Autism & Cartoons

We watch a lot of cartoons in our house.

But when we live with an autistic young man, we watch them in our own unique way.

Tbh, I tune out of most of them.  There's only so much Humpf (in fucking Bulgarian) I can cope with before I start questioning the fabric of reality and frantically search for a void to scream into.

Yesterday, though, for a horrible half hour, I was forced to pay attention to them.

Well, when I say 'forced', the remote was out of my reach and I was too lazy to look for it.  I'd love to pretend I was caught up in the transcendental flow of my current crochet project, but really my arse and the sofa were locked in a deep and meaningful relationship.  They were in love.  Who was I to break that up?

I was so lazy that I voluntarily chose being tortured by The Enchantimals over moving my comfortably upholstered butt.

I can handle my own terrible truth.

Then I learned something.

I discovered that cartoons are subversive brainfuckery.  It might be less dangerous to employ Freddie Kruger to do a spot of babysitting.

Never mind the obvious violent, misogynistic racism of Tom & Jerry (those cheeky rascals).

Bob the Builder is a workaholic sycophant who only values his 'useful' team members.  

Ditto Thomas the Tank Engine.  Any deluded engine who imagines he will be loved for being himself, and not for the work he performs, can get right in the bin.

My Little Pony teaches us that if you're enough of a body-shaming brat, you get to become a princess.  Not a surgeon, or an artist, or a teacher.  Another (yawn) princess.

Peppa Pig has full-blown complex PTSD due to having a narcissistic father with delusions of grandeur, and a passive-aggressive mother who doesn't realise she's living in a houseful of pigs.  The sooner they're roasted and slapped between two slices of brioche, the better.

I miss the good old days of the Clangers, when sweet little moon mice visited the soup dragon to acquire some magic, green broth.  Or when Dougal worried about where to stash his 'sugar cubes' in the Magic Roundabout (while a bombed out Dylan sang folk tunes to the trees).

Absolutely no drug references there.

I recently discovered that Rainbow was absolute filth (sadly lost on six year old me).  And we won't even go there with Captain Pugwash.

Tbf, fairy tales and nursery rhymes are horrific, so terrifying our kids for the craic is nothing new.  

But cartoons are way more entertaining than I was aware of.  Once again, Finian has schooled me.

"get the green shit!"

Autism & Electronics

 I am in awe of neanderthal autistics.  

To narrow the timeline a little, I am in awe of any autistic person who existed prior to this shiny, new milennium.  Specifically, I am perplexed as to how they survived.

In the same way that a fish needs gills, and a bird needs wings, an autistic kid needs a smart phone grafted like an extra limb onto their body.  In time, maybe evolution will do the decent thing and genetically predispose autistic kids to sprout an iPhone from their wrist.  In the meantime, we have to settle for making Apple investors laugh all the way to the neurodivergant bank.

This morning, a Twitter mum commented on the guilt she feels over her kid's reliance on gadgets.  Perverse as it is to take pleasure in someone else's distress, I was DELIGHTED that another parent feels as inadequate as I do.  It's always nice to have company in the shit swamp. 

I did a quick audit on Finian's current electronic inventory.

He owns a smart phone, a dvd player (inc tv), a portable dvd player and a nintendo.  As well as having access to the family TV and desktop.  And this doesn't include the various iPads, laptops and smart phones he robs off his family members (he laughs in the face of passwords... cracking them just adds to the fun of it).

I am more than aware of how awful this is and how summary execution by the parenting police is just too good for me.  My mothering skills seem to have been learned from a manual co-written by Myra Hindley and Cersei Lannister.  A Good Mother would spend 16 hours a day enaging their kid in finger painting and visiting museums, in between baking organic gf/cf meals and worrying about their gut biome.  

Meanwhile, I feed my boy Nutella on pancakes and allow him free access to the internet, hoping that I won't die of inadequacy by bedtime.  Some days I even get dressed before noon.

I stopped feeling guilty about the use-of-gadgets thing ages ago.

All week, Finian works hard at school.  The rest of the time he is working harder than we can imagine to survive in a world not designed for him.  If he can find some relief, and even a little pleasure, in watching Peppa Pig passive aggressively body-shame her father, then I'm down for that.  

I'm just a little horrified for the generations of pre-millennial autistics who didn't have cyberspace to save them from going insane.

Peppa, that fat-shaming whore

Autism & Addiction

Last weekend my husband deleted over 2,300 episodes of Peppa Pig from Sky.  Two days later, Finian locked the sitting room door and un-deleted every fucking one of them.  His fine motor skills aren't great, so he didn't manage to give us the finger.  But I know he wanted to.

We laughed and said "gawd that kid is so addicted".  As I was eating chocolate and opening a bottle of wine.  Irony is a thundering fury-bitch, but she's usually worth listening to.  Hate that.

We tend to use the term 'addicted' loosely..... and I really ought to know better.  As I've talked about before, addiction tore my childhood apart.  It's taken a lot of therapy to help loosen it's grip on me. 

Of course Finian's Peppa Pig love-in is more aligned with the perseveration we see with autism, than with addiction.  So Finian gets a pass.

I can't speak with the same confidence about our weekend rioja and dairy milk, however.

What IS addiction though?  When does a pleasant pass-time become dysfunctional?

When we continue to repeat a behaviour for the rewarding hit, despite it being damaging (physically, socially or mentally), then we have a problem.  The dopamine surge is so overwhelmingly compelling that we are unaware of (or unconsciously deny) the harm we are doing to our bodies, minds, pockets, relationships and careers. We crave it in it's absence.  We surround ourselves with people who collude with our behaviour, and become increasingly disconnected from our own soul. We can be addicts and not even know it.

We can get addicted to anything.

Alcohol.  Prescription drugs.  Sex.  Porn.  Religion.  Instagram Likes.  Shopping.  Street drugs.  Gambling.  Sugar.  Dieting.  Martyrdom.  Peppa fucking Pig.  Cleaning.  Toxic relationships.  Exercise.  Candy Crush (true story).  Self-harming.  Shoes.  Keanu Reeves.

What we're addicted to doesn't really matter.  What's important is what it's shielding us from.

Addiction is seductive because it protects us from pain.

Addiction is soul-destroying because it protects us from pain.

Short-term respite at the expense of long-term wholeness.  

As the cheery Buddhists point out, life is suffering.  Sitting with, and owning, our awfulness is how we re-connect with ourselves.  Finding peace at the other side of  the (admittedly shitty) process is how we rediscover, and love, our true selves.

It's simple, but not easy.

Special needs parents need to be particularly vigilant.  We have plenty of reasons to crave escape.

Beneath the addiction, beneath the grief/shame/anger/whatever you're having yourself, is peace and self-love.  It's totally worth digging for.