Most of all reassuring him we’d be fine and dandy, after all everyone is different in lots of ways, try not to stress too much that we’d get through it together and anytime he needed help or I did we’d have each other to face the ups and downs good days and bad days. I knew and could tell by his actions it was tough for him, it took a couple days for him to really process it all. But he took trust and truth i gave him with the promise, I’d do everything in my power to help him and always be at his side.

Then I reminded him that he was not only adopted, but God must have loved and trusted me ALOT because he didn’t send me just any ole child he sent me a very special little boy that happens to be handsomely cute. I am the luckiest Mom in the world because he had already taught me so much about life and love, meekness, patients, understanding, acceptance in Gods designs, strength,wisdom and boldness. Then I giggled and said, Son you’ve even made your mommy a better and smarter woman and to think I couldn’t have came thus far without you. Son I thank God daily for you, You are the best blessing I’ve ever had!

~~~ in return I was giving love that is so pure, unconditional and untarnished to a lot of the worlds ugliness that I found through in my son.

IT WAS THE BEST THING I DID, BE HONEST WITH YOUR CHILDREN WHERE ELSE WILL THEY LEARN HOW TO LOVE, TRUST & HONESTY.

What I needed was a combination of a number of things (some of which I can give longer descriptions of, some of which I can’t):

Time to let assorted information settle into my brain, a process that is not conscious and can take a very long time. (I have had spans of decades between hearing words and understanding them, for instance, and there’s still at least one instance from when I was about three that I am very conscious of the sound, can replay it at will, but I still can’t understand the words.)

Context, and lots of it.

Understanding that the way I understand something isn’t necessarily the same as someone else does, and that therefore pushing for immediate and conscious understanding is unlikely to produce long-term results. Understanding generally has to come about by a longer-term process, but when that does happen, I’ll understand something in more depth than usual.

(That last one accounts both for my total lack of understanding of a lot of things that I describe, and the observation you made that I seem more “reflective” than most people. The “reflection” takes place differently, and so does the processing of information that leads to it. You won’t get immediate conscious comprehension of a lot of things, but you’ll get extremely detail-rich long-term comprehension that I’m often not even aware of until something triggers it.

I suspect these are two sides of the same coin, rather than a contradiction. There’s only so much a person can hold in conscious memory at once, and only so many connections that can be made between things that way, and I don’t have as many of the shortcuts as some other people can take to understanding. But I think those shortcuts, which have many advantages that I lack, come at their own price.

And of course I needed the actual information to steer me at least a little into how to look at these things, because otherwise there would be patterns I just plain wouldn’t see.

I also needed time away from being pushed to use a certain kind of understanding (that is not sustainable to me) to the absolute limits, which meant that I was too busy doing that to really understand a lot of other things. This includes using certain abilities that took substantial amounts away from all other abilities in order to use them.

I don’t know if that answer is complete or not but it’s all the explanation I can give right now. I know what I mean, though.

Also, parents — check your school yearbooks. In my child’s yearbook, the teacher who assists her is clearly labeled as the Autism Specialist. Any child who can read and attends that school therefore knows my child is autistic, so I cannot imagine trying to pretend it isn’t so or imagining my child might not know. I think that pretending it wasn’t so would only lead my child to wonder what was so awful about her that it could not even be spoken of.