This turned up on AOL News. Maybe its not personal from a member... but its an interesting "Get to Know You" story, about Aspergers Syndrome. I'm happy to have seen AOL was bringing attention to A.S.
Shonda Schilling Lifts Curtain on Family, Son's Asperger's Battle
Some excerpts...
"Their tale centers around a young boy named Grant. He was the third of the Schillings' four children, born in 1999, and for a long time Curt and Shonda thought he was just a bright but willful kid who had trouble interacting and understanding simple requests. It was years before the Schillings learned the nature of Grant's idiosyncrasies and behavioral problems: at age 7, he was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism."
...
"I didn't get it, and I wanted to kill him. I knew that if I put my hands on him again, I'd hurt him," she writes. Sobbing, she called Curt, who again was in another city, preparing for another game. He told her, "You just have to show him who's boss. He needs to respect you." Curt's answer was always the same: Grant just needed more discipline. She hurled the phone against the wall, curled up into a corner and bawled."
...
"The children decided if their story helps even one kid, whether they have Asperger's or an eating disorder or whatever, it's worth making their story public," she tells FanHouse. "It's about our family and our differences, but doesn't every family have its share of issues? We aren't any different just because their father happened to be a professional athlete."
"A couple of reasons," Shonda says. "Like so many people, I had never heard of Asperger's before. When kids get to be about 3 or 4, they do stuff without a filter. We started putting rules into play, but it took a while to learn that they weren't sinking in. It really is a process for parents to feel out why something is different, especially if they're not aware (of syndromes like Asperger's or autism)."
She discovered Asperger's is the result of peculiar wiring in the brain's frontal lobe, causing blips in the processing of social cues and making interactions difficult. Children with Asperger's can be loving and clever; they can also be extraordinary obstinate, socially clumsy and lack awareness of what others are thinking or feeling.
Shonda writes about the guilt she bears for "having missed the clues for so long and (treating Grant) harshly under the assumption that he was simply disrespectful of me. I will probably wrestle with that for the rest of my life. I don't know if I'll ever forgive myself."
Curt is more practical, drawing on an athlete's instinct to let go of the past, but he admits to feeling "immense guilt. Everything would have been different given what I know now," he tells me. "For a long time the solution for me was to be firmer, stricter, tougher -- the exact opposite of the approach you should take with a child with autism or Asperger's.
"I was all about the male psyche and coming from a place where the dad is the authority figure. I grew up in a house with a strong male figure, and I thought my son could be raised the way I was raised," he says. "When we finally got the diagnosis I flashed back to everything I had done physical. I spanked my kids less than 10 times combined in their lives, but I thought of all the yelling and the timeouts. In one fell swoop I realized Grant never intended to be disrespectful. It was just gut wrenching.
"It's still a challenge for me," Curt says. "It was an incredibly trying time in my relationship with Grant and it still is because he's so smart and normal. There's nothing visibly wrong with him. A lot of it comes across as immaturity and disrespect, but you dig deeper and find out it's neurological, the way a child with Asperger's brain is wired."
Shonda Schilling Lifts Curtain on Family, Son's Asperger's Battle
27 Apr 2010, 12:03 am
