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The Autism News English, English Aimee Mury, autism, autistic, Eliza Mury, film
Eliza Mury was only one year old when she said her first word — ”doggie” — and a few more words followed. But soon her parents noticed that her vocabulary seemed frozen. Speech therapy didn’t help.
Eliza’s mother, Aimee Mury, took her daughter to doctors and specialists, but none diagnosed anything more serious than a hearing deficiency. Friends and relatives, though, had gently begun to suggest that Eliza might be autistic. Aimee Mury was so fearful of the condition, she could barely say the word.
After repeated exams by specialists, Eliza was diagnosed with autism when she was 2 1/2, in the spring of 2007. Aimee Mury read everything she could about the condition. But as she learned about traits and treatment, she had a hard time seeing what an autistic child looked like.
”It’s very hard initially to meet other people and kids,” Mury said. ”I was on YouTube and I was trying to search for autism. And I found there was very little out there.”
Nearly three years after Eliza’s diagnosis, Aimee Mury has helped create a movie about her daughter and their struggle to get her diagnosed called ”Eliza, My Songbird.” The movie, produced and directed by Mury’s neighbor, Zadi Zokou, will have its first public showing Sunday at Natick’s Morse Institute Library.
Mury, 42, saw the movie as a chance to help other families with autistic children get diagnosed more quickly than Eliza. But Eliza also plays a prominent role in the movie. Mury and her husband, John, pastor of Natick’s Beacon Community Church, hope that making autistic children more visible will help diminish the stigma of the neurological disorder.
”I think it’s a wonderful tribute that she is willing to do this,” said Kelly Gryglewicz, a member of the board of directors of the Autism Alliance of MetroWest, and a friend of Mury’s. ”A lot of people are not willing to disclose the diagnosis.”
Getting Eliza diagnosed with autism was a long and frustrating process that began when the girl was 18 months old. Appointments with specialists took months to book, and in the beginning, none of them believed Eliza was autistic. Girls are less likely than boys to be autistic. And while many autistic children shy away from social contact, Eliza was very social — even though she was indiscriminate, trying to sit on a stranger’s lap, for instance.
”That’s what I was quickly learning was that even within the professional group, there’s a lot of misunderstanding of what a child with autism can look like,” Aimee Mury said. (more…)
