Sundays are my alone days. Baby Bear goes to his father's, so I usually spend the day leafing through the newspaper, switching around the Sunday talk shows, or taking a nap--"drifting,"as I have come to call it. It's my own precious, unstructured time to decompress from the past week and gather strength for the coming week.

Yesterday I decided to go online and see what was new on the autism forums. As I was browsing, I came across a message that contained a link to a web site called "Autism Speaks":

http://www.autismspeaks.org/video/glossary.php

When I went there, I found that it had video clips of "typical" children doing simple tasks, such as playing with a toy or responding to a request, and alongside each was a clip of a child with red flags for autism doing the same tasks.

I watched the first clip of a baby playing with a toy and interacting with the clinician. Then I watched the companion clip with the autistic child. As I watched, the world seemed to shatter and drop at my feet like smashed glass. The second child was acting exactly as Baby Bear had acted at that age, examining the toy intently, turning it over and over in his hands, not making eye contact or responding to the clinician's words. I jumped up from the computer, ran blindly down the stairs to my bedroom, flung myself on my bed, and sobbed. Never had my son's situation been made so clear to me. I'd never analysed what "typical" children did before--Baby Bear is my only child, and whatever he did and continues to do seems "normal" to me because that's all I know.

Presently I composed myself, went back to the computer, and watched every one of the clips. I saw many examples of Baby Bear's behaviour reflected in the autistic children, but not once did BB mirror the "typical" children.

At that point I decided to review some videos I had taken of BB when he was a baby. I dug out one in which he received his first tricycle when he was 21 months old. I remember the day well, and I was always so glad I'd captured it on tape because I thought it was so cute.

Here again was BB's father carrying him down the stairs to the yard where the new trike was waiting. Here again was BB's delight at the wonderful new toy. And here again, seen through my new eyes, was Baby Bear very deliberately kneeling beside the trike, overturning it, and spinning the wheels and foot pedals with his tiny finders. He refused to sit on the trike, but remained preoccupied spinning the wheels. When his father put him in the seat he promptly got off, squatted beside the trike, and spun the wheels some more. Finally he grasped the push-handle behind the seat and wheeled the trike down the street by pushing it in front of him. I remember that we followed him like this for at least an hour, and he never sat on the seat until the very end. However, he did stop several times to spin the wheels and pedals with his hands.

I then watched another video, this one from Thanksgiving of that same year, in which some friends of ours brought their two little girls over to the house. Again through new eyes I watched as the girls played and pretended with each other while Baby Bear sat off by himself, absorbed in in a toy or clinging to his father.

At this point I decided to buy a video converter so I can preserve the dozens of videotapes I have to DVDs. That way they will be preserved, and I can study them in more detail through the tears, and the hope, in my new eyes.