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Ever since he was a toddler,
Michael has received special services for his multiple
disabilities. He is visually impaired and has poor gross
motor skills, sensory integration dysfunction, communication
impairments, and an IQ in the mid-60s. Despite his challenges,
he’s a cheerful, kind, and loving teenager, and
the Child Study Team in his New Jersey school district
thought they knew him well. That is, until March 2003,
when his mother, Mary, shared a new diagnosis with the
team—Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS). “A stunned
silence filled the room. There was a sense of disbelief,”
she said.
Mary didn’t have
any trouble believing the diagnosis. Alcoholism was
rampant in her family, and by age 7 or 8, she was sneaking
chocolate bars and her father’s whiskey for a
picnic with her grandfather. Mary led a double life
throughout her adolescence (she was both a National
Honor Society member and someone who’d prostitute
herself for alcohol) that extended into college and
medical school. “I had the typical “if only”
attitude of an alcoholic. ‘If only I can get into
college, I’ll stop drinking…If only I can
get into medical school or get the internship I want,
it’s over. If I only I were married.’ Well,
I got all those things, and I kept drinking anyway,”
says Mary, a physician who is currently not practicing
medicine.
In the late 1980s, Mary
and her husband wanted to begin a family. Her alcoholism
made becoming pregnant difficult, but once successful,
she vowed not to drink. “I did manage to not drink
for those nine months,” she says, and her first
child, a son, was born healthy. Soon after the postpartum
period, Mary began drinking again.
In 1991, Mary became
pregnant a second time. Early on, she dismissed the
lack of menstrual periods as the irregular cycles she
was accustomed to and attributed the symptoms of morning
sickness to her drinking. “I had no idea I was
pregnant during the first trimester, and I was drinking
daily,” she says. “Once I knew I was pregnant,
I became very distraught. As a physician, I knew that
every drop of alcohol I had drunk was potentially harming
my baby. Still, after an ultrasound during the second
trimester showed a normally developing male, I drank
a half a pint of vodka in the hospital parking lot.”
That’s how alcoholism progresses, she says, from
being able to stay sober for the first pregnancy, but
not the next. And it was during her second pregnancy
that Mary knew, for the first time, that she was an
alcoholic. “But I didn’t know there was
hope or recovery,” she says.
Soon after Michael was
born, it was clear to Mary that Michael had been affected
by her alcoholism. He was a tiny baby whose weight and
head circumference were in less than the fifth percentile.
He was diagnosed with failure to thrive and later, as
a toddler, had profound speech delays. Mary and her
husband knew that Michael would need early intervention
therapies as a toddler, but the diagnosis of FAS was
not officially made at that time.
During her years of abusing
alcohol, Mary tried to achieve sobriety, but with varying
success. Twelve years ago, she found a rehabilitation
program that worked for her, and she has been recovering
ever since.
The aftermath of Mary’s
drinking, however, remains now and forever in Michael.
Early intervention for him was key, and in his elementary
years, he was mainstreamed in public school.
“Michael’s
a great speller and likes to read, but math has always
given him problems,” says Mary. Third grade was
problematic, and it’s when Mary realized she needed
to advocate for her child. Michael’s education
went back on track by fifth grade, but his parents thought
he would do even better in a specialized school. To
get him into that school in sixth grade (one year earlier
than planned), Mary got on paper what she had recognized
years earlier: a medical diagnosis of FAS.
Today, Michael, a seventh
grader, is doing well in school. He receives social
skills training, pre-vocational training, and extra
help in math, particularly with money and time concepts.
As far as his future, he’ll be able to work with
some assistance. Like other mothers’ dreams for
their children, Mary hopes that some day Michael will
find a compatible partner to be happy with in life.
One of Mary’s dreams
has already come true: forgiveness, which has opened
new pathways of communication in her family and enabled
her to speak publicly about her experiences. For some
time, Michael knew he was different than his brother
and a younger sister, both unaffected by FAS and in
their schools’ gifted and talented programs. He
wondered if God put him in the “wrong” family.
Michael’s FAS was never hidden from him, but Mary
remembers the day it all clicked for him. She had started
sharing her story with other women as a way to help
them understand the consequences of drinking during
pregnancy. “While driving with Michael one day,
I played one of my tapes in the car,” says Mary,
now a member of the New Jersey Task Force on Fetal Alcohol
Syndrome. “He listened and then asked, ‘Why
do you go tell moms that if they drink alcohol while
the baby’s inside, it could make the kid’s
brains hurt? You mean you drank alcohol when you were
pregnant with me?’”
“I told Michael,
‘Yes, I did. I hope you can forgive me someday,’”
she recalls. “He asked me if I was really sorry
that I had drunk alcohol when I was pregnant with him,
and I said I was. Then he said, ‘I don’t
mind. I love you, Mommy.’ That’s when I
finally experienced self forgiveness. I thought, ‘If
he can forgive me, how can I not forgive myself’?
Forgiveness has transformed my shame and grief into
healing for all of us.”
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