Chapter 1 of LADYBUG

Chapter 1
She was born in 1989, February 21st. I graduated high school that same year. I was the only one in my class whose parents had to find a babysitter in order to come to graduation. My dad was out of town and I was “on call” in case my mom went into labor. Not a typical role for a senior in high school, but many things about my life were not typical. When my mom first thought she might be pregnant, she actually thought the best plan of action would be for me to stop in the local grocery store to pick up an EPT. The obvious conclusion most people would come to was lost on my mom, she was so caught up in her own situation, she could not see what everyone else would see. So, I did it, cringing as I walked down the aisle and stopped in that section, quickly walking to the check out and choosing an empty line, refusing to make eye contact with the clerk, all in an attempt to hide my face and spare the embarrassment of explaining that indeed I was not pregnant, no sirree, just my mom (as if anyone would believe that story!). Anyway, all week, I had been waiting to be urgently called out of class to go get my mom. It was rather anticlimactic when, after my English class, I noticed a pink message slip on the door of my locker. It simply said to call home. I did, my mom was having contractions and thought it might be a good idea to go to the hospital soon. No sense of urgency whatsoever, indeed very anticlimactic. I located my brother (he was a freshman) and we drove home, at the speed limit, to retrieve mom. My dad made it in time for the big moment, and joined the delivery room full of family to witness his fourth child entering the world. She was beautiful, perfect in all visible ways. She had all the requisite body parts, a nice round pink face, a good head of dark hair, and she scored in the normal range of the Apgar test. Everything looked good. There was only one problem. She had no name. For months, we had been going round and round on names, we could never agree. My mom was into the jewel names, Pearl, Opal, Ruby and such. My brother and I were adamantly opposed, no sister of ours would be allowed to endure such tortures. We put together various combinations of family names, but still we could not agree. It was four days later that Joanna Elaine was randomly thrown out by my brother, and funnily enough, we all loved it. It was perfect and it was final. The birth certificate was signed and we went home.

The first several months were blissful, isn’t that what you are supposed to say, what everyone expects you to say, when you have a newborn in the house? Our house was just small enough that her crying all night kept us all up. My brother and I had a hard time getting up for school, my parents were exhausted, our other sister (only 2 years old) was too young to know just how much everything had already changed. We all chipped in, we were expected to. It was our job to help with bottles, baths, babysitting, grocery runs, cooking, all of it. We were all so busy, so weary, but also so enamored with Joanna that we did not notice the first signs. We coddled her, we did everything for her, it took us quite some time to notice that she was not doing things that she should have been doing for herself. One of the first obvious signs of what was to come came one afternoon. My boyfriend picked her up under her arms and swung her up in the air. She immediately and totally stopped breathing, her face turned an odd blue color and we freaked out. She recovered quickly, but the event spurred some doctor visits, questions, tests, more doctors, more tests. She spent several nights hooked up to a heart monitor, they ran MRI’s, there were no obvious answers. But, other symptoms began to make themselves more apparent. She was delayed in her sitting up, her crawling, her standing. Her verbal skills were not what is in the normal range, we were all concerned. Eventually, we got one answer, an answer that was mysterious, sort of an unknown: Autism.