Autism.

It's been a while since I've posted, and a lot has happened, but I want to start with the most important.
My son's developmental specialists believes that my son may have Autism.

Actually, it came as a shock to me and my husband. We never, ever looked at AK and thought "I wonder if he has autism." It's just...Never crossed our minds. Once the specialist mentioned it, we began talking to a good friend of ours who has a son with autism, and she was actually surprised we didn't notice it. She said that our son reminded her so much of her own at that age, and she'd had suspicions since day one. It was hard to hear. I'm well aware that autism is far from a death sentence and autistic children have every opportunity available to grow up and be successful adults, but I know it's a struggle.
Children are horrible, mean, insensitive little things and to introduce a child who has a condition that predispositions him to be socially awkward? That terrifies me. I'm not upset that my son may have autism. I'm upset and horrified of what other children will do or say to him. I don't ever want someone to say something hurtful to my son, I don't ever want to see that pain in him. I love my son, I don't want to watch him hurt.
I was a bully. I was an enormous bully in high school, but I didn't bully the down trodden, I bullied the popular kids. I stuck up for the so called nerds and dorks, they were my friends. I however tortured the living shit out of the popular children, so I KNOW what people like me are capable of. While I would never, ever bully a special needs child and often received tardies to class because I would hold the door open for the special needs children and say good morning to them individually, but there are people worse than I was, people that will bully a special needs child. I am terrified of that person for my son.
My son has a speech/audio evaluation tomorrow which may be rescheduled due to snowy weather, but it will be a deciding factor in his diagnosis for autism. I love him so much and I will always accept him whether he is gay, straight, transgender, in a wheel chair or autistic, he is my son and nothing will change that. But I'm so scared to watch my baby struggle through life. He struggles now in speech therapy and it hurts me so much to see the frustration on his face when he just can't understand.
Thus far, he's shown a few signs like head banging. He used to throw tantrums so severe that my husband and I had to pad a corner of our living room and lay him there until he worked through it because he'd busted my lip and bruised me and my husband so severely. He's thrown these tantrums after we've pulled him away from the wall for banging his head repeatedly, as well as head butting head boards. When frustrated or confused, he'll pull his hair. He is pretty much non-verbal. He does not respond to his name most of the time and when he does, I feel it's simply because he turns to see what's going on or why we're speaking. I never put these clues together before, never thought to.
SD was informed of all this. Even though he's not a part of AK's life, it's serious information that could be useful to him when he has more children. That's for another time though, the next post.