A MOTHER SHARES THE STORY OF HER EXTRAORDINARY SON.

By Maxine ROSALER

Mister Dog is my favorite children’s book. It was a Little Golden Book written by Margaret Wise Brown in the 1950s, with illustrations by Garth Williams. When I was shopping for baby presents recently, I was delighted to see that it was still in print.

Before presenting Mister Dog to the baby, I read it aloud to my sister-in-law in the kitchen of the house where the annual family reunion was being held. When I got to the part about how Mister Dog wanted everything to be exactly the way it is supposed to be, I burst into tears. I don’t know why it had taken me this long to realize how much my son and Mister Dog had in common.

Benjy was diagnosed with autism almost twenty years ago. He was four and a half. The signs had been there long before, but my husband and I refused to see them.

After spending two frantic weeks traversing the different time zones by telephone, I found out about a therapy that could cure my son. That’s what a man in Brooklyn told me.

“It will bankrupt you. It will destroy your marriage. It will make you old before your time. But you will have your son back.”

The “cure”

For ten years I deluded myself into thinking that Benjy would be “cured.” He would get married, he would have children, and he would have a career.

He might not grow up to be president, but he would have a life. That was what the psychologist with the permanent smile attached to her face who had diagnosed him in the basement of an old church had told us.

I spent the next ten years in a furious race against time. My son had been diagnosed just six months before the magical age of five—the time after which, I kept on hearing, the brain starts to lose its “plasticity,” meaning its ability to form new neural connections. In other words, my son had just six months to be “cured.”

In the beginning, Phil and I did the therapy which consisted of sitting Benjy down at his baby table with a clipboard filled with Velcro stickers—tokens of the rewards he would earn if he learned the thousands of things that neurotypical children learn through osmosis. These were things that autistic children needed to learn step by step over and over and over again. Things like, a smile means a person is happy and a frown means he is sad; the difference between the pronouns “you” and “me” and “he” and “she”; and important safety tips such as it wouldn’t be a good idea to jump headfirst into an empty swimming pool or to put your hand on a hot stove.