The Child Nobody Prepared Me For

I did not know, when I packed for Canada, that I was also packing for a version of motherhood I had not been told about.

My son was two when we arrived. He was a quiet child, which I told myself was just his personality. He did not like loud sounds. He did not always respond when I called his name. He arranged his toys in straight lines and cried in a specific way when anything was moved. I thought: he is adjusting. We all are. Give him time.

By the time he was three and a half, a developmental paediatrician sat across from me in an office in Scarborough and said words I had heard before but never in relation to my own child. Autism Spectrum Disorder. She was kind. She explained things carefully. She gave me a folder of resources.

I sat in my car for forty minutes before I could drive.

I want to be honest about what my first feeling was, because I think a lot of Nigerian mothers have had this feeling and nobody talks about it. My first feeling was not grief. It was shame. Not shame of him. Shame for myself, the immediate irrational fear of what people would say, what my mother would say, what the aunties at church would say, whether someone would find a spiritual explanation for something that has no spiritual explanation, whether I would spend the next five years defending my child to people who should already be on his side.

I called my mother that evening. She said: is it serious? I said: it is a lifelong condition. She was quiet. Then she said: we will pray about it. I said okay. I did not say what I was thinking, which was that prayer is fine but my son also needs occupational therapy three times a week and speech therapy twice a week and a school that understands his specific needs and a mother who learns an entirely new language of parenting, and none of those things arrive through prayer alone.

The system here is both a gift and an endurance test.

The gift is that the support exists. There is funding. There are programmes. There are specialists and advocates and a school board that is legally required to accommodate him. In Nigeria, I do not know what my son's life would look like. I do not want to think about it too long. Here, there is a path.

The endurance test is walking that path.

The waitlists are long. When we were assessed and referred for therapy, we were told the wait for publicly funded services was eighteen months. Eighteen months. My son was three. I did not have eighteen months of the developmental window to spend on a waitlist. So I paid privately, which meant I picked up extra shifts, which meant I was exhausted, which meant I was trying to be fully present for a child who needs a very particular kind of presence from a woman running on not enough sleep.

The IEP meetings. The school calls. The days he comes home and I can see from the way he carries himself that something happened that he cannot tell me yet because the words are still finding their way out. I sit with him. I wait. Sometimes he tells me. Sometimes he does not. There were weeks I was not good at the waiting. I was short with him in ways I am not proud of. The exhaustion does that. I am working on it. Some days I am better at it than others.

My husband has been as involved as well, it's just that i feel this weight lives mostly with me in the way that weight about children mostly lives with mothers or maybe he's just being strong for us. I am the one who memorised the sensory triggers. I am the one who knows which textures he cannot tolerate and which sounds make everything worse and which order the morning routine must happen in or the whole day is already difficult before it starts. I carry this knowledge constantly. It does not have an off switch.

There are days I am angry. Not at him. Never at him. At the isolation of this. At the fact that back home I would have had people around me. My mother. My sister. People who could take him for two hours while I sat somewhere and breathed. Here it is mostly just me, raising a child who has turned me into someone I did not know I could be.

There are also days that stop me completely.

The day he looked up from his puzzle and said mama for the first time at four years old and I had to leave the room because I did not want him to see me cry. The day he held my hand in the supermarket without being prompted, just reached up and took it. The day his teacher sent a video of him counting to twenty in class and I watched it eleven times.

He is six now. He is funny in his own way, which took me time to understand because his humour is not always where I expect it to be. He is precise about things he loves. He knows the name of every Thomas the Tank Engine character, the number on each engine, and will correct you if you get it wrong. He is building a vocabulary for the world he lives in and some days he surprises me so completely I have to just stop and look at him.

I did not know what autism was in any real way before my son. I knew the word. I did not know the daily texture of it. I did not know how much it would ask of me, or how much it would give back in return. I did not know that it would make me a different kind of mother than I planned to be, more patient in some ways, more fierce in others, less worried about what people think because I do not have the energy anymore for that anxiety.

My mother asks about him every Sunday. She has learned some things. She knows about the therapy now. She asks whether he ate. She asks whether he slept. She asks whether he is happy. I tell her yes, mostly, and he is, mostly, and so am I, mostly.

We are figuring it out. The three of us, across a lot of distance, in a country that is still learning what we need.

He has a good life. I have made sure of it.

That is what I came for.