Autism & Hormones

Hormones are impish little chemical messengers we need to stay alive.

We need insulin to transport sugar from our blood into our cells.  Adrenaline activates our primal survival instincts. Melatonin makes us sleepy at night (unless, of course, you're my autistic son who takes this as a personal challenge).  There's about 50 more hormones playing fast and loose with our well-being, trying to maintain some semblance of balance within our insanely capricious bodies.

Hormones are all well and good, though, until they try to kill us.

I'm not so much thinking about the major diseases like diabetes or osteoporosis.  I'm more thinking about the complicated stew that exists within households when everybody's hormones affect everyone else's.

For the past few years, Finian has been surfing hormonal swells and troughs that have left him half-drowned and disorientated.  Meanwhile, I've been busy honing my menopausal skills of  becoming wise (laugh among yourselves, please), developing acne and growing an impressive beard.  

The co-existence of puberty and peri-menopause is the back-lash of women's audacity to live into old age.  A century ago (in the west) the life expectancy for women was 48.  In 1500 we could look forward to the sweet release of death at 35.  Good times.

Menopause was not a thing when you were the geriatric mother of toddlers.  We were pushing up the proverbial daisies long before our ovaries cashed in their pension and retired to a villa in Costa del Sol.

These days, the chemical soup of living in a house with badly behaved hormones is the unwanted gift that keeps on giving..... like the Christmas bath salts that can be multi-purposed as drain cleaner.  We think we've reached the end of it, but it always surprises us with an unexpected new layer.

Recently we took Finian for psychiatric evaluation as we couldn't figure out if his escalating anxiety and self-harming was a result of puberty, pathology or autism.  Or maybe a thrilling blend of all three?  We're still none the wiser really.  It reminds me of the unending new layers of therapy; I dig into the dark places, process the blocks of awfulness and then endure the post-grief exhaustion.  Believing, in my naivety, that it's over.  But it never fucking is.  It'd be so wonderful to take a holiday from myself for just a while; I can totally see the attraction of searching for a little oblivion down a bottle or in a pill.  Of course, there's no real escape from our clashing hormones or from our dark stuff.  We have to be brave enough to live our real lives.  The best route of 'escape' is to work through the shit show with courage and vulnerability.

I bet our ancestral sisters, who never needed a tweezers or hair dye, are laughing in their graves at us.

not a real Christmas gift