Girls & Asperger's

Posting while listening to Rosie and her grandmother have their morning argument. Very unpeaceful. It's always something. They're about equally pigheaded each in her own way.

Anyway. A quick post, since I'm out of time this morning.

A friend sent me a link to a Newsweek article "Why Girls with Asperger's Might Not Be Diagnosed." http://www.newsweek.com/id/168868/page/1 I'm glad to be seeing much more attention being given to the differences in thought.

And, I finally did get Attwood's book Asperger's and Girls, though writing about it will have to wait a bit. I had about the confusing reaction I expected - sometimes upset, sometimes grateful. There are a lot of things I'm going to need to remember to tell Rosie as she gets older, and I'm very glad to have some input there.

First Day of Holiday Wigging

Well, gosh, I'm on time. I tend to start to freak out about my least favorite holiday right around two weeks prior, so I'm right on track for a total meltdown around Thanksgiving.

Yay.

Last year, I Xanaxed my way through it and sharpened my teeth some (this was before I got my mouthguard to prevent my grinding all my teeth down in my sleep). I couldn't get my crap in one sack quickly enough to figure a way out of Having A Lovely Family Thanksgiving, so I capitulated and wasn't that nice. This year the sense of tension and obligation is already racked up pretty high for various reasons, and I figured unless I wanted to find myself freaking right the eff out, bolting out of the house, and finding myself in Alaska or even Siberia before I slowed down, I'd better make a plan.

So, escape plan in place, things have calmed a bit, but I still feel pretty jumpy. Rosie and I spent a quiet evening playing card games. One round of SET and two rounds of another game, Lie Detector. She can play through a round of SET now, but it still gets on her nerves a bit. Lie Detector is actually far more complex in its way, but she has a special interest in detection and mysteries, so... there you are. Rosie commented (for maybe the hundredth time) that she thought she might like to go into law enforcement when she grows up.

I could see her doing that. Detective work! Anything that requires analysis, really. I remember Easter several years ago, when she gathered evidence quietly for a week or two, then presented it to us in a verbal bullet-point style to prove definitively that her dad and I had to be the Easter Bunny. She detailed each item with chopping motions of her hands.

1. She saw a box of Peeps through the doubled plastic of a bag I brought home a day or two before Easter. The Peeps didn't show up later, but there were Peeps in her basket.
2. Her dad and I were acting funny.
3. The Easter Bunny left a toy for her cousin, but it was in a package, which meant it had been purchased.
4. The Bunny left a green pawprint on a napkin, but she spied a white spot in the pawprint she thought should not be there.

Put that all together, and it pointed to: my parents are possessed by the spirit of the Easter Bunny.

We've worked on logical conclusions since then, of course.

Autism Hangout

I forgot to post this link, which I found interesting. http://www.autismhangout.com

It even has a job board.

It seems to be supportive in the right way - day to day living rather than focusing on some mythical cure - but I'd feel a bit better about it if it weren't part of a suite of support sites (hearthangout, cancerhangout). Seems a bit two-faced - both helpful and exploitative - because of that.

Life stuff - BFFs and babies

Rosie just loves little kids. One of her goals in the next few years, she says, is to be able to babysit. Yesterday, she was playing at the park with her BFF, who had two baby dolls with her, and the girls were holding them and pretend-baby-playing. It was a little surprising to see Rosie baby-playing, since she's never had the faintest interest in baby dolls. Human ones, anyway. She always plays with stuffed animals and pretends she's an animal mother. I'm reminded of some of the information that has drifted out onto the net and people's conversation about Tony Attwood's book on girls with Asperger's, and how he notes the differences in girls' presentation. Girls are more able to take social cues from another person to follow along.

On the other hand, some of the other things he's apparently noted is that girls tend to 'suffer in silence' and become very shy. This runs counter to my experience with the women friends I've known with Asperger's and HFA, who have been, on the contrary, very in-your-face and belligerent. But then, I'm attracted to that, so perhaps that's my personal sample bias, heheh. Maybe I've just never gotten to know a quiet woman aspie.

One of our local Asperger's/autism support groups has regular support meetings for young women; but nothing yet for girls. I keep hearing that in social skills groups, the ratio of girls to boys is low enough to be uncomfortable for the girls. Maybe that's where I need to focus some organizing effort, rather than in the more general homeschooling for aspie kids area. Personally, I always got along better with boys, but I can see that Rosie does need the company of other girls though she insists that she is a tomboy. One of her aspie friends, a boy, always gives her this incredulous look when she wants to pretend or role play anything but pirates. LOL!

On a side note, I know I should read Attwood's book on girls, but I have now noticed - and am willing to admit at this point - that reading the excerpts makes me nervous. Not for Rosie - I look forward to reading it for her. No, for me. I know already that I'm not exactly NT. But nearly every excerpt I read from an adult woman sounds like something I've thought or said or experienced. I look at the diagnostic criteria, and I don't meet them. But just barely. The criteria are there, it's a matter of focus and control for me. Objectively, I can take a step back and recognize that if there were such a thing as a diagnosis when I was a kid, and if anyone were actually looking, I probably would have had one of PDD-NOS or NLD. Maybe even a light Asperger's, if they were looking carefully, but probably a strong PDD-NOS. [Nah. Upon reflection, if they had to dig that hard we're talking something lighter.] I was fortunate (??) enough to be both intelligent enough to compensate for my behavior and have a parent who forced me to recognize and correct some of my behaviors. The ones that embarrassed her. (Although I am trying my damnedest to keep her from doing the same to my kid, because it was incredibly demeaning and freaking traumatic. For example, how the hell did she think making fun of my monotone speaking voice was a positive way to change it?)

OK, see, this is why I'm a little apprehensive about reading it. I know I'm going to be upset.

Relevance Rates Rising

A Google search turned up this blurb from California:
http://autism.freedomblogging.com/how-common-is-autism-in-orange-county/

"According to data collected by the California Department of Education, autism rates continue to rise, with about 1 in 68 of this year’s kindergarten students being reported autistic. In 2000, that figure was 1 in 293."

I think that in these numbers, which cover a much wider range of the autism spectrum than previously, we're looking at the very beginning of a long-term shift in thinking about cognition and behavior: 'Wait a sec, a rather large portion of people perceive and think in a different way.' At least, that's the direction I hope it will eventually go in. It'll be decades in the making if so. Currently, of course, cognitive differences that have been there all along in the population are marginalized and pathologized. Perhaps with more recognition, that will eventually change. The parallel with homosexuality eventually being removed from the DSM comes to mind, though there's oversimplification in that.

And I have to ask: how much of pathologizing the new recognition of the range of the autism spectrum is driven by a pervasive, notoriously rigid institution like the public educational system? Is it possible that children are being identified in droves as autistic not because there's a rise in autism, but because the current educational system is broken? If that's driving it, the system as a whole is struggling to patch cracks that have been there all along, cracks children have been falling through for decades. If you add up just all the kids with school-diagnosed ADD/ADHD and autism, you're looking at a rather large percentage of kids for whom the current school system does not work.

Deconstruction

It turned out that I'd actually written about constant mental deconstruction of the environment elsewhere, about a year and a half ago, six months before we had a diagnosis for Rosie (or even dreamed that we needed one) and the Great Revelation descended on us. But I'll quote myself here:

I have a weird thing anyway, that I can't think about anything at all without this sub-surface line of thought about how it was built. If I see a couch, I'm thinking about how much padding was used, whether the frame is solid wood, whether it was joined or nailed or what. If I see anything of plastic or clay, there's always this sub-thought about how it was cast or thrown or molded and the process of it hardening and being popped out of the mold and etc. Anything I read, I automatically deconstruct into functional passages and the framework of the article or the arc of the story. With labels on things I end up musing over the glue that holds them on (and how the glue might have been developed) and the decisions that went into the positioning of the label and who researched the facts and whether it's printed on paper or a paper-plastic blend. I literally can't look at anything without imagining how it was put together. Half the time I'm awake, that's probably what I'm thinking about.

I ask me, what the hell is that? The only thing I can tie it to is when I discovered as a kid that I could write to manufacturing companies and ask for a brochure about their products. Goodyear and Peter Pan peanut butter each sent me these booklets that showed how tires and peanut butter were made. Fascinating! But somehow it doesn't seem to be something that would fuel a lifelong obsession. You'd think I'd have been an engineer at that rate.

Reasonable Explanations

A few posts back or maybe last year, I mentioned this thing I have where I can't think of an object without thinking of the process that created it. It's likewise with other processes, so I'm completely sympathetic to Rosie's need to clearly understand exactly how something works, and how it can paralyze her if she doesn't have that understanding.

Case in point: sleeping with the light off. After some alarm over 'the dark' completely typical of most kids, we'd gotten in the habit of leaving the hallway light on when Rosie went to bed. Problem is, she has trouble getting to and staying asleep because it's a bit hard to wind down. Yesterday, I told her that I was going to turn the hall light off.

"What? No! I always have it on!"

"It'll help you sleep if I turn it off."

"NO! I don't want it off! Don't touch it!" Shrieking.

"It'll help you sleep! You know how you have trouble sleeping?"

"NO! NO! It won't! I want it on!" Hysteria.

"Look... the fewer photons from the light that strike your optic nerve, the less your pineal gland will be stimulated and you'll sleep better."

Silence. "What?"

"Photons from the light bulb strike your optic nerve and stimulate the pineal gland in your brain, and the pineal gland regulates sleep."

"Oh. Well, turn it off, then."

Asleep in minutes.