Thanks to all of you! It is good to know that other parents also seem to dwell on the past. Now I am so aware of everything. I do research on everything. Something as simple as Jello. I had no idea what Jello was made of. It grossed me out when I found out. Think of the poor vegan people who have no idea. It is amazing the stuff we put into our body that we really have no idea what it is. But it is true I do need to just focus of helping him now! Thank you for the list of your regrets, it lets me know we all have our own list of regrets. The list is only handy if you decide to have more children really.
Janis,
As long as this thing is the puzzle that it is we would always wonder and search everywhere for the reason why? I sometimes wonder if contraceptives have anything to do with it. How many people took contraceptives after conception without realizing it? We would always wonder. I like Leanne C's advice of feeling no guilt and just looking forward. As It stands now, Autism can happen to anybody. No family is 100% sure they are autism immune with the way this thing stands now. We are all just doing the best we can given what we know today.
Concernedpa.
This may sound crazy. But a mother of an autistic child will think of absolute every possibly cause of her child's disorder. Yesterday I was giving my NT 8 year old daughter her vitamin when I seen on the label it had DHA for the brain. Beside it it mentioned it's from fish oil. Then I started thinking about when my son (my autistic child) was a baby I gave him Carnation Good Start which had DHA in it. If DHA is derived from fish oil and fish hold mecury. I have heard that most autistic children have immune and metabolic issues. If he holds toxins maybe the mecury has been building up since his infant bottles. It sounds crazy. With too much caffine and guilt you can ponder crazy things up. I just wanted some insight and what you all think. Janice,DHA is a chemical isolated from fish oil. ISOLATED. Meaning there should not have been any mercury with it! And besides, DHA is given in milligram amounts ... how much mercury could have been incidentally isolated with THAT?
Quantity is important, too. Heck you probably BREATHE more mercury vapor each day than is in that isolated DHA.
But sure I understand the thought -- or how else could I have worked that out?
Now THAT'S guilt.
If you drank a lot of wine or coffee or were a bit chubby - and then got terminal breast cancer, would you let regret whack you down? NO. If you drove over that bridge in Minneapolis that just crashed, would you blame yourself if your kid got injured in the collapse? NO.
Autism is an accidental occurance. We did the right things and are still doing the right things. Ain't no such thang as "coulda woulda shoulda"...life is a passage of steps. Not steps untaken. No such thing.
Its okay to occasionally look at the path behind us, but is pretty stupid to do so very often. You cannot look forward and back at the same time. Eyes to the future, heart to today...our backs to the past.
Edited: too depressing and waste of time.
My mom smoked 3 packs a day (she even smoked in the DELIVERY ROOM! I was born purple from lack of oxygen), drank a pot of coffee every morning with aspartame-containing sweetener, ate horribly fattening/unhealthy foods, fought daily with my dad, handled sick cats, lived in a mildew-infested trailer house, and did other such things while she was pregnant with my siblings and I, and I do think about it a lot. What caused my ASD? Why was my brother born with Pierre-Robin syndrome, a cleft palate, and Asperger's Syndrome? It's only natural to wonder, especially because no one cause of ASD has been identified. I don't blame you for wondering. There's nothing wrong with questioning; as of now, that's the only way to understand the disorder. Once you better understand the causes, you can make more informed decisions about treatments that will be most effective for YOUR child. There IS, however, something wrong and counterproductive about torturing yourself and obsessing over possible causes. Women/mothers in general are far too hard on themselves. We owe it to ourselves to be able to walk with our heads held high, harboring no guilt or self-blame over things we can't control (and most likely had very little to do with us, anyway.) If you can separate your curiosity and inquisitive mind from emotion, you will be doing yourself and your child a service by thinking about/researching possible causes of autism and related disorders.
In my opinion, we would be doing better to question some of our society's practices, such as putting cumulative additives with unknown long-term effects into our foods, vaccine manufacturers who inject our children with mercury, aluminum, squalene and other neurotoxins and make it virtually impossible to refuse/put off vaccination, and the factories dumping mercury into our lakes and rivers...it's a worldwide epidemic, and to blame it on incompetent mothering just doesn't make sense.