Sometimes it occurs to me
just how much my family just... does because of my dad’s autism, and how it translates into things we just do with my own.
My dad wanders off in stores. My mom rolls her eyes sometimes when she’s trying to get his opinion on something and can’t find him, but other than that we just expect it, and account for it. My brother and I joke that he’s gone off into another dimension to fight vampire zombie pirate ninjas.
My dad will, on the rare occasion he feels he’s done enough work and enough housework to stay on top of it and enough research to understand the current advancements in his field, simply wander into the TV room and turn on a game, and whoever is interested will casually drift in there and sit down and quietly watch. Or he’ll start a movie and we’ll just... join him. Because he uses whatever media he’s putting on as an invitation to spend time in each others’ presence without having to talk or discuss anything, just enjoy being together. It has been that way my entire life.
My dad loves biology and computer science. We have a box garden in our back yard, because growing things in clay is hard and we had to get better dirt, which we don’t care for as often as we should but when we do, my dad will infodump on us the entire time we’re out there about the structure of plant cells or how Darwin’s theory actually works or why genetics work the way they do. My high school biology teacher refused to help me understand anything she was teaching and once exclaimed “am I speaking Chinese?!” when I visited her after school to request clarification on something I didn’t understand, throwing her hands in the air and refusing to explain it to me. I passed that class because my dad was always willing to tweak the language he used in his info dumping to help me get it.
I just... never thought of these behaviors as autistic. Because in my family they were normal. They’re just things my dad does, things I’ve never known him not to do, so why should I be surprised when he wanders out of the room in the middle of a conversation? Why should I be surprised when he goes out and tinkers in the garage with no explanation? I don’t think my mom even notices when she’s reading my dad’s mind anymore because she knows that when he goes out to the garden, he has a plan. When he pulls out this device or that tool, he has something in mind which he probably brought up months ago and is now finding time to do.
And it’s not all the same, but it’s always been really similar for me?
Like, the first thing my mom asked me to do every day she picked me up from school was info dump on her. And I would talk the entire way home about whatever interested me that day, usually something linguistic or historical, and she’d listen and ask interested questions and follow my random jumps to other topics just fine. And I never thought it was anything weird to talk the entire way home about one verb form in French or a single person in history because she never made me feel like it was anything but normal. She actively tries to have just enough base knowledge to follow along in whatever thing my dad and I have taken interest in; she was a computer science major with him for a little while before she went into math instead and can follow the ideas behind my dad’s tech-related rambles. She’s terrible at spelling because of an auditory processing disorder and being nearly deaf in one ear, but she can follow along on my rants about the vital differences between two similar suffixes that convey deep, religious meaning to me about the nature of the words they make. When the rest of us are too distracted by what we’re doing in the garden to continue to prompt my dad, she’ll lean back and ask for clarification on a point, or ask if something is similar to what he’s been talking about, and then he’s off again.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that my mom does really well with autistic people and never made me feel anything but normal, partly because to me, my dad was normal. And I could never understand in school why other people didn’t think the way I did, and my teachers never quite understood why I would randomly start info dumping in class (partly because almost none of them ever thought I might be autistic), but my mom got it. And as rough as we had it for several years, especially when I was younger, I’m really grateful to her for normalizing my dad’s autistic behaviors in our home. Because I would be a very different person if my mom had said “shut up” instead of “this needs my attention right now, can I listen to you in just a minute?’ or “stop wandering off” instead of “hey, can you get x from the other side of the store if you happen that way?” or “Stop. Be still.” instead of “Can you try to stay a little bit closer? It’s hard for me to understand when your back is turned toward me, especially if you’re farther away.”
I just think about the fact that I never even heard that it was normal to look people in the eye when you talk to them until I was in middle school and read a book about a girl with Asperger's. I think about the fact that instead of saying “look at me” my mom said “If you look at people’s mouths when they talk you can understand them better” and instead of telling me not to stim by chewing on my arms because it was gross or weird she explained that she was worried about the bruises I was leaving because she didn’t like seeing me hurt. She gently scolded me when I took up nail-biting instead and continued to express mild concern but no outright control of “you cannot do this” for years until I finally decided to break the habit in middle school because I found other ways to stim. She understood when I said I hated the feeling of cutting my nails and rather than only forcing me to do it anyway she helped me soak them beforehand so the skin could adjust more easily to being newly exposed to air-- which was really important, because the awful sensation of adjusting meant playing my violin got hard at times and she helped with that.
I think about how normal Autism is at my house and I can hardly believe it now. Because my mom chose to marry an autistic man and chose to learn to understand his behaviors instead of rejecting them. And they both chose to work to understand and put up with each other, my mom with my dad’s emotional distance and small expressive range due to years of trying to numb his extreme emotions, and my dad with my mom’s temper tantrums when she would forget that she wasn’t always the victim of every circumstance.
They each actively and independently chose to do whatever it took to be able to live with each other forever. And that meant accepting autism as a way of thinking, as a way of being, and that meant accepting that mood disorders and childhood trauma continue to affect life long after you’ve left your parents house, and that meant accepting that everyone needs a therapist sometimes and it doesn’t mean you’re broken it just means you’re lacking certain skills.
And now that I’m at college? Living with roommates who are very neurotypical and have never had to deal with someone with autism and selective mutism before? My mom continues to remind me that I can learn things, I can do things to make my life better. I told her I had nowhere to be alone; she told me it was okay to move my mattress under my bed and drape my spare sheets over the top. I have a cave now. My roommates have no idea why and give me weird looks every now and then, but don’t say anything. She reminded me it’s okay to have needs, even odd ones related to my autism. I complained to her at my grandfather’s funeral that I had no idea how to talk to people, I don’t understand the purpose of small talk, and people greeting each other on campus as they pass is the bane of my existence because I can’t speak fast enough to still be facing them when I reply and I thought people were supposed to face each other when they talk. She said I should ask one of the counselors at the school to be my social coach so I can ask what normal interaction looks like and how to behave and respond in a socially acceptable manner. So I did. And I have a better grasp now, because while he thought it was a little odd, he answered my questions and helped me understand.
I guess all I’m really trying to say is that in my life, autism has always been the norm. And even now that I’m away from home-- so very, very far away from home-- my mom is working to make sure that I know it’s okay for it to continue to be the norm. And that’s really made all the difference.
