Special Needs

Two simple innocuous words when used individually. Special conveys so many positive things, and everyone has needs. Put them together however, and you have the makings of something every parent dreads.
Every parent spends their pregnancy saying "as long as the baby is healthy". We all assume things will be fine. That our children will be born with the pain and stress that goes with it, but in the end the happy healthy baby will be placed in our arms. For our family, it hasn't been quite the journey we'd expected.
When our 8 year old son, Dragon (names changed to protect the innocent), was born it was with a fury and swiftness only a dragon could possess. The hospital told me it wasn't labor, it was too soon. Well, Dragon showed them. They'd barely gotten the monitor on me when my water broke, and the words "No fetal heart tones" left the mouth of the nurse. It was like the world stopped spinning. It was the most terrifying moment in my entire life. No. Fetal. Heart. Tones. There was a rush of medical discussion and 18 minutes after arriving at the hospital, our son arrived. An emergency C-section dragging him into this world.
My husband sat in a hallway while they put me under, cut me open and brought our firstborn into the world. He sat, alone and scared in a quiet hallway while his worst nightmare unfolded around him.
10 fingers, 10 toes. No signs of what had gone wrong, our little man proved to us that he was a fighter. He had no intentions of letting his dramatic delivery overshadow his presence. He was a demanding baby. Thrashing when I tried to breastfeed him, or hold him too tightly or too much. He simply wanted to be. He loved anything that had music (and still does to this day) but, the touch of another was something he just didn't desire. It was frustrating at times, but we assumed it was just his personality. After all, he was our first and what did we really know about this little alien creature in our midst?
As a toddler, he insisted on choosing when he was held or cuddled. If he let you into his world to play with him, you were the luckiest soul on earth. And when we attempted to give him his first time out, there was an explosion like we'd never seen before. Thrashing, and screaming. It was surreal. This same sort of behavior continued, with seemingly random things triggering what we assumed were just tantrums.

When he began school, we became very aware that our son wasn't quite the normal child we had thought him to be. Intellectually he was off their charts. He could read better than any of the kids in his class, and he picked up math concepts with minimal explanation. But when it came to social situations, he was clueless. He seemed to be in his own world. Sometimes allowing other children to join in play, but only under his rules and limits. He was a playground dictator, trying to control every detail of anything that he was involved in.
Eventually he began having to spend time in the special education room. He was simply too disruptive in the regular classroom. Bookshelves would be emptied, desks overturned, pictures torn from the walls. As parents we were ashamed, embarrassed. Surely this was our own fault. At the advisement of the Special Education teacher, we took Dragon in to be evaluated by a child psychologist.
4 weeks of visits and evaluations, therapy and chats. And the psychologist was able to put a name on all the struggle we'd been having. We sat quietly as she explained charts and scales and numbers. She described normal reactions and interactions and where our child fell in those things. And then she gave us her diagnosis the two words that have redefined our family:

Asperger's Syndrome