#redheadedwonder

Dante was diagnosed with Asperger’s when he was 8. It had been such an uphill battle all the way. He still doesn’t fit the normal persona that comes with how people view Asperger’s but none the less I promise you he has it. I know a lot of people who have chosen not to share the diagnoses with their children but I never thought twice. To me it I felt it would bring him peace and understanding into himself and he could use his diagnoses as a tool. We joke about it a lot around the house, to me it is easier to unmask it through humor than allow it to define Dante. Dante is Dante and Dante happens to have Asperger’s, but Dante is NOT Asperger’s.

More often than not I say he has Dantebergers or Danteism because there is only one Dante. My kid gives the word individual a whole new meaning and he is true to himself regardless of consequence. Like refusing to cut his white trash tail, no matter how many times people tell him to, no matter how cute the girl or how cool the boy or how mean the teacher is that is telling him, he will not back down. He is already a red head to the 700th degree. It literally looks he is carrying a direct port hole to the sun on the top of his head. He used to run off when he was little because he never had any sense of danger or boundaries and I swear if not for that golden ball of light, there are times I never would have found him. People who think a kid on a leash is inhumane have never had a Dante to keep track of. There is only so many times your baby can take off before you do things you never in a million years thought you would do, like a leash disguised as a teddy bear back pack. Like somehow by attaching it to a giant stuffed animal makes the fact that you are walking you kid like a dog a little less fucked up. But I’d rather be walking my kid than mourning him, so choices were made.

Dante barely spoke till he was 5 and what he did say sounded a bit like Chinese or he would just have random moments of incredibly clear speech. One of our favorite Dante stories took place right after Josh and I met, which was right after Dante turned 3, we were sitting in Carl JR (for you Arkansans, that is the exact same think as Hardees, why they have a different name for it here I have no clue) and Dante looks up at us and says “Burger fries and a coke, don’t bother me I’m eating” which was the Carl Jr catch phrase at the time. It was the first time Josh had heard Dante speak and understood him, he just looked at me and we busted up laughing. Dante was not even aware that he had said or done anything unusual but I guess that is synonymous with being an Aspie. He continued to struggle with his speech, or actually he didn’t struggle with it, I did. Society dictates that by 5 your child should be speaking in full sentences that you can understand. He began speech therapy around 4 and continued for a year. His speech therapist called me in for his annual review and said Dante was not improving and we may need to rethink his therapy. A couple of weeks later he began to speak, with a pretty impressive vocabulary at that. He was discontinued from speech shortly after that. It was like he just decided to talk one day. I think he didn’t want to speak until he knew exactly how to express what he wanted to say. He still has a tick where he repeats the last syllable or 2 in a word when he is thinking like “Im going oing oing oing to get my bionacles.” It is funny and so a part of who he is. No one who has worked with him has met another person who has done it. It is starting to fade or become less noticeable and it kind of makes me sad.

Dante is very tactile and always rubs the moles on my arms and neck especially when we are sitting in church, he also play with my hair, it soothes him. When he isn’t sitting next to me, he rocks. People used to stare and make comments about it, like there was something sexual about it and it used to piss me off but now I’m like whatever, if you are ignorant enough to think I am having an inappropriate relationship with my son because he is playing with my hair you are way too impressed by your Arkansas incest stereo types, get over yourself you pervert.

When he was little and we were living in California the specialists tried to convince me he was “slow”. They tried to make me put him in a communicatively handicapped classroom. I remember going to visit the class. It reeked of shit and there was kid in the corner kicking the wall saying “I hate my teacher” over and over. I was like, ya um, fuck no and made them put him in a regular class. Dante couldn’t talk and didn’t know his colors. He also was not potty trained till he was over 4. None of this was for lack of trying on my part. I tried my hardest. We worked on colors every mother fucking day and the only color he would learn was green because we sang “the green grass grows all around all around, and the green grass grows all around.” But he learned his alphabet in about 10 minutes after watching Elmo sing it on Sesame Street. He could also build. It was how we knew he wasn’t color blind because when he created it was always symmetrical, colors and all. He could build Bionacles and Lego sets meant for kids 12 and up when he was 3 and he could do puzzles. It used to piss Zoe off to no end. Zoe has always been very stereo typically smart and she was kind of an asshole when she was little. It wasn’t her fault, there was a lot of shit being fed into her very impressionable mind, and she hated Dante. The fact that Dante could always out build her even though she could identify the difference between pink and magenta and Dante couldn’t tell yellow from grey,  made her blood boil. Now she thinks he is a rock star. Every time I tried to explain to the specialists in California about Dante’s savant level building abilities, they told me I was in denial. I was a young mom, I had had Dante when I was 18, so it didn’t take a whole lot for them to think I was stupid or for me to believe them.

When we came to Arkansas, which is a long drawn out story for another day, they IQ tested him. I had just gotten saved and Josh ad gone back to California to serve some jail time (we have come a long way in the past ten years) so I was alone other than my faith. I prayed for strength to bear the news, whatever it may be. When I went in to his first official IEP in Arkansas there was like ten people all grinning at me.  They told me to sit down and the head of Special Ed began to explain the intelligence scale in children. The drew me a hill and at the top of the hill is where most kids IQ fell, then they said that Dante’s nonverbal IQ was 126 and his verbal was 101 and drew a mark way to the right of the average and told me my sons nonverbal intelligence was way above average and his verbal was higher as well. Then they told me he was smarter than anyone in that room. Nothing prepared me for that, I cried. I cried many many many more times after that over something Dante has done to prove people wrong but that was the defining moment in my life as a mom where I decided no one would EVER make me doubt what I already knew.

 I’m fixin to go to battle here again soon. The school refuses to place Dante in pre AP English because he can’t spell. I know he can’t spell and he has an IEP and special modifications to deal with it but his analytical and comprehension skills are above and beyond the majority of his peers and for them to place him in a class with children who struggle with concepts and ideas is undermining his intelligence and not helping him live up to his potential. Dante is not at the top of his class. He makes As and Bs and sometimes a C but he always has an A in English because he is a rock star when it comes to reading and analyzing. He can’t spell because the English language defies what his brain says is logical. He could get straight As but when they study things he feels is irrelevant he doesn’t retain the information. Ask that kid about any Greek God and he can tell you who they are, what their name means, what other Gods they are associated with, how they are associated, what their power or whatever is and anything else you don’t really want to know. In fact your interest in the subject has absolutely no bearing on whether or not he tell you every last detail. When we went to my sister’s house in Cali he was picking up all of her weird statues and saying this is the God of fertility or this is the God of peace and he knew their names. Considering we live in the heart of the Bible belt you know he isn’t learning this shit in school.

He carries a magical staph where ever he goes that is adorned in different symbols of the elements of some shit he has read about. It is really a giant walking stick that was left over from the giant ass storm that ripped through our town a couple of months ago that he has decorated with my broken jewelry and shit he finds on the ground. He is always and forever picking shit up off the ground. It is my fault because when I find something cool like a bracelet or money I pick it up and go “GROUND SCORE!” it comes from coming from a family of scavengers whose favorite day was the major cleaning days in Marin. We would so go and scope the trash of the rich and famous and score on all the shit they felt was outdated, it was like Christmas. Dante however, does not understand that trash, actual trash, is not a ground score. He picks up a colorful piece of paper that he thinks is cool and fails to notice it is covered in mold or dripping wet with some unknown substance. He shouts “Mom, groundscore!” and I crush his little soul with my less than delicate demeanor “Dante, that is not a ground score that is a bacteria infested cesspool of disease, put that shit down and wash your hands before you get your sister sick,” Sometimes though he really does score though. Like the other day he found a hair pick with a Black Panther fist on top to pick out his giant red fro. I told him to scald it in hot water and he could go to town.