Xavier was born on April 30, 2001. He is my third child of six, all of them boys. Xavier was a beautiful baby, drawing the admiring glances of everyone we passed on the street. People would stop me in the store or at the park and tell me what a pretty little girl I had. I would laugh and correct them, telling them that he was not a girl. Of course as a mother of a new baby, I would be flattered by people’s comments, but after a while, I was fed up with smiling and telling them “thank you”.

When he was one year old, I went back to school. I would get up and leave before he woke in the morning, and at noon I would come back home. Xavier would often be playing with his cars that he would line up in a neat line on the floor. When I came through the door, I expected him to be happy to see me, but he would just look up and go back to his cars as if I had never left. I thought it a bit odd, but waved it off. I assumed that he was so into what he was doing, that he did not care about anything else.

We moved to Fort Smith, Arkansas three months before Xavier was two years old. His speech was developing normally, but about three months after we arrived, Xavier refused to continue talking. That is when I began to have the minute suspicion that maybe something was wrong, but friends and family advised me not to compare him to other children. After all, it was not as if he could not talk, he just refused to do so. The only time he would talk was when he was asking for something that he wanted.

My son Keshawn was born in July of that year, and Xavier had a hard time accepting the baby. Twice Xavier endangered his baby brother’s life, once by dumping talc on his face. From that point on, Xavier was not left alone with the baby. Xavier also ignored anyone who was talking to them, as if he did not hear us. I knew from having his hearing tested that his hearing was fine, but when we called his name, we got no response. He also avoided any eye contact with us. This was troubling, but I did not jump to any conclusions. We discussed it with our doctor, who told us that he was probably going through a “phase” In October, we moved to Las Vegas. We did not have a car in the beginning, but soon we were established and bought a car. We drove around Las Vegas and the surrounding communities to familiarize ourselves with the city we had moved to. It was at this time that Xavier taught himself to read.