Life with a hidden child.

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I am a parent of two little girls. These girls are 5 and 6 years old. My 6yr old is smart, beautiful and very emotional at times. A perfect drama queen as I have observed in most 6 yr old girls. My 5 yr old is also beautiful, smart and very loving. She and her sister are night and day even though they are 11 mths apart. I also have a hidden child. This child is mean, angry, violent, uncooperative, and can't communicate with you at all. When this child comes out of her hiding spot, she will stay for a few days and then go back and hide for a day or two. No, this is not some weird child rearing thing and right at this point only a select group of parents know what I am getting at. This hidden child has a name. It's Autism. My 5 yr old has Autism. If you were to meet her though, you wouldn't know it, but spend the day and you will more than likely meet this hidden child. I make this reference to you because it's the only way I myself can explain what is going on with my child. When her Autism shows it's like a totally different child has replaced her body. My daughter has some lovely habits. She loves Science. She can tell you all kinds of scientific terms and processes that even I didn't know. She also is obssessed with rocks. She will come home from school with a bag of rocks and if you want to keep the hidden child at bay you cannot touch the bag. My fishtank is filled with the big rocks she collected and that's exactly where she wanted them. You can't do things like teach her at all. She only learns when she is ready to teach herself. She is in Senior Kindergarten and this is the first time she is going for full days. So far she is doing very well. She has speech Therepy, Occupational therepy, behavoiral experts and so on. For us to get all of this for her I had to spend one frustrating year getting her diagnosis. Most parents with austim know how hard this process is, but once it's done, everything snowballs. So I am opening a dicussion today for parents of chilren with mild forms of Austim and your experiences. How do you handle the hidden child within? Do you have to use medication(one thing they are trying to do with my daughter)? How has your experience been so far? I leave this discussion to the mild forms of autism because these are the hardest to spot and in my opinion the hardest to control because you don't know when it's coming. Now I am not even trying to suggest that my child's mild austism is harder to deal with the full autism. I commend you parents that have to deal with that. I am just saying that for this discussion today you can see full austism, but you can't see mild austism clearly. I want to know that I am not alone.