Different… and Good!
03 August 2010
It dawned on me not too long ago that I am the mother of three "only" children. Each of my sons, it seems to me, occupies a place in the universe that is separate from that of their two brothers -- and so they could each feel themselves an "only child."
My oldest son, Sam, now in college and the product of my first marriage, was nine years old when his first brother, Dylan, was born. The simple fact that he is that many years older sets his world apart from his closest-in-age sibling. My older sister is the same number of years apart from me, and as we were growing up our worlds rarely collided. She changed my diapers when I was a baby, and by the time I was school age, she was a teenager thinking about things teenagers think about.
When my youngest, Jack, was born less than two years after Dylan, naturally we thought he'd now have a sibling close enough in age that they'd enjoy many of the same interests and, at the very least, have a playmate. It seemed to start off that way.
Then Dylan went to live on the island of autism.
We did not know, at the time Jack was born and Dylan was 19 months old, that Dylan had autism. I look back at video footage taken when they are both still in diapers, and no one could have known. They engaged in their sibling chatter and giggles, walked around the house wearing daddy's giant shoes on their teeny feet, and when their big brother was around, did what they could to bother a pre-adolescent.
For Sam, having a brother with autism, the chasm created by simple math was made all the wider. As Dylan's autism became more apparent, his brothers' attitudes towards him didn't change right away, but slowly I saw a flicker in Jack's eyes when he would try to decide if it were worth the effort of asking his brother to play. At the same time, Sam was busy navigating the complications of being a teenager – a challenge of its own. And so, Dylan's island of autism got bigger, and the sea between him and his brothers wider and deeper.
Don't get the wrong idea; all the boys love each other. It's just different from your typical family in which siblings can understand each other without saying a word and whisper to one another after the lights are out at bedtime. Sometimes it makes me sad when I think about it ... but when I see how much they care about each other, how Dylan's brothers have embraced him, how they've grown more compassionate and understanding, I realize that our "different" is good.
In Awe, Kim
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