I read in a book about Asperger’s syndrome that Aspergers are often good writers when they choose to write because of their “incomparable directness”. Well, I don’t know how good a writer I am due to my bluntness, but I do know I need some place to come unload my thoughts so I don’t keep driving my wife crazy, so I started this blog. I started it mostly for me, but also for my loved ones in case they care about the thoughts that go running through my mind they have such difficulty understanding.
Growing up in the time I did (I was born in 1974) and the place where I grew up (middle Georgia) was quite challenging to say the least. I had an illness no one really had a name for yet and was in a place in time where any nails sticking up were hammered down without mercy or apology. Adults would marvel at my recall of historical facts and baseball statistics, but were horrified at my inability to “just fit in and be like everyone else”.
I would like to mention at this point that even though I will probably make some unflattering statements about my mother during my blogging, we have finally reached the point where we have a good relationship. My mom is quite the classic neurotypical and we had many of the problems most Aspergers and neurotypicals have getting along. She has apologized to me for not protecting me from my abusive alcoholic father, and for trying so hard to force me to be like she thought I needed to be. For my part, I have apologized for being such a difficult child to raise and for the many temper outbursts she had to endure from me over the years. So, in short, I don’t hate my mommy. I quite love and respect her.
My first Asperger memory takes place around the age of four or five. My mom was friends with a very large woman who would come over to see my mother once a week or so at our house. She would complain endlessly about her weight problem, but she would do it between elephant-sized bites of whatever snack food my mom happened to offer her. On the particular day in question, she was wolfing down my favorite potato chips, whining in her endless way. I was sitting at the table having my peanut butter and jelly sandwich lunch. After a few minutes, her whiny voice interlaced with the crunching of the potato chips begin to make my head hurt. I realized that woman didn’t really want to lose weight, she was wanting to feel sorry for herself and have my mother feel sorry for her too. So I blurted out “Yeah, you’re right. You are the fattest person I have ever seen. And you eat all the time.”
At this point I stood up and grabbed the remains of my PBJ and begin the march to my room, as I knew inevitably I was about to be sequestered there. I marched past my mom and the potato chip thief, knowing I was in trouble but feeling a strange sensation that I had told this woman something she needed to hear but no adult would have ever said.
Not long after this my mother gave me the order “Get in the bathtub.” Being an Asperger, I took this literally and entered the bathroom and climbed in the tub, fully dressed in my styling sweater and khaki pants. My mother commented that she didn’t hear any water running and I thought to myself, “Why would you?” She burst into the bathroom to find me sitting in the bathtub, completely dressed (and dry) and became quite irritated. She told me I was being smart, which I filed away in my mental rolodex as a compliment since I had been told being smart meant you were intelligent and would do well in school. Her facial expression did not fit the compliment, but that didn’t matter to me. I had been told I was smart. Imagine my surprise when a moment later I was being yanked out of the bathtub, being giving the ultimate threat in my childhood home “I’m going to tell your father when he gets home”. If only she understood his methods of motivation…
Dating was quite a sitcom due to my directness. I always read and hear how Aspergers never have many girlfriends. I did ok dating, as far as number of girlfriends and such. I think the main reason was that words appealed to me in the way that engineering, mechanics, physics, etc. appeal to most Aspergers. Compared to a NT (neurotypical) dude my age, I guess my dating life was about average. But among the Aspies, I would have been considered a Casanova.
I must have been a nightmare for the poor girls who drew the bad luck to date me, because I would say pretty much anything to them. I would stupidly answer “yes” when they asked if a certain outfit made them look fat, would say “no” when they would return from the hair stylist wanting to know if I liked the new look, and would force them to watch sports unmercifully, telling them the minutia of hockey goaltending statistics. I’m sorry, to those of you who had to be that girl.
My father was a real piece of work. He was involved in political planning, organizing conventions, planning meetings, kissing backsides. He didn’t know when to go sleep it off, and most of my early memories of my father are of him walking into walls, mumbling slurred nonsense, and the overwhelming toxicity of his alcholic’s breath. When my mother was not around, he was a real tyrant, forever calling me names and telling me I was going to cause my mother’s death if I didn’t “act right”. He never offered an explanation as to what it meant to act right, so I was stuck thinking I was slowly killing my mother for not doing something I didn’t know how to do.
Sometimes, he would explode at me if I didn’t understand what he said or sometimes if he just felt like it. He would rain a closed fist down on the top of my head, watering my eyes and blurring my vision. One time I was riding in the car with him and tried to change the radio without asking permission. His fist came down brutally, striking me so hard I fell over. He then warned me not to tell my mother, saying she wouldn’t believe me anyway.
When I was six, my only sibling joined the fun, a baby sister. She was two NT parents’ dream come true after having been stuck with my Asperger ways for six maddening years. She conformed instantly, and was keen on the same “keeping up appearances” approach to living that was so dear to my parents. Through the years, she was the apple of both my parents’ eyes, on the homecoming court, Junior Guild, class president, sorority queen, one of the social inner circle that my parents so coveted being part of. As for me, I was the dude with the thorough knowledge of obscure religious symbolism, batting averages and on-base percentages, and the willingness to be unpopular. Who do you think was the favorite?
Usually, the younger child in a family of two children spends their life answering in the affirmative that they indeed are so and so’s little brother/sister. It was backwards with me, people constantly coming up to me to beam about how they saw my sister in the homecoming parade or saw that she was in the oh so very exclusive and prestigious Kappa Delta sorority. My mother constantly would brag to me about my sister’s latest accomplishment, which was usually just being elected to something or other by the rest of the cool girls. I never understood why the approval of her snotty peers was something to admire so openly. But there was my mom, cooing that “Amelia never stops going” and I still don’t for the life of me understand why that made her so happy. I wonder if it was because I was content to stay at home, reading, playing video games, being unpopular.
It wasn’t until I was 33 years old that I finally was diagnosed correctly as an Asperger. I had been in and out of psychiatrist’s offices and psychiatric wards for over half my life, being pumped full of drugs and reminded over and over that I needed to forgive my father for his abuse. I was labeled bipolar, and once the medical profession sticks a label on you, it takes nearly an act of God to escape that label.
Credit where its due, my sister was the one who first thought I might have been diagnosed incorrectly and needed to be treated for being on the autistic spectrum. She is a teacher now and was attending a seminar about autism and Asperger’s Syndrome. She told my mother she thought that better explained my problems than anything else she had heard, and my mother agreed. She finally worked up the nerve to discuss it with me, and I researched it, decided it made a whole lot more sense than anything else ever had, and talked it over with my psychiatrist, who is excellent. He brought my mom in to discuss my childhood personality and tendencies and decided that Asperger’s was the correct diagnosis.
It’s really quite a relief and yet a punch in the gut to find out at age 33 everything you thought you knew about your own life was wrong. I mean, it’s a blessing to look back and be able to say “hey, that makes a lot more sense now”. But at the same time, it is endlessly frustrating to find myself wondering “what if I had been born in 1992 and had been diagnosed correctly?” How different would my life have been? How many hurt feelings and tragic consequences could have been avoided entirely? How many unecessary medications would I not have had to tolerate the side effects of? I know its a bit crybabyish, but I can’t help but wonder about this things…
As anyone familiar with the characteristics of Asperger’s is aware, one of the dominant features of the syndrome is intense special interests other people may find frankly bizarre. I love sports (lots of 33 year old dudes do) but I also love the statistics, memorizing them, comparing them, boring my tolerant wife with them. I can tell you what Derek Jeter’s batting average in 2000 was but can’t recall many things most NT’s would deem routine. I also love learning about symbolism, particular religious symbolism. It was mostly for this reason I became a Mason. I love being a Mason but many of the social aspects of it escape me. Why should I have to go around the entire meeting room and shake everyone’s hand, exhanging banal banter in the process? If someone is right in front of me, I will say hi and shake hands with them. But I find it ridiculous to circumnavigate an entire room just so I can tell 25 people that I am doing fine and that my wife is doing fine. I also find a particular contradiction maddening and just plain wrong. Masonry trumpets itself as a universal brotherhood, yet in the state of Georgia men of color are not allowed in white Lodges. This to me means Masonry is patting itself on the back while punching others in the face. Most states in the US allow all Masons to sit in Lodge together, but in the deep South, change happens painfully slowly.
I also am a collector, as are most Aspergers. I have countless dozens of sports figures and bobbleheads, particularly those of my favorite sports team, the New York Yankees. Over the past year or so I have tried to change my ways and get rid of some of my less favorite collectibles, but the desire to collect and display will probably accompany me for my entire life. Now that I know about my problem, I find I am better able to say to myself, “You don’t really need this as much as you think you do.”
I have two pet house rabbits, named Jeter and Mo, after Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera of my beloved Yankees. To me, they are like little fuzzy Aspergers. They are capable of love and affection, but prefer to spend most of their time going through their particular routines and only rarely seeking social interaction with yours truly. When they allow me to pet them more than a few seconds at a time, I think of how my mom must feel when I allow her to hug me.
I don’t really like dogs, but we have two of them. I love them despite my general dislike of the species. Our male dog is a Morkie named A-Rod (another Yankees player, naturally) and our little girl dog is a tiny toy poodle my wife has named JoJo. Cathy (my wife) picked JoJo out at a local groomer’s/kennel and we were visiting her so she could get used to us during the time before she could leave her mother. This Morkie puppy bounced up to me, wagging his tail so enthusiastically his entire rear end was a blur. He wouldn’t leave me alone, and so I decided he must really like me, as I don’t give off a dog-friendly vibe, and I decided to take him home. Two days later, I took him to the vet to discover he had a parasite. Happily, the vet said that with medicine he would be fine, and now A-Rod spends his days as the greatest chick manget who never got to score his human companion a chick. If I had A-Rod when I was 19 and single, I could have had my pick of women, until I started boring them with some obscure sports trivia. His bouncy, care-free, happy attitude is like that of my wife’s, and the two of them lift me up and drag me to the finish line when I decide to take a mid-race nap. They remind me that even Aspergers need to sometimes stop studying and dissecting life and just enjoy living it.
Cathy is the perfect match for me. All NT women who successfully tolerate the many challenges that an Asperger husband provides deserve a Nobel prize, or at least a t-shirt that says “Please have a normal conversation with me”. My wife has really sacrificed a lot for me and my special circumstances. For instance, she has given up going out to the movies with me because a movie theater, especially on weekends, is an autistic mine field. Between all the cell phones ringing, people carrying on their inane chatter about who just started dating, and the moron behind me bumping the back of my chair every time he crosses and uncrosses his legs, I would just rather wait for the movie to come out on dvd. So my wife has decided that if she wants to go to the movies, she calls my sister. This is just a small example of the many sacrifices and compromises she has made for me since we got my diagnosis right. In the beginning of our relationship, we often butted heads about social situations, but now she has really gone out of her way to make sure both our needs are met. She is a hero to me and I hope I return the favor even a small amount.
The rest of my family has likewise been patient and helpful since I was correctly diagnosed. Now instead of taking offense when I avoid crowded situations, they understand that I will do as much socially as I feel I can. I don’t begrudge them their lack of analytical insight, and they try not to begrudge me my lack of tolerance for the noise of small children. It isn’t perfect, but it sure is a lot better than it was in years B.D. (Before Diagnosis).
Tags: asperger, asperger's, autism, bipolar, bunnies, child abuse, Georgia, morkie, new york yankees, poodle
