Born in the Box: 1980-1990

Now comes my story.

I take my time, I guess you could say. I have different priorities in a lot of what I do. I wasn't in a rush to grow up, I wasn't even in a rush to be born. My mother had to be pretty patient with me from the start, really. I started by not showing up until they decided to go camping for Labor Day weekend (yes, Labor Day; I have style) a good hour or two away from the hospital.

I grew up first in Merrimack, New Hampshire. My first words came at six months, my first full sentences at one year. My walking developed normally, also at a year old. I had my first haircut at two, much to my own protests. I would continue to have problems with the electrical hair clippers through at least fourth grade, as well as with the vacuum cleaner, my dad's power tools, and anything else that would make a sharp or loud noise.

Concerns about my developmental skills started to arise around the time I was two years old. My parents started to consult doctors about strange behavior, clumsy motor skills, a lack of attention, and my tendancy to become oddly anxious or fearful of things others judged as mundane. Early reports noted robotic speech. Yet, faced with a boy of normal intelligence for his age, doctors set aside some of the autistic symptoms. I was generally intelligent; autistics were not normally, and savants had more of a localized gift. And so my first diagnosis at age two was simply left-brain disfunction, gathered from behavioral patterns and developmental difficulty, and supported in their opinion by my left-handed dominance.

At five, we moved out of Merrimack, and into Mason, New Hampshire. This was where I would spend the rest of my childhood, all the way up to college. I do not recall, nor do my parents, any major issues with the move, vis a vis my adjusting to a change. Did I wander off aimlessly into the woods and have to be found by the family dog? Yes. If nothing else, the entire process of moving out of the old house, watching big trucks bring a modular home down the dusty back-roads of Mason, and walking around a brand-new house -- and exploring the vast back yard much to my parent's chagrin -- probably filled me with enough wonder and sufficed to distract me.

Peer relationships and behavioral difficulties showed up in my parents' first attempt to send me to pre-school. The teachers at the preschool ended up refusing to allow me in, as I was too difficult. A second, more successful attempt was made shortly after we moved, going to kindergarten at a large farmhouse with many of the neighborhood kids my age. The teacher's style was different, and the activities were far more varied. I may have benefitted from being able to mature another year, but while there were no serious incidents there were still hints of problems with socializing, and with my temper.

Before entering first grade, my school system had kids take a year of "Readiness" classes. I haven't heard much of that word being tossed around when the family talks about my nephews or niece, so I've come to assume that it's gone out of practice or been put under the umbrella of Head Start; it was basically putting me into the actual school where I would be staying and getting me more used to being away from home for an entire day. I did pretty well in that setting, and had a few friends from Kindergarten to socialize with.

With first grade came signs of some problems. My academic development seemed stunted; I would end up put into occupational therapy, and later into physical therapy to deal with coordination issues. My social interactions began to fall apart, as my behavior began to become more alien to the other kids. They would react either with discomfort and aversion, or with bullying. It depended, of course on their own personailties. This was also the time that I would skirt close to fights with other children. I fell short on making friends, and keeping friends was a challenge. Luck would have it that I lost touch with the ones who stuck through.

Towards the end of first grade came one of the more frightening periods of my life. So I don't panic my readers, in no way would I say it's a trait that everyone on the autistic spectrum has, and is so far an extraordinary story to others I tell it to. I can trace it back to the way my mind percieved the information I was given, but likely this doesn't manifest in such a dangerous way. I'm alive and well, so read on, knowing it turned out okay.

We were learning about the human body, including health and first aid. I was extremely interested in the beginning, but at one point the discussion turned to the respiratory system and the teacher told us about choking and the heimlich maneuver. To simplify my mental reactions:

1: If you eat food, there is a chance it will go down your trachea instead of your esophogus.

2: If this happens, you would choke, and could die if not helped. Thus to avoid this...

3: Don't eat. Anything. Ever. And (the detail that slipped my mind) starve to death.

Late spring, into summer of 1987, my parents struggled to get me to eat. It took maybe two meals and a quick talk with me and my teacher for them to discover the cause, but nearly a year to get me to eat normally again. Between tricking me, scaring me, bribing me, threatening to put me into the hospital to be force-fed, and sometimes spoon-feeding me as if I were still in a high-chair, my parents managed to get me to eat enough that I didn't waste away. But I was still eating very little, often coughing up what I did put in my mouth because I feared I had just started to choke.

I remember the details of my thought process, several moments and methods my parents tried to get me to do more than nibble on bread, but struggled to remember what the turning point was. I asked my parents, but they feel I just at one point snapped out of it. The only event, thinking back about it, was when a scene I made one supper upset my sister. The fact that I can remember minute detail (a maccaroni shell stuck to the roof of my mouth, and I panicked) makes me think it was then that my mind started thinking that A: I was being ridiculous, and B: I was making everyone around me worried.

It was about a year later that a doctor diagnosed me with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and perscribed Ritalin. Unfortunately, this came at the tail end of my episodes with being afraid of choking, so getting me to swallow a pill, even one so small as Ritalin would prove to be a challenge. Between the struggle to get me to take the medicine and the side-effects (tremors in my case) I showed with it, I was quickly taken off. While this was happening, I was facing stress in school from bullying and my learning problems, which quickly grew into severe panic attacks and constant nightmares. A little while after I was taken off Ritalin, I was put on Prozac for the purpose of eliminating the anxiety and nightmare problems.

Fourth grade was the last year I would spend in elementary school; for the rest of their education, children from Mason, Greenville, and New Ipswich were sent to a single middle school for four years, and then to the regional high school. A decade gone by, I would soon be moving on to a brand new school, a new page in my life...

Page 5

Turning The Key: 1990-2000

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