Almost inevitably, when I mention to someone unfamiliar with autism that my son is autistic, they begin talking about vaccines. Sometimes they proudly tell me how they have not had their own children vaccinated. Sometimes they go off on a screed against scientists, drug companies, government agencies or the establishment in general. If they do ask my opinion, it is to confirm their own fears: I have heard about the link between autism and vaccines, haven't I? They shouldn't have their own children vaccinated, should they? They have seen enough stories in the media and heard enough talk going around that they accept that there is some link between vaccines and autism and are suspicious when I say that's simply not the case. They see my son as damaged and defective, injured by the vaccines that were supposed to help him. They imply that I was at best ignorant or naive and at worst foolhardy and rash to have had my son vaccinated.

Here's the thing about autism, it appears on a spectrum. Every autistic child (heck, every child, lest we forget) is different, and autism presented itself differently in each and every one. The sensational news stories that people have seen on TV linking vaccines to autism show just one of the many ways autism presents itself. The stories generally show pictures and videos of a baby or toddler who is smiling, talking and interacting. Then we are told that days or weeks after receiving the MMR vaccine, this child became completely non-verbal and ceased to interact with others. The child suddenly became autistic and the parents blamed the vaccine. Now who knows, if my child changed dramatically one day, I might blame a vaccine too, but my child (and many, many others like him) didn't.

Before my son was born, he reacted so powerfully to sounds that I used to joke that he was going to be a musician. Whenever we were exposed to loud noises (most often music), I'd be treated to a series of violent, jerky movements as he twitched and thrashed in utero. He was hypersensitive to sound. It was strangely different from my daughter's serene rolling kicks, and her obliviousness to the same external noises that made her brother dance madly inside me.

When my son was born, he cried, constantly. Nothing comforted him except breastfeeding, which I did almost non-stop, day and night, for months. The very first night he was born, I lied to the nurses at the hospital about how much time I spent holding him and nursing him, because when I told the truth they told me he didn't need that much, but if I stopped, he'd cry in these high-pitched piercing wails, like he had flames licking at his body, like needles were piercing his flesh. It didn't help to hold him or sing to him or rock him.

I came to feel like a shell shocked war veteran, cringing and screaming at cars backfiring or news helicopters passing overhead. I felt like I was living with a fire siren wired to a time bomb. He could go off at any time, with those horrible, inhuman screams. I didn't leave the house with him until he was three months old. When my daughter was born, I thought, "Oh, so this is what babies are supposed to be like! This is why people like and get nostalgic for infants." She cried normal baby cries; cries that said, "Hey, Mama, it's time for more milk" not the soul splitting "Mama, please, please help me! Help me! Help me, Mama, please!" that I heard in my son's cries, day and night for nearly all of the first year of his life.

When my son was about six or seven months old, I went to the hair dresser and overheard another woman there talking about her daughter, who was just about my son's age. She talked about how cute it was when her daughter waved bye-bye. "That's funny," I thought, "my son's never done that. Oh, well. Girls are more social than boys. I wonder when he'll start." He didn't start waving until he was nearly a year and a half, and when he did, he would hold his hand with the palm facing his own face, as if he were waving at himself. (It was ridiculously cute.)

Before he was one year old, he stopped eating anything new. He wouldn't even try the birthday cake I made him, and his tastes remain timelessly stuck back there at the beginning of toddlerhood, even today.

When he was two years old, he wasn't speaking yet, not really. He would repeat back things that were said to him or parrot things he heard from books, but he wasn't forming independent sentences. And he couldn't articulate most sounds, so what he was saying was comprehensible only to us and only because we knew he was repeating something he had heard. However, he could read and type words on the computer and count to a thousand. I remember the first time he counted out loud, sitting on the floor one day, lining up Matchbox cars and saying, "uh, ka, uh, ba, ka..." (counting aloud "one, two, three, four, five..." of course) all the way up into the thirties, the total number of Matchbox cars we had back then. I was so incredibly proud of how smart he was; I videotaped him doing it.

Of course, I didn't think he was autistic back then. I thought autism meant that he couldn't be loving (which he is), that he wouldn't smile or interact (which he does), that he would bang his head or harm himself (which he doesn't). At the time, I thought he had a speech delay and was, like me, a shy, picky eater who was sensitive to sounds. Over time, I came to realize and accept that the particular collection of quirks I saw in my son did go by the name of autism. Looking back, the signs were there all along, he's been different from my daughter, different from the other babies I've known, different from the peers I see him with, from the time I felt his first movements, from the day he was born, from long before a vaccine entered his system. My son is autistic, and he was born that way.