I realized that I sort of left the past hanging....I stopped the story at 4th grade and he is in 11th now. For the sake of completeness (if that is a word), I'll finish the story.
Third grade was the year his father and I got divorced. Over the summer before 4th, we moved to a new house and he went to a new school...with Mrs. Wonderful, the worlds best teacher. I started dating again, a guy who's son I was convinced had AS. Strange how I could see all the signs in him but not my own son. This kid was a great kid...but definately had AS. He loved to turn in circles, hated to be touched or hugged...even by his parents. He couldn't make eye contact and would look down and away when asked a question. He would answer questions with brief sentences. He had a NT younger sister, who was the same age as my AS kiddo. Those 4 made quite the group. Nobody thought any behaviors were strange....everyone understood weird or odd behaviors.
At this point, Alex, my son was deeply involved in community theatre. I have read recently that it is a great activity for AS kids. They seem to have no stage fright, their loud speech and over exaggerated facial expressions are prized. They memorize scripts of conversations, with specific directed emotions...so they learn to put that face, with those words to convey that expression, like anger or fear. He did very well with the tech side of things as well (no suprise there!). I remember that grades were a struggle, and he still never did homework. He failed spelling that year....but was busy learning Latin at the gifted program. I was assured that spelling issues were a frequent problem with gifted children because they learn to read before they learn to spell rather than at the same time. I don't know...I think that AS gifted kids have trouble spelling. Anyway...he auditioned and was accepted to a magnet school for drama focus. We were very excited because he knew a bunch of the kids that were already in the program from the community theatre.
We had an incident just before school got out for the summer. He had one of those giant sized pencils. Well, he was forever forgetting to bring his supplies to school...so he decided to try and use that pencil in class, but it needed to be sharpened. Now, in hindsight a NT kid would have brought a different pencil, or asked the teacher for help, or brought it home to sharpen. My son took his pocket knife to school and proceeded to get it out at the start of class to sharpen his pencil. By the time I got to the school, the police were already involved. He was suspended immediately pending an investigation. Looking back, it was very odd that the school requested that he come in for standardized testing for 5 of the 10 days of his suspension....but I took him figuring that if they tried to say he was such a danger...it wouldn't hold up in court if they asked him to come back. We meet with the school district head lady....and she unsuspended him, but that was the last day of 5th grade. It didn't affect his entrance to the drama program though.
6th, 7th and 8th were a blur.....all three of us were involved in the theatre...Alex had great teachers...he got to go on school field trips to Atlanta, DC, and NYC. He seemed to have friends...the kids he hung out with at school were the kids he hung out with at home, because they all did the same after school activities, or were my friends kids. He still hadn't outgrown his Pokemon craze and his best friend was actually a senior in HS (who probably had AS). His grades were ok...several times he was on the honor roll. He was a junior scholar. He told me he didn't understand the middle school dating rules, that "revenge dating" didn't make sense to him. Where a girl goes out with one boy just to make another jealous. I was assured he was very "mature" socially and would bloom in high school and college.
The summer between 8th grade and high school....I had a whirlwind romance and was married within 3 months to Step-dad. Soon after, I adopted his son...who was the same age as my youngest. Alex seemed to get much worse after that....or else I just became sensitized. Having another NT kid in the house provided a stark contrast to what was going on with Alex. Then he started high school (with all the same kids in the same drama focus program), and decided he was having so much fun with theatre...that he didn't do any homework. For the first time, he began to fall behind due to lack of homework. Algebra 2 was a struggle when he never did any assignments. I felt like I was being judged (I wasn't but I felt like it) by Step-dad because I hadn't taught him better work ethics. The younger 2 started middle school....and both had straight A's and were doing homework without prompts. Alex also had his own room for the first time ever, and began to spend more and more time alone.
To make matters worse, for him....the family made the decision to move half way across the country. He had to change houses, change schools and leave the kids that he had gone to school with for 4+ years. Where he came from the drama kids are more popular than the football players.....it was a very special school. The school he moved to was a massive super school. Still, his teachers assured us he was bright, social, polite....he just had an aversion to classwork. Don't worry, they would say...he'll do fine in college. After much yelling, grounding, harassing, counseling sessions, med adjustments....he managed to finish up the 10th grade year with nothing less than a C and a couple of Bs.
By the end of the school year, the psychologist and psychiatrist he was seeing suggested that we have him tested for Aspergers....and by September of 2011 at the age of 16 1/2....he was finally diagnosed. So far, things have gotten worse not better!
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