Becoming a Mother in the Vegetable Room 🥦① My Eldest Son Before His ASD Diagnosis

Up until now, I've only talked about being a 'lonely working mom in a male-dominated workplace,' so it probably felt like, 'Is this person actually a mother?' So, I'm finally going to write about mother-related topics.

Honestly, it's harder to write about than the male-dominated workplace stuff, and since it involves my own feelings of inadequacy, it's even harder to get the words out.

About my eldest son with ASD

As I wrote briefly in my self-introduction, I have two children, and my eldest son has been diagnosed with ASD.
Leading up to the diagnosis, it was painful for me, and I'm sure it was even more painful for my eldest son.

When he was a newborn

My eldest son was a child I conceived after about a year of fertility treatment.

Until the birth, there were no particular problems other than developing gestational diabetes; if I had to point something out, it would just be that the labor took a long time and ended up being a vacuum-assisted delivery.
He was born at full term with a standard weight, and the subsequent progress for both mother and child was smooth, so we were discharged as usual.

As a newborn, he was a baby who wouldn't sleep very well.
It was my first time raising a child, so I wasn't used to it and it was incredibly tough, but well, that's a path most people go through.

However, he cried a lot for various reasons.

He had a tendency to cry especially when I was changing his clothes or diapers, or whenever I was handling his clothes.
It wasn't like that with my second child, so thinking back on it now, he might have been a bit hypersensitive.

From about six months old, little by little, a sense of unease began to emerge.

6 months to 1.5 years old

He rolled over the day before he turned six months old.
If you have children, you probably know that even if they roll over for the first time, they can't immediately roll back.
Only when they can do what's commonly called 'rolling back' does their sleeping position become free.
They say there are individual differences in this, but it took my eldest son three or four months to go from rolling over to rolling back.

Furthermore, my eldest son didn't really crawl or creep.
Even if I encouraged him, it was no use.
People say it's good to let them crawl a lot, but if they don't do it, there's nothing you can do.
In the end, he started creeping from the latter half of his 11th month, which was a very late debut.

He was already a chubby 11-kilogram baby, so maybe he was too heavy to move?

What was strange was his mysterious belly-crawling swimming.
It started shortly after he began rolling over; he would lie on his stomach, lift his head and limbs, and move his hands and feet like he was doing the breaststroke 🐸
At first, I thought it was cute 🩷, but three months later, he still couldn't crawl or even creep, and he was just doing the belly-crawl breaststroke, so I started to get worried about whether he was okay.

He was able to sit up and pull himself up to stand at a standard time, but only on the condition that I was the one sitting him up or standing him up to keep him in that position.
I think it was after he was 10 months old that he became able to sit up or stand up on his own from a lying position.
By the way, my second child had already started walking at that age...

Besides the statutory health checkups, there were 6-7 month and 9-10 month checkups, but I couldn't check 'Yes' to questions like 'Does your child do X?' on the maternal and child health handbook or the questionnaires.
That's when it started to slowly become apparent.

After he turned one, he finally started cruising, and he was able to walk independently at 1 year and 3 months.
Around the same time, he also started to speak.
By the 1.5-year checkup, he had cleared the two major hurdles of weaning and walking, and he was speaking, so I thought we had finally reached a milestone.
I didn't worry too much about minor concerns like 'he doesn't point' at that point.

~Birth of the second child

Shortly after my eldest turned two, I became pregnant with my second child.

People often say that age two is the 'terrible twos,' but as for my child, to be honest, there wasn't that much defiance.
Like throwing a tantrum and rolling on the floor.

It was just that he had no motivation at all.
Two-year-olds often want to do things themselves, right?
My second child was like that.
But he didn't have that.
Even if I asked, 'Do you want to do this?', he would just insist, 'No, Mommy do it.'


He loved trains and had been playing with toy trains since he was one.
He would use the grooves of the sliding doors as tracks or line them up like a train depot.
I'm sure other children do this too.
What was characteristic was that he would bring the train he was running to the same level as his eyes, move the train back and forth right in front of his face, and watch it 🚃
A teacher at the developmental support center later told me he was watching the movement of the wheels, which I thought was interesting.

By the way, he still does it now in second grade.

He would suddenly say lines he heard on TV or from someone else, regardless of the TPO.
It's what's called delayed echolalia.
It had started appearing around this time.

He didn't show much interest in his peers.
If anything, he tended to gravitate toward teachers or adults.

It was around this time that I started to gradually sense, however faintly, the differences between him and the other children after he started daycare.
At the daycare parent meeting, they talked about how children become able to do certain things by age two, or how certain behavioral issues might arise, and that these are all part of the growth process for this stage, but none of it applied to my child at all.
The other parents were nodding along in understanding, but I was the only one left feeling completely confused.

Since he was my first child, I tried not to worry too much, assuming it was just a matter of individual differences.

Between working and preparing for the birth of my second child, I was overwhelmed every day and didn't really have the mental space to worry about it.

And so, my second child is born.

This has become quite long, so I will continue later.