is a perservative used for vaccinations and claim it has an effect similar to mercury poisoning. Thus there is a small but steadfast group of parents who refuse to have their children vaccinated. (Side note: my physician claims that vaccinations are optional. Technically this is true but good luck getting your kid into a school, public or private or even into daycare or organized sports. Ain't gonna happen.) Still others believe it is related to a traumatic event resulting from an unknown upper respiratory infection that has an adverse affect on the kids. Lastly, there are the curmudgeons who insist these kids are simply late talkers. Thomas Sowell wrote a book called "Late Talking Children" detailing his own experiences as well as that of his readers. He admits the data is anecdotal but that does not make it any less surprising. He talks about his frustration in having his child labeled either retarded or autistic when he was convinced he was neither of these things. He talks about how bright his son was and the only thing that was missing was the fact that he did not talk. He could look at a child safety lock for a moment and then simply remove it once he had studied it. This mirrors my own experience in that, my son too, finds ingenious ways to thwart my efforts to keep things away from him. Does that mean I don't agree with the diagnosis of PDD? Maybe. I was initially uncomfortable with the label because it meant my son was something less than the perfect child I believed him to be. Later, I realized I didn't care what they called him so long as they had services available to help him learn to speak. Call him a martian, I don't care, just get him what he needs. That's where we are now. He is making great strides (imnho) since he began going to "school" (really therapy) and by having an OT (occupational therapist) come to the house to work with him. It is amazing to me how fast he picks up on some things and how he makes up games for me to play with him or remembers the ones that I made up in the spur of the moment but they stick with him and he loves them.
I have no doubt that he will catch up to (and eventually pass) his peers. He is a very bright boy who is very affectionate and a quick learner. None of these are present in autistic children. All autistic children have some level of mental retardation and are neither affectionate nor do they make eye contact. I know that someday I'll tell him about how worried we were that he would never speak and how now it's hard to make him stop. Maybe I'm wrong but I've always been an optimist. Even if he never speaks a word, I know he'll be fine on his own as he is very bright and understands most of what I say to him. My father was taken aback when I said it doesn't really matter to me if he never learns to speak because he is my son and I love him more than I could ever express in words. I'm sure he knows I love him, i just hope he knows how much.
Most of what a put forth here, Dear Reader, is admittedly, navel grazing. What I write here is really for me and me alone. I've never told anyone of this site, nor do I think I ever will. For me this exercise in self-reflection and mental masteurbation is my feeble attempt at writing and there is something cathartic about putting one's thoughts in print. It forces me to examine my thoughts more deeply than I would otherwise and that helps me center myself and clear out the clutter of unformed arguements and beliefs that are ungrounded or unexamined. If you have somehow found this blog, welcome. I may not have expected visitors, but I hope you find enough interesting tidbits here that make it worth reading.
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