S6 was diagnosed about three years ago with AS. W has been very much proactive in finding as much information as posssible on this disorder. She practically considers herself an authority on the subject when she talks to me. And I will give full credit to my W for seeing to it that S6 got the OT and other therapy that has helped him adjust.
The problem is that I was skeptical at first when W presented this to me as a possibility. She had already explored and ruled out so many other possibilities to explain S6's behavioral issues -- SID, ADHD, etc. So when she began to explore Aspergers I was wondering whether this was just another unconfirmed hypothesis. By the time we got a definitive diagnosis, there was already some tension between W and myself concerning her layman "diagnosis".
And though I have since come around to recognizing S6's AS since the official diagnosis, W continues to think of me as being in full denial. That has been the foundation for the friction between W and I concerning our approach to raising our sons.
Our marital realtionship failed for several reasons, not the least of which is that I became severely depressed and began to emotionally withdraw, for a whole host of reasons, but then it becomes a question of the chicken and the egg -- which trigggered the other? The depression or the marital failure?
W has been attempting to link my emotional withdrawal to our son's AS. She is making the case that I have and am the source of S6's AS. She wants to believe that I have a trace of AS or HFA that caused me to callously neglect her needs. For someone who likes to think of herself as very studious and able to educate herself on any number of medically-related subjects, she displays an utter ignorance of clinical depression. She either totally discounts or chooses to be ignorant of the effects of severe depession and the side effects of anitdepressants on one's behaviors. No, she has seized upon Asperger's as the answer to my withdrawal. And it certainly could have had nothing to do to her own actions, could it?
So that is why W is urging me to be screened. She knows full well that noone knows for absolute certain whether there's a hereditary link to AS or not. W is just trying to rationalize blaming me for S6's condition, and at the same time trying to absolve herself from the failure of our marriage.
Now that we know that two children in the same family have very similar disorders, and they're related on W's mother's side of the family, it represents a pretty rare circumstance. More importantly, now the odds of someone on my side of the family also having the same or similar condition just got a lot slimmer.
