NaNoWriMo 11 – Parenting

ACCEPTANCE

Acceptance is the gold standard. The one thing that #ActuallyAutistic adults want most. Because out of true acceptance will come…

• Individualized support services
• Access to mental and physical health services
• Educational and job opportunities.

Yes, all those things begin first with Acceptance…with…

the process or fact of being received as ADEQUATE, VALID, SUITABLE, SATISFACTORY, and RIGHT.

a person’s assent to the reality of a situation, recognizing a process or condition without attempting to change it or protest it.

But if any one portion of those definitions is dearest, it is…

without attempting to change it or protest it.

You see almost every therapy, treatment, intervention, and ‘cure’ out there is about one thing…

Changing the autistic person.

Making her ‘normal’.

Not because he necessarily wants to be…at two or three, who even knows or cares what ‘normal’ is.

No, #AutismParents in particular (if you ain’t figured it out yet…them there words be fighting words to this girl. You don’t parent autism. You parent an autistic little human. Wrong emphasis!) spend all their time…and too damned much money trying to change their little human.

If they cannot cure them…make them ‘normal’…then they t the very least want to make them ACT ‘normal’. Yes, that is possible.

But at an incredibly high price…

the self-esteem of your little human!

Imagine your earliest memories being of hours of control & conditioning behavioral management ‘therapy’ designed to change the very way you thought and felt. Imagine that this was instigated by YOUR OWN PARENTS! Methods actually designed so that if you do not do what others want…attention and affection are withheld. Yes, the only way to get your parents’ love is to EARN it…by acting ‘NORMAL’.

But it does not end there…

Your parents drag you to every doctor, therapy, school, and quack they can find. If leaving the familiarity and safety of your home several times a week or daily or more were not bad enough, you get to hear them telling these ‘experts’ how damaged, broken, wrong you are. A laundry list of all your ‘problems’.

But it does not end there…

All you ever hear them telling not just these ‘experts’ but family, friends, hell, perfect strangers in the park, store, and on the street is how CHALLENGING you are. How hard their lives are…because of you. What a burden you are.

But it does not end there…

They get online and whore for sympathy…sharing their ‘grief’ with other #AutismParents. It becomes like a teenage slumber party of who has it the hardest. A competition to see whose child is MORE autistic.

But it does not end there…

They get ALL the sympathy. Everyone agrees these poor people…they deserve an award. Look at how much they have to put up with from THAT CHILD. Yes, you are not a person. Not an individual. Not a human even to the world.

In the end…

Autistic little humans are MURDERED…and parents are offered sympathy.

That is reality, folks! Not some bad sci-fi story. But how things work in this world, when you de-individualize a whole group of people.

Do you realize that even before they came for the Jews…the Nazis eradicated the disabled…the imperfect?

The movie Rain Man with Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman is probably the first time that most people ever heard the words…AUTISTIC. Unfortunately, almost thirty years later, the myths from it continue to color the way that #Autistic people are seen and treated.

In that movie, Dustin Hoffman’s autistic character had been institutionalized when his little brother was born. Out of fear. Out of ignorance. In order to save the ‘normal’ child.

A lot of people want to think that we have come sooooooooooooo damned far since those days.

The nasty, dirty truth is…We HAVE NOT!

Even me…developing and using all these alternative strategies to enable my #HappilyAutistic and #ProudlyPDA little human to reach her full potential…CANNOT shelter her from the awful truth of that world out there.

She has listened as someone on the bus demanded I take her off…because it was one of the rare times she stimmed. Being me, I turned on the a$$hole and told him…My autistic child has just as much right to live on this earth and ride this bus as you or anyone else.

I was once so upset by a run-in with a neighbor who referred to PanKwake as…THAT CHILD…and offered me sympathy…that she overheard me crying in the kitchen on a friend’s shoulder. You know what my beautiful #autistic seven or eight year old little human said…Don’t cry, Mommy. When people say mean things like to me, I just turn it into COMPLIMENTS! (And she still does.)

She has had an old woman drag her grand-daughters way on the playground because she is ‘different’. Being me, I screamed at her back…Don’t worry. Autism isn’t contagious.

For me though, the worst is the almost physical battle on the playground with an #AutismParent telling me that my child did not deserve any accommodation…that I needed to teach her to be ‘act normal’. She could not expect a ‘free pass’ in life just because she was autistic. Besides she could talk that meant she was not REALLY autistic so what did I know about being an #AutismParent anyway?

That is the disgusting truth about the world we live in, folks.

And as long as the prevailing talk is of…

• Therapies
• Treatments
• Programs
• Interventions
• ‘Cures’

That will make our #ActuallyAutistic be or act ‘normal’…

We can NEVER truly have ACCEPTANCE!

Acceptance by definition means…

without attempting to change it or protest it.

Period. Full stop. Exclamation point. Dot dot dot.

No, I cannot protect my #HappilyAutistic and #ProudlyPDA little human from that. Change comes slowly when you are talking about institutions, systems, and especially culture/society.

But the single most important thing that #AutismParents can do for their little humans is…

STOP TRYING TO CHANGE THEM!

Stop attempting to make them ‘normal’.

If you do nothing else…take nothing else from this book…except that one thing…I believe you will make a significant impact upon your little human’s self-esteem, future, and HAPPINESS.

Please, I beg and plead with all #AutismParents…your little human deserves that at the very least. Please…pretty, pretty please!