Slow and Steady Wins the Race

It is easy to fall into the trap of chasing the cure for autism. When I read The Sound of a Miracle years ago, I set up Pamela for auditory integration training the following summer. While Pamela benefited from AIT in observable and quantifiable ways, it was no miracle for her! Over the years I have read many books that offer the magic bullet and, when tried, the pie-in-the-sky miracle vanishes like a mirage: Let Me Hear Your Voice and ABA, Son Rise and Options, Unraveling the Mystery of Autism and Pervasive Developmental Disorder and Special Diets, etc. What is left are several steps forward in Pamela's development. Nothing we have ever tried inspired a Helen Keller at the water pump moment, but many things did yield slow and steady progress.

We left the emotional rollercoaster of cure chasing long ago and now seek improvement in quality of life. We have done our best to implement therapies that seem to have the most bangs for the buck, based upon Pamela's unique profile. The last thing we want to do is turn our lives upside down chasing the latest cure, only to be disappointed and embittered. We have learned to be pleased with the slow march of progress Pamela has made over the years, which accumulate to small miracles. From week to week, we appreciate the little wonders revealed whenever Pamela conquers a new skill. We do not crash and burn emotionally when a therapy fails to produce the miracle cure, but we do savor those tiny sparks of joy when we see improvement.

Here is a sample of the small bundles of joy I witnessed this week:

• Pamela learned all her choreography for the last song of our Christmas program City on a Hill and stays on beat most of the time. This is a miracle for a child who flipped out at circle time as a preschooler.
• Pamela mastered recitation another poem this week, which has the most complex language and punctuation to date. This is a miracle because, up until this year, all attempts to memorize poetry ended in failure except for Mother Goose rhymes!
• Pamela took her first baby steps in conquering decimals with the help of dollars, dimes, and pennies. This is a miracle for she took several years to master simple addition and subtraction.
• Pamela mastered new syntax for questions and sentences with their and they combined with can/have/do/are. This is a miracle because up until three years ago she has never been able to make predictable and measurable gains in grammar. As I prepared next week’s I/my personal description stories (to be followed by you/your questions), the questions in the first story startled me! Eight years ago, I used to drill Pamela to memorize this same list of questions in Teach Me Language through visual cuing and verbal repeating. I did not realize that, because of her syntactic aphasia, I was asking her to do a task that she has only been able to master after three years of applying a truly multi-sensory method of teaching language.