Our son’s journey through Autism

I want to continue my story about Corbin for those who wonder about him. Corbin is happy, LOUD, unique but most of all he is our son. Since his short 3 ½ year life, he has taught me more than anyone living ever has about this world. He’s brought me to tears, he’s showed me patience and he has unveiled to me the true face of GOD; the kind of thing that goes beyond religious institutions to the very essence of what faith and relationship really are. I’ve watched him take life by the throat and every challenge that he comes across, the kind of simple tasks we take for granted, Cor does them his way. Since birth he has struggled with himself, what we call disorder in him is quite simply his reality. When he was 8 months old, just learning to get around, he did not ‘crawl’, he did this kind of ‘worm’ thing. Cor started walking a few months after his 2nd birthday, by this time he was already involved in early intervention, a school program for children with special needs. He had a really hard time adjusting to his new much more social surroundings. He would scream from drop off to pick up, often getting violent with his peers but more or less took most of the abuse on himself. By 2 ½ Cor had been diagnosed with Pervasive Developmental Disorder, a branch on the Autism Spectrum. The basic idea was that Cor was not entirely ‘Autistic’ by the classic definition, but exhibited many of the traits involved with Autism.


We put the financial burdens this diagnosis was no doubt going to bring aside, (as this effectively ended health coverage for Cor with anything pertaining to the disorder) and began to really focus on nothing more than figuring out who Cor really was. We noticed there was a struggle in every area of his life, no matter how trivial it seemed, those things were the obstacle. I can remember working on 1 sign, ‘more’, for nearly a year before he finally picked it up. When he unveiled that, it meant everything to him, because it changed the landscape of his communicative world. He was finally able to gain an independence to tell us what he wanted. ‘More’ was used for everything and he knew that something other than screaming finally worked! For a very long time, Corbin’s ONLY way to communicate was to grab your finger and walk you to what he wanted signing ‘more’. We began moving slowly to more signs like ‘ball’ and ‘eat’, he now has a handful of signs he uses to communicate. He also uses a one word at a time vocabulary, containing about 30 words. These words are to the untrained ear nothing more than gibberish but to Cor and those who know him it is a valuable language.


I notice a constant struggle in him, I believe he knows exactly who he is and that his every thought is to him very clear, but I think it is the expression to the outside world is where it gets lost. So what I want to do and what we work diligently to seek is every possible way to glimpse inside his mind and understand how he views the world. Like I always say, Cor doesn’t live in the world with us, we live in the world with him and he lives in a world that is normal to us but very strange to him. Its like when you have a baby and they are new to the world and begin to mature and adapt. They learn, they explore and they conform to the simple ways and cultures of society, right? that’s what’s supposed to happen. Well, to Cor and many others like him, these kind of simple conformities, everyday task and social skills are not easily understood. So my simplest way I have to understand it is through a quote from Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view - until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."