Isaac's journey!

I am so chuffed with pride!

KH and I are invited to attend the SJI Junior Prize-giving Ceremony on 9 Apr. Isaac will be receiving a Merit Award during the ceremony.

He got the invite at school yesterday and was so happy that he called me on his handphone right in the middle of the school day! I was in a meeting and could hardly make sense of his excited stream of words. And when I came home, he was running out to greet me waving the green invite.

Tomorrow we will be attending the Kumon award ceremony where he will receive his Achiever award. I will be there to clap for him since KH will be busy chauffering the kids to and from other activities.

With the fashion show on next week, two award ceremonies coming up, our friend is in a real anxious/excited/scary/happy flap. I'm glad. It's a nice feeling to have.

Looking back, who would have thought?

If, 8 years ago, you'd told me that I would one day be attending award ceremonies for this boy, I would not have believed you. Not when everything seemed so dark and hopeless back then - when he was displaying all his weird behavior, when we were told that he was likely to be autistic and required therapy and certainly not in my blackest moods when everything we read about autism told us that it was incurable and lifelong.

He's come a long long way. I'm so thankful to God that our path has turned out thus.

I know autism can never be cured. And till today, I scratch my head wondering how we got here when psychologist after psychologist could not conclusively say yes or no to his autism - he is and yet, he isn't. At P1 when the KKH psych gave us the final low-down, unable to explain Isaac's development, unwilling to label him as autistic yet unable to definitively dismiss it, I was just happy to accept this. Happy to hear that somehow, by some miracle, he 'got out' of autism - something technically impossible.

But yet, reflecting on this today, I don't think Isaac will ever be totally free of the 'autistic' label.

As he grows older, the strange quirks become more obvious. He still has very faint lingering traces of autistic behavior - the stims (playing with his fingers), the echolalic behavior (yes, he does echo himself!), the awkward social behavior, the preference to stay in his own world (yes, he does play with other kids, but if you watch carefully, after a while, he will retreat), the sometimes staccato way that he speaks (my mother is always amused/appalled by this!).

Last year, two of his teachers asked as delicately as they could, if Isaac "had a problem in any way". They could not pin him down - he was quiet, well-behaved, finished his work on time, did not go on a testosterone overdrive and was just not like the other boys in class, they said.

I remember KH and I looking at each other then - for years we had not told the school Isaac's history, preferring to let him be as 'normal' as possible until someone saw or suspected something - and since the time had come, we decided to let them know. And when we finished telling them, they sighed and said, yes we suspected it might be something like that but could not say for sure what it was. This year, one month into the new school year, his form teacher had asked us the same question - commenting that Isaac was "very different" from the rest of the boys.

So I guess maybe he never was totally free of being 'autistic'. Maybe he is an exceptionally high-functioning Asperger's Syndrome. Whatever it is, he will always be a bit different and maybe labelled as the sort of guy who straddles the fine lines between 'weird'/'geek'/'strange'. I don't know. For now, I just want to sit back for a moment, think about him and let myself feel as proud and happy as I can be for my boy.