Finally letting her know!

It turned out that Rosie's anger (last post!) was due to her thinking about the conflict between what she understood her school psychologist to have said a few weeks ago, and what I told her when I heard about it. Or at least that's what she said it was about. I'm never quite sure, when I try to get to the bottom of something like this- sometimes I suspect she's coming up with something just to have a plausible answer so I'll stop asking. It had been bothering her anyhow, so it's just as well.

Her school psychologist hadn't launched any kind of therapeutic effort, he explained when I called him, but was trying to engage her in conversation during the assessment process. He told her something along the lines of it being easier for her to make friends at school if she could act like the other kids do, and Rosie took it as meaning that she has to stop being herself and be like everyone else. When she told me about it, I was a little distressed and said that was wrong. Apparently she was mad at me for saying this. So, I explained to her that I'd talked to her school psychologist the other week and that what he had meant was acting only - that she didn't have to give up her true self.

She digested this for a moment and then said, "So I don't have to be like everyone else? I can think my own thoughts? I just have to appear like everyone else?"

"Yes, exactly," I said. "Learn what they do or say."

"It's pretend," she said. She was radiant.

A second later, she was eyeballing the cover of a book left in my room on Asperger's. "What's this about?" I thought the timing was good, so I told her that her qualities of special thinking had a name, Asperger's, and this book was all about that. "Really? Cool!" she said. (Hey, my kind of thinking's in a book!) I went on to remind her of things I'd mentioned before, without using the term: that Asperger's meant that she had a unique and valuable way of seeing things and that she had a fantastic memory, but that it also meant that she had some trouble understanding what people were saying or doing sometimes. She nodded eagerly, and so I also reminded her that Mom and Dad hadn't had many friends when young either, but that it got easier to find other interesting people to be friends with as you got older. She liked that, too.

After our nice chat we went madly shuffling around the house, round and round, faster and faster, trying to build up enough of a static electricity charge to light a tiny neon light. (Five bucks at Edmund Scientific!) It was hilarious. We couldn't get it to discharge with just one of us holding it, but it glowed beautifully between us, so it was a nice interactive, too.

I was really glad that the opportunity to broach the subject came up and that it went well. I was fretting about waiting to get hold of one of the kid's books on Asperger's and if any of them were worth it for her - and rather blindly wishing that there was a video out on YouTube by other aspies that could tell kids her age what it was about and not to worry. Maybe I'll write a few videobloggers and ask!