One Year Later

It’s been about a year since the school and pediatrician determined that Rosie’s autistic, and I at least seem to have gone through the process I expected. I knew there would be a wave of assimilation and identification with the new reality to go through, perhaps some anger… stages in the process. And so there has been, but I feel lately as though I’ve come through it and am looking at it in a more matter-of-fact way, so I conclude that this initial period is over.

At first, there was the initial surprise and rejection that I know Rosie’s dad and I both went through – the whole family, in fact. How could her character traits and behavior possibly be labeled autistic? She was just like her dad and I, just a little more so. Following an intense period of research, we realized that of course the traits we shared were actually characteristic in their pattern, and Rosie and her autism became the lens through which we scrutinized our family. Rosie’s dad acknowledged that for some time, he had recognized that she was exactly like he had been as a child, but without identifying it as autism. Since his childhood had been traumatic, he had been trying to protect her, and most of all, not treat her like his parents had treated him. (In this, he has been profoundly successful.) It took me longer to realize that my own childhood traits followed a similar pattern.

Looking at my wider family, for a long time, I had already been aware that the men in my father’s family had something a little odd going on that usually landed them in a great deal of trouble around adolescence. I had actually looked at the autism criteria several times over the years with my brother in mind, but kept dismissing it since his traits weren’t strong enough to be classic autism. Plus, my brother is athletic and I thought at the time that all autistics had motor control difficulty. I found autistic traits in so many of my relatives that I started to worry that I was overapplying the criteria and seeing everything as relating to autism. However, even with a cooler perspective, I can see that the pattern of traits is still there. It’s as much a part of my family’s genetic heritage as our shared bone structure or blood type.

In seeing autistic traits as part of a continuum of human behavior, I went through a period of anger at the way the rest of the world viewed autism that told me that I was identifying pretty strongly with it. I’ve always had this me vs. them resentment; in some ways, this was just another way to fuel it. I don’t think that this anger is over, to be honest, only that this week I’m not feeling it.

This week, this is what I feel: so what? Autism explains my eccentric family. Some of the family members have a diagnosis, some are not about to go get one, some are misdiagnosed, some are subclinical for Asperger’s and are only missing a trait or missing a matter of degree. To my knowledge, no one has a diagnosis of classical autism. Same for my husband’s family, and same for several other families I know where one or more members have an Asperger’s diagnosis, though classical autism pops up in other families with this pattern. To me, that is really a strong indication that the autistic pattern, in humans, is effing normal. It’s part of the range of possible characteristics, and once enough genetic research is done, we’ll likely find that there are other patterns of characteristics other than autism that are triggered by strong genetic combinations or by external factors, too. So… so what? Let’s just get on with being brilliant, and weird, and obsessive, and cranky, and antisocial.