I was at Marshalls today buying my baby men’s medium jogger pants. He outgrew all the other ones.

There was a time, in the not-so-distant past, that I would marvel at how big my little fella was getting. I would see pictures of us together and be surprised by how much he had grown. My brain never saw it. He was my baby. He still looked like one to me.

Of course, my baby is now 12 years old so most people would give me an upturned eyebrow and tell me to cut the apron strings (although I’ve never worn one). They would have all sorts of advice to give about letting go and leaving the nest. “One day,” they would warn, “he will be old enough to leave you and go into the world.”

Then they would find out that my baby is non-verbal with autism and will require care for the rest of his life. They’d learn that Lucas has pronounced delays in many life skills and the reason I still see him as a baby is because we still do many of the things now that he did when he was a baby. From TV shows to bedtime stories, so much has remained the same.

It’s then that they would get awkwardly quiet. They’d tell me about their friend’s niece, who has autism. Then we’d talk about something else – food or Netflix or some such nonsense. As the years have gone on, it’s become somewhat entertaining to watch as a person frantically tries to jump back out of the deep end of the conversational pool.

I get their feelings on this. To be honest, it still sometimes surprises me that I can write about having a non-verbal boy entering adolescence so calmly and normally. Had this been ten years ago and you’d tell me that this would be my life, I wouldn’t know how to respond.

The idea of raising a non-verbal 12-year-old was terrifying to me when I was raising a non-verbal two-year-old. I remember the first time I saw a video online of a boy in his teens, doing the same motions to his father that Lucas was doing to me. As the dad tried to talk about living with his son, the kid was laughing and pulling his face away to look at him. He was hugging and giggling and showing his father so much love. Anyone watching would surely give an “awww.”

Except me. I felt like I was going to throw up.

Back then, the only goal was speech and “overcoming” autism. Up until the moment he was diagnosed, autism was presented as a bad word. With so many warnings, red flags, and things to avoid, you almost felt that the moment you heard that diagnosis was the moment you learned you did something wrong. I felt I had failed my son.

The only way past that was to help him out of it. Autism, to me at the time, was like a temporary setback. It was an injury or a lapse in my parental understanding. While I may have raised his sister earlier to walk, talk, and excel, Lucas’s lack of advancement was a sure sign that I messed up somewhere in the pipeline.

As the years went by, I stopped feeling that way. I learned that the more I hoped for him to become someone different, the less I took notice of the person he actually was. If I spent his formidable years wringing my hands over every age-inappropriate thing he did, I’d never accept the person he was growing into. I’d never know my son.

Bonding with Lucas has been easy since the first time I showed him that I was willing to join in his world. I began watching the YouTube Kids videos that made him shriek with joy and took turns in his board book flipping and toy car back-and-forth rolling, rather then correcting him on “the right way to play.” He felt seen and understood. I saw it in his face the first time. I see it in his face today.

What makes all of this so perfect now is that my baby is now close to the age of that boy in the video I saw a decade ago. Lucas is over five feet tall and shares shirts with me. When I cut his hair, I’ve begun shaving his little peach fuzz mustache as it grows in. I look at him and I see the man he’s maturing to be. It’s rarer to see a picture that makes him look little rather than the other way around.

That sick feeling I had when I watched a boy his age back then never lasted. I’ve worked harder to get him to communicate than I’ve ever worked at anything in my life. He has too. There may be no words and he might still be turning my face towards his own with giggles, but we communicate just fine. Ipad language devices, PECs, hand motions – we have our ways. He gets me. I get him.

Because that happened, I now know that when I see a video of a man in his 30s or 40s, balding with a handlebar mustache, acting out in the same way Lucas does, I won’t feel nauseous. I’ve already lived long enough to learn that the future is a slow burn. You get there step-by-step. We’re not in the movie “Big”. He’s not Josh Baskin and that stuff doesn’t happen overnight. You grow together and become the people you become together. The three of us in this house are the perfect examples of that.

Men’s mediums? Deodorant? Body spray? Sesame Street videos? They’re all part of our routine. I’m used to it and I’m OK with it. I’m OK with it because that’s who my baby is and I love him.