Having a child with special needs means not dwelling in the past or fully living in the present. For those who constantly worry about tomorrow, the mind often drifts into the future.

I know mine did. When my son, Lucas, was just a baby and I was first to spot certain “red flags”, I was already doing it. My mind tried to paint a picture of the person he was going to become.

Keep in mind that we do this with all kids. I get that. His neurotypical sister is three years older than he is and I flash forward to future incarnations of her in my brain. The difference is that I feel more secure in what that version of her will be like. There are variations, but I know there’s a good chance that what I see will match who she becomes as an adult…hopefully.

With a non-verbal child with autism, like Lucas, the picture isn’t as vivid. When he was little, the picture was barely there at all.

Non-verbal? Autism? I didn’t know what those things truly meant in terms of how it affects a family and how it would affect ours. I knew that autism was supposed to be scary and memes warned me not to do all sorts of things that might cause my child to catch it. Well, game over. He’s got it. Now what? What comes next?

That answer was left in the wind, just when I needed it answered most. I asked doctors and teachers to help me know who this little boy would become. I needed some sort of direction. There was none.

Anything can happen.

They said that all the time. The accompanying shrug and smirk were triggering, as the kids say. Today, I understand the reasons why it was said. It doesn’t make it any less maddening at the time.

In the face of all that, I was forced to paint my own pictures of Lucas’s future. It wasn’t visual, it was visceral. My stomach twisted when I tried to imagine what my toddler, non-verbal with autism, would become as an adult.

The problem was that I knew nothing of how it would be and the image I saw wasn’t really an image. It was just dark and foreboding emotion. The colors weren’t vivid. The people weren’t defined. Fear took on a whole new meaning for me during this time.

Of course, the only thing I knew for sure was what I didn’t want to have happen. There was a mental checklist of everything he was facing at the time that sat pinned to the corkboard in my head. The parameters for a worst-case scenario were for him to reach an older age having never said a word, lacking some fundamental life skills, and requiring daily assistance from those around him.

Today, he’s 13. We’re a happy family. My kids get along with one another and I couldn’t be happier with who both of my children grew to become.

Welcome to the worst-case scenario.

Yup. We’re in the future. He’s never said a word, lacks certain fundamental life skills, and requires daily assistance, That’s all true of my son, as a teenager. All those scary things came to pass.

However, the picture of what that looks like doesn’t match what I thought it would when he was little. That’s because I didn’t picture anything. I felt it. It put a pit in my stomach.

Had I been able to see what it looked like, I’d realize that it looked like the life we already had at the time. We were the same people, living our lives, and moving forward. We were people who had survived terrible heartache and incredible joy. Nothing was insurmountable if we have each other.

Making today’s image even less scary is that we’ve had over a decade to ease into this as our life. The fear of an unknown future makes sense when you’re playing Madam Cleo with a crystal ball. The fear of a future that you’re already in, created, and share with people you love makes no sense.

The best part about knowing all this is that it there are still futures for me to envision. Lucas is 13 today, but years go by like days. Soon, he’ll be a full-blown adult. What will that mean? What will his worst-case scenario be then?

Let me answer that. It means that this person I know will become an older version of the person he is now. The sweet boy that Lucas grew into will be a sweet adult. That’s the general hope and, barring any unforeseen circumstances, I doubt it will be any different.

When he was two, I couldn’t do that. His personality wasn’t fully developed yet. We spent so much time worrying about him that it became all I saw for a while. I couldn’t predict who he would go on to be because I didn’t know who he was at the time.

As far as worst-case scenarios – there are none. Group home, my home, no words, all words – whatever. No matter what he does, where he goes, or who he becomes, Lucas will always be perfect to me. He’s one of the purest souls I’ve ever known. Our family loves him and he loves us.

We love him for who he is, not for whether he ties his shoes or says words. Most people talk too much anyway, and we can always buy him sneakers with Velcro.