oh also! cute story from work yesterday under the cut!! kinda long but!!
so this woman walked in and checked in her two kids and when she realized she left her socks (we don’t allow shoes on the play area floor and you need socks) in the car, she asked if she could go ahead and send the kids into the playground while she went out to get them. she said “my daughter will have a meltdown if i take her out of the building and she thinks she’s leaving” and i immediately went !! and wondered if she meant meltdown in the autism sense. then when i was giving the kids their stamps to go back, i noticed that the little girl didn’t talk and that her mom gave her a warning any time something was about to touch her, and i recognized that she was on the spectrum. so with her older brother watching over her, i let them back into the play area while mom got her socks.
when mom came back in she thanked me for letting the kids go ahead and go back and mentioned that the daughter has autism, and i said to her, “i’m on the spectrum, i totally understand.” and the mom’s face kind of lit up. she was about to say that i seemed a lot more high functioning than her daughter then just kind of leaned in and said, “i would have never known.” and i talked to her a little bit about how i may seem high functioning in a lot of ways, there are areas of my life where my autism affects me pretty severely. for instance, she asked if i had always talked or if i had been nonverbal as a child, and i explained to her that i go nonverbal when i’m under emotional distress (or sometimes, it just happens) and she was talking about how worried she had been ever since the diagnosis that her daughter wouldn’t be okay or successful or happy, but that seeing me functioning so well gave her a lot of hope. so i talked to her a little bit about how i don’t see autism as a bad thing, and that just because we do things differently doesn’t mean we can’t live fulfilling happy lives.
it was a very nice talk and she was very respectful of my experiences and i think i helped change the way she thinks about her daughter’s disability and it made me feel really really good!!