marieclaire.com.au (^) | 79
EMOTIONAL
In 2003, Jocelyn gave birth to a son, Jack, her third
child with husband P.J. Here, she writes about Jack’s
autism diagnosis, six years after they were first told
their daughter Lily was autistic.
O
ne morning, when Jack was
13 months old, I noticed he
was acting strangely. No longer
a bright-eyed, smiley toddler, he
went into a short trance, his eyes
unfocused. He was also starting
to fixate on strange things: two
power points symmetrically placed on opposite walls
in our lounge room. Repeatedly, he would walk from
one side of the room to the other to examine them.
My autism radar switched on.
I interrupted him and, as I had done with Lily,
read to him by putting him on my lap facing me, so
I could hold the book up and he could see both it
and my face at the same time. After reading several
books, I let him get down again. He went straight
back to the power points, checking on their symmetry
again and again. I took him out to the park and down
to Tamarama Beach. A soon as we got home, he
started doing his thing with the power points again.
I felt a cold stone forming in my gut. Fear again.
A few days later I realised I hadn’t seen Jack
pointing recently. It was a skill he had now lost. I
knew losing the ability or desire to point was a bad
sign, because this simple gesture is a basic form of
pre-verbal communication. Then he lost the handful
of words he’d acquired. The worrying symptoms were
like falling dominoes. Loss of words, loss of gestures,
loss of eye contact, the development of obsessive,
repetitive behaviour. It was happening again.
There’s a moment in the beautiful Julian
Schnabel movie The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
where the main character, the victim of a
catastrophic stroke, imagines his brain falling
apart. The film cuts to footage of glaciers calving,
huge chunks of ice falling into the ocean. That image
of slow but massive destruction is how I felt as I
watched Jack. It seemed to happen over one weekend.
But that cannot be true. What is true is that my
awareness of the truth evolved over one weekend.
I immediately made an appointment for him to
see a childhood developmental specialist in Sydney.
“He’s fine,” she reassured me. “He’s only 13 months
old. Lots of kids this age have little delays.” I had
heard all this before. She did all the proper tests
and he passed as “normal”. But she wrote me
a referral for a speech therapist. “Just in case.”
The first thing the speech therapist did was
have me sit Jack on the floor. She placed a wind-up
jack-in-the-box in front of him. She wound the handle
while the tinny music played the melody of “Pop
Goes the Weasel”. Jack watched her hand as it went
around. As the music reached its climax, the lid of
the box burst open and a toy clown popped up. Jack
laughed and I laughed too. “His name is Jack,” I told
him, “just like you, darling.” Jack didn’t look at me.
The speech therapist repeated the whole procedure.
“I am worried he’s not showing joint attention,” she
said. Joint attention is a shared moment. It usually
happens when something unexpected occurs. The
clown pops up, startling the child. The child looks
to the adult, checking whether or not they should be
alarmed. If the adult seems happy about the clown
doll, the child relaxes. “Oh no,” I said. I knew, from
years of research, that the absence of joint attention
was a warning sign. “Don’t panic,” said the speech
therapist. “His joint attention is a little delayed,
and his pre-speech is also delayed, but it’s
nothing to worry about yet.”
Another two months went by. I sensed that Jack
was slipping away from us. P.J. and I decided to pack
up and move back to the US, even though neither
of us had any work on offer there at that time.
FROM LEFT
Jocelyn
Moorhouse
with her
daughter,
Lily; and
shortly after
Lily’s autism
diagnosis.
marty
(Marty)
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