Breakfast in our house can be a little...unusual.
My son is usually very happy when he gets up in the mornings. At his worst point of regression into autism at around three years old he went down to sleeping just one hour out of twenty-four. Now, at sixteen, he’s a typical teenager in that he loves his bed. So after a good night’s (natural, not medicated) sleep he’s full of beans and usually expresses this by whizzing round the kitchen singing ‘oo-ee-oo’ at the top of his voice while I fix food for him. Our new young cat gets very hyped up with all this and scoots in and out of his feet while my daughter, who is a not a morning person, staggers through it all with her eyes closed, homing like a heat-seeking missile towards the espresso. Somehow this bizarre choreography works and everyone eventually comes to rest with their breakfast of choice...fruit and yoghurt, Whiskas and caffeine respectively. My son continues to ‘oo-ee-oo’ between mouthfuls, the cat munches and my daughter’s brain engages as the Fairtrade Columbian takes hold.
Autism can bring problems and so too can giftedness but they are at least entertaining. My son can be hilarious in his early morning exuberance. He adores music and it’s a necessary accompaniment to breakfast but if the spirit of it takes him too much he’ll be up off the seat for a bit of ballistic twirling between courses, sometimes pulling me in for some inspiring, if rather unconventional, waltzing.
My daughter, now with all neurons firing, throws in the comment...
‘I think it’s the most common disorder...’
She is currently studying issues of community health for an Open University science degree so I’m not sure if she’s talking about autism, CJD or haemorrhoids.
‘Normality...really it’s just the most common form of disorder.’
There are advantages to having a gifted person in the house. Firstly, in that the quality of mealtime conversation is always interesting and secondly, that you learn a lot.
She then went on to explain her theory that ‘normal’ is only ‘normal’ because the majority of people agree that it is but that, in fact, many of the norms of ‘normal’ are just as bizarre and arbitrary as those of autism can appear to be...it’s just that ‘normal’ has, like a political party, more people voting for it.
In behavioural terms this is a very valid point and we then spent some time discussing the correlations between ‘normal’ and ‘autistic’ behaviours, particularly in relation to rituals and conformity.
My daughter went to infant's schools here in West Cork from age four to seven and then tried secondary schooling for a year and a half from eleven to twelve. Both experiences were dire, partly because she was very bored and partly because she had the unacceptable habit of asking awkward questions. Her schooling years were, for her, more like an ethnographic study of the strange things normal people did, both teachers and peers.
I pass on her insights here because I think they give a useful perspective on autism. So much about educational and psychological approaches to autism centre around the aligning of the autistic person to ‘normalcy’. Certainly every autistic person needs to be able to function as well as they can within the social world but too often this is attempted by pulling the person out of their way of being into a space of appearing to be like everyone else, where the rightness of the ‘normalcy’ of the group known as everyone-else is taken for granted and never questioned.
Here are a few of her examples......
Object/subject fetishization and other bizarre behaviours of normal people.
It’s very common for autistic children and young people to be especially attached to, or mono-focused on, one object or subject, wanting to only engage with or talk about that one particular thing.
When Jess went to secondary school at eleven she was looking forward to having a bigger pool of people to engage with. By then she had been Home Educating for four years and we had linked with a number of other home-schooling families and she had been engaged in lots of activities and courses of different levels. She was used to mixing with people who had a number of different interests and was used to both chatting to and debating with a wide variety of people of all ages.
After only two weeks at school she was getting more and more disillusioned. Eventually she came out with the reason....that she couldn’t talk to the other pupils. I couldn’t understand this and asked why.
‘Because I can’t think of anything to say about mobile phones. It’s all they talk about all day. I mean, what do you say about them, after the first two minutes? A phone is just a phone.’
But not to her peers............mono-focus, object/subject fetishism...sound familiar?
But the key question is why did they behave like this ? Why did they focus so obsessively on mobile phones at the expense of anything else ? The answer is that in teen culture it’s a way of belonging, a way of feeling secure, of feeling personally okay, a way to communicate without having to communicate too directly, a means to establish a sense of self in relation to others...er, hang on, I’m getting confused, are we talking normal or autistic here? Ah yes, normal of course, because there were lots of them.
And the other thing was that she got picked on for looking different, because she didn’t habitually wear pink, or sports gear twenty-four hours a day, or have her hair tied back at exactly the right angle to produce a ponytail that looked like a defecating cow. In fact, when she continually refused to look like this her peers went ballistic. Now, let’s just replay this, obsessive attachment to wearing certain clothing, obsessive attachment to small detail, losing the plot when these things are denied or transgressed. Now surely we must be talking autism? No, I forgot, there were lots of them so of course they were normal...gloriously, ridiculously normal.
Now let’s take a look at her teachers.
One of the characteristics of giftedness, and often of Asperger’s Syndrome, is a passion for fairness and social justice. Schools are not havens of either, especially not secondary schools.
The one thing that did endear her to her peers was her ability to speak up articulately, from the pupils’ point of view, when teachers were being unfair and unjust. The results were usually...
a. Teachers acting as if they had not heard her.
b. Teachers hearing her but ignoring the point of what had been said and carrying on regardless.
c. Teachers exploding.
Hmm, seeming to be ‘deaf’ or impervious to speech, inability to perceive the point of view of others, habituated behaviours that do not respond to reasoning, explosive behaviour when challenged. Give us an ‘A’, give us an ‘U’, give us a....you get the drift.
Our list of the autistic things that normal people do grows daily. Try keeping one of your own, it’s hilarious and very enlightening but be careful...there are MORE of them than there are of us !
Gaia Charis, April, 2010.