Autism & The Cute Quotient

I'm not entirely sure when Autism stopped being cute.

Back in the day, Finian was met with indulgent smiles when he flung himself into the arms of strangers.  He was chubby and cuddly and loudly generous with hugs.  His disregard for boundaries disarmed the most defended of people.  He took Cute, blended it with feral vitality, and unleashed his own irresistible brand of Lovable onto the world. There was no-one he couldn't charm.

Then, in the space of a few disorientating months, he sprouted body hair and grew 3 feet taller.  

The once compact, rosy-cheeked, ankle-biter scaled up into a man-sized Jitterbug, composed mostly of knees and elbows.  

He began to scare people.

Ngl, it was kinda a shock.  

I'm a card-carrying Irish mammy.  I am blessed with the unshakeable knowledge that I have given birth to the Most Beautiful Children Who Have Ever Existed....... but even I can see that Finian is at risk of becoming known for all the wrong reasons.  My son's deceptively adult body is governed by a banana republic with a drunk toddler managing the war cabinet ..... but all this limited world can perceive is an alarming eccentric with little regard for social convention.

It's my job to keep him as safe as I can in a world not designed for the neurodivergent.

There's nothing about this in the DSM.  There's no graduation ceremony, graph or flow chart to give us a heads-up.  We don't receive slices of cake, or HSE memos, or milestone reminders, indicating that the Delightful Quotient has degraded from Enchanting AF into Social Menace territory.

Special needs parents have to figure things out for themselves.  We have to be clear-eyed about what can make our kids lives difficult, and be creative with how we circumvent future hardship.

Finian is an unpredictable pre-schooler inhabiting the body of a nineteen year old man.  My task is to be his tree in the storm;  I need to have strong roots anchored deep in safe earth, with flexible branches that bend with the wind.  Because I enjoy a stretchy metaphor so much, I also need to be the leaves that evolve with seasons and create beauty out of air and earth.  No small task.

Flexibility, the willingness to embrace change, is central to the wellbeing of our special needs kids.  When we bend, we won't break.

Autism & Cuddles

I'm a shameless hugger.

No-one is safe.

In public, I practice an exercise where I mentally pin my arms to my sides and count to ten until the urge passes.  

Then I hug them anyway.

I've had to had a stern word with myself to refrain from hugging the postman or the bank clerk (mainly to avoid injury or incarceration).

Usually this works.

The thing is, I miss cuddles with my adult children.

Yeah, we hug, and chill together on the sofa etc. etc. But we don't do the big, full-on, soul-deep cuddles we did when they were little.  When puberty arrives, cuddles like that become a bit creepy and Game of Thrones-y.

Finian, however, doesn't waste any mental energy on social norms or raised eyebrows.

Finian folds that flying fuck into an origami humming bird and catapults it far, far away.

This is one of the sunny sides of autism.

On weekend mornings he waits for his dad to get out of our bed (Freud, eat your heart out), dives in, and cuddles up beside me from his head to his toes.  With a big old silly megawatt smile radiating from his lovely face.  The man just wants a goddamn cuddle and isn't shy about getting it.  There's a purity about his demand for love that is both vulnerable and courageous.  His autism bypasses all the conditioned bullshit that prevents most of us from experiencing this.

Things can be right in the world with love like this

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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