Autism - Don't Lament The Boy Who Never Was

Don't Lament The Boy Who Never Was; doesn't that sound like a Morrissey track?  It is one of my mantras to help me cope through the occasions when I mentally spring back to the time that my son, Lenny, was born and the year or so afterwards when I whole-heartedly believed that I had a whopper of a super-normal son.

Picture me, the smug new mum, gracefully reclining on one of the crisply made up beds of Dewsbury Hospital's maternity wing, being treated with the respect that I well and truly deserved upon the birth of my third child.  Up and about only six hours after my third ceasarian section.  Well versed in the knowledge of long-term breast feeding.  Expert carer of a highly dependent special needs baby and quirkily likable toddler.  Ahh, possibly the high point of my life so far.  I had my soul mate husband, my budding best friend Rose, the adorable Daisy who would stay with me forever, and now.... a son... and what a specimen! Three weeks premature but eight pounds plus anyway, blue blue eyes and a leonine growl instead of the usual high pitched cry of the newborn (the reason I called him Leonard).

          "Mrs King, you have a healthy baby boy!"

I imagined long rainy Autumn afternoons playing toy soldiers.  There would be a wooden castle.  Battle strategies! Wigwams in the garden.  Superhero comics.  Sobbing teenage girls on the doorstep.  My mind was giddy with possibilities.

Never, ever, for one minute did I picture out sized nappies for a seven year old, carpets covered with merrily scattered around wood-shavings, and constant resonant humming.

When I look back at that smug new mum on the hospital bed I want to put my arms around her.  "Be careful! Watch out for the bombs!  They're coming...one...two...three...oooh, its going to hurt so bad and there is nothing I can do to protect you!"

"Leonard", that toy soldier battle strategist of my imagination; he never was.  It was always my "Big Hugs Lenny", all elbows and knees.  Potato waffles and ham each night for tea, eaten with fingers, never cutlery.  Potato smiles and ham on particularly experimental days.  I love him loads just the way he is.  Would I change him? Probably.  But only to make his life easier and more full.  I could never erase my real son and replace him with a figment of my imagination.  Actually, thinking about it now, that "Leonard" chappy sounds like a bit of a pain in the posterior anyway!