Crisis Mode

I am sure I felt like most parents feel when they know their child has a complicated disorder or disease. I immediately began researching on the internet. The problem I ran into was that there was no information on infants and ASD. I was devistated and scared to death. What do I do? I could find NO ONE to guide me or help me. I wrote to many support groups and asked many therapist that work with kids on the spectrum but everyone was stunned by my sons age and didn't know how to help. I read the book "The Boy Who Loved Window" which was about a mom who suspected from birth that her son was on the autism spectrum. She began Floortime therapy with him and in the end he was never diagnosed. So I thought to myself, wow, is that possible, could you really prevent ASD with enough therapy? Well I was on a mission. I thought all I needed to do was be in his face 24/7 and make him love being with me and look at my face and he would be ok. I also found a Ph.D in London, England who said working with Infants at risk for ASD was very easy and they could be cured of their symptoms in 3 weeks. I thought WOW cured in 3 weeks...This is what I need. I want someone to make my baby better. So Nick, Gregory, my 2 daughters and I jumped on a plane and headed for London for 3 weeks. Well I think I knew deep down this was not possible but I couldn't leave any stone unturned. I had to try. We used every penny of our savings and put our faith in this doctor and her therapist in England (Infant Mental Health Clinic, or her association IPAN). CRAZY I know but no one else was willing to help me and I felt we were losing time. Well to make a long story short it was a huge waste of money. Our family had a well needed vacation and a nice time together but it was disappointing to return home with Gregory and the same symptoms he had before we left. He still didn't like to make eye contact, he was very stiff, arched away from us, held his arms up away from us when we carried him up on our shoulder, gassy and constipated, rocked back and forth and didn't sleep well at all. He was now 6 months old. I remember crying to my husband in the middle of the night for weeks telling him I lost my baby. I told him I brought him home from the hospital but I have lost him and I can't find him. This is how it felt. Sometimes I felt like I was going crazy. It felt soooo unbelievable. Like a BAD BAD dream. I felt no connection to my son. He didn't want me...What do I do????? Some professionals would blow this off as depression. I had just had a baby so maybe I was depressed. I hoped and prayed this was the case. PLEASE GOD let me be crazy. Let this be about me and not my dear son. Maybe in a fews months this will all disappear. We started Floortime. All day everyday. We saw Dr. Greenspan. We had an OT. We massaged him many times a day. I carried him with me everywhere I went. I slept next to him. I bathed with him. Still there was so much awkwardness between us. When my girls were infants I felt like we were one person. They needed me. They met my gaze. They cried for me. They smiled when they saw me. If my son is ok then why doesn't he do these things? I put my girls on the back burner. They spent many hours a day in another room while I sat playing with Gregory. At night I would cry that my baby girls we being neglected. But how can Gregory get better if I don't spend every waking minute rewiring his growing brain. I put Nick on the back burner as well. I didn't give him the time of day. When I wasn't playing with Gregory I was on the computer looking up Autism. Wondering how we could try to afford another therapy. What else can we do for Gregory? Nick and I began to feel like strangers. We slept in different rooms, we didn't talk to eachother. We began to argue about everything. Finally when Gregory was 14 months a women who is an infant specialist and now our RDI consultant told us she sees what we are worried about and she would recommend RDI. She said that RDI is the best tool that she has at this point to help us with our sons development. Our son still does not have a diagnosis of ASD but I feel very sure he is on the spectrum. At this point I cannot find a diagnostician who looks at development the way RDI does. Yes my son points and yes he has MANY words and yes he has some kind of joint attention but there are so many other things that just aren't the same as a typically developing child. All of those great skills he does have were taught. I worked on them day and night. For goodness sake, if my son was typically developing he probably would be ready for kindergarden by now. I should mention that Gregory was making it hard on me to show people what I saw. He loved novelty so when he saw a strangers face he initially liked to look at it because it was something new. He would make eye contact and smile. So he could fool many. It started to become more obvious when he reached the 14-15 month mark because now you would expect a 15 month old to engage longer then a few seconds. Gregory initially would look at what you showed him but a few seconds later he was looking away babbling to himself or spacing out at the window. When I decided to learn about RDI and read some of the books on it our life began to change. Slowly I feel like I am coming out of the crisis mode.