Exceptionally Beautiful

Angel

4/13/2020

When she came into this world it definitely wasn’t with a roar, she was quiet and observant. Those big blue eyes captured my heart from the first moment, and that has never changed. Her life hasn’t been easy….actually, it’d been REALLY hard. When she was little she was incredibly easy, until something upset her world, and then she would just explode. It would come, it seemed, out of nowhere and I was usually ill prepared for those moments. I hate tantrums and hers felt like they would never stop. She would look like a caged animal, wild eyed and angry. She didn’t speak coherently until almost five years old, when we realized it was because she couldn’t hear us. She would get such bad ear infections, and we wouldn’t know because she wouldn’t complain about pain. Her reactions to the world just seemed….off. Aside from those complete meltdowns, she was happy. Even when happy wasn’t appropriate. Nobody complains about a happy child right? But it was those moments when someone got hurt, when a pet died, when her dad and I divorced…..her reactions just didn’t match. She had a hard time fitting in with her peers, and ws often left out because they saw her as weird, and she had a habit of saying things that would seem mean or inappropriate, but were just her unfiltered thoughts spilling out. She would do things that made me want to pull my hair out, but I still thought it was just her little quirky self. She would pour everything out….milk, shampoo, toothpaste, anything. She wrote on everything, big colorful swirls….even when visiting someone else’s house. It got to the point that we would have to have friends put everything away before we got there. She wasn’t being naughty, because it was painfully obvious that she didn’t understand why we would get upset. And she wandered. We couldn’t take our eyes off of her, because she had zero sense of danger. At six years old, after months of testing, she was diagnosed with Autism. I remember the doctor commenting at the fact that I wasn’t sad or upset about it. Why would I be? There was finally a starting point, and an answer! We learn so much from her every day. She is one of the absolute strongest people I will ever know. She’d almost 16 now, and while she isn’t at the same level of maturity as other girls her age, she is coming into her own. She is making her way in this world and it is beautiful to watch.