That’s why it’s funny, yo.
And conversely, there’s this. I’m very aware that most people with autism are not like the young woman in the story.
I am the mother of a beautiful little boy whom I adopted at birth who happens to have autism . I have also been teaching children with special needs for twenty years. I am a single mom as well. I definitely do not feel that I am treated special or as a “goddess” as stated. If anything us moms have to work harder, fight harder and struggle harder. It is definitely not glorified in any way. My son is my life and I will do whatever I need to for him… Nothing comes easy and nothing, no matter how small is ever taken for granted.
Let’s avoid making posts like this that don’t really add anything useful to the thread other than a chance to seemingly dump on it.
I have never encountered the “mother of an autistic child” phenomena as described in the OP. But I do regularly run across internet postings by mothers of autistic and all other kinds of special-needs kids. The posts are always full of way too much information and they make you question the sanity of the mother. Expect one paragraph to list all the diagnoses and suspected diagnoses of the kid and everyone else in the family, another to describe current medications (with dosing schedules) and past medications, another describing food allergies and on-going elimination diets. And then FINALLY, you’ll get to their actual question…which is always something mundane like, “DS has itchy feet. Does anyone know if itchy feet could be caused by ADD, ADHD, bipolar-II, TS, OCD, OPD, ASD, dyslexia, mental retardation, bed-wetting, breech birth, insomnia, left-handedness?”
Then you’ll find everyone replying in amazement because their child has itchy feet too.
Those kinds of posts drive me nuts.
Oh, and I really hate “DS” and “DD”. People don’t refer to their kids this way in real life. So why the hell do they do it on the internet. It’s insane.
I loathe the breast cancer people. No one hates cancer more than I, but it shouldn’t be a lifestyle.
Re: autism - I’m sick of hearing about it. I have three autistic kids in my family (one of whom just seems like a brat, but anyway) and I get it. I am close to their parents and know how hard and sad it is. But…
It sometimes seems like they want something to be wrong with their kid. And I’m tired of the expectation that every facet of society has to be bent to their specifications, particularly in the schools. I have kids, “normal” kids, smart kids. And the idea that were mainstreaming autistics kids with serious disability is absurd to me. Borderline kids that would have just seemed weird in the olden days are one thing. But kids who are mainstreamed for two hours a day, and need a personal assistant for that time? No way. I’m not for that. We don’t have enough resources, and I’m tired of those resources going to those kids, who’s future potential is limited at best.
I don’t know about worshipping their mothers, but autistic kids seem to be kowtowed to all the time. Related to that, the has been an uproar lately about the distant potential of curing Down Syndrome, with lots of people saying that we would be monsters for causing the extinction of Down Syndrome. I’m sorry, I know and love people with severe disabilities of all kinds in my family, including severe spinobifida and my cousin who was born without 3/4 of his brain. But, I view it as biology and these people have defective biology. I would never consider that once born, they should be killed, but I think we should be working to fix them, and we should not be changing every facet of society and limiting opportunity for “normal” kids for autistic ones.
At least in my experience, I haven’t run into autistic kids being kowtowed to all the time. Nor worshipping their mothers. At times there is sympathy for the parents but worship, not IMHE.
Certainly Sateryn76 isn’t kowtowing to autistic kids unless “I’m not for that.” counts as kowtowing…
I don’t understand that kind of stupidity (I heard that about autism as well). I would pay everything I am worth for a “cure” for my autistic kid. And he’s fairly high-functioning.
If there was a way to cure the mental retardation associated with Down syndrome, I’d be all for it. We’ve already figured out how to remedy many of the other problems associated with it (mostly heart and GI issues). Some people have had plastic surgery done on their DS children to try and make them look normal :eek:, and these have proven to be drastic failures. The ones I’ve seen now looked retarded, KWIM? Now, if a person with DS actually has something wrong with their face, yes, fix that, but just to change their appearance? That’s really cruel, IMNSHO.
@ nearwildheaven
A related fact:
In the day before all those chromosomal aberrations had been identified sometimes hospital staff would chart the birth with FLK - Funny-looking kid.
Maybe some people lose their sense of balance and become their breast cancer or start thinking of themselves as mothers of Autistic children. They are overwhelmed or preoccupied and forget that their lives can be defined in many other different ways.
As a mother I can understand how that could happen. Happens to most mothers to some extent, I think.
As the chewable vitamins mother it sounds like in some ways the role is foist upon them by a public which want to make them feel better. Or maybe someone who just wants to be able to say they know someone with an Autistic child. Like it’s chic or something.
I think the OP may be experiencing Facebook Fatigue. (If you care enough, are brave enough, love Jesus enough, you will share this on your Wall for just one hour…)
I know, right? That and all the pit bulls and cats makes me scroll for Why Don’t We Do It In The Road? kind of stuff.
But since you brought it up…
One of my nieces has Asberger’s. Nobody noticed at first because she was just so damned smart. Big vocabulary and she wrote backwards, right to left. Mirror writing, like Da Vinci. Until she was taught not to in school. As she grew older, sometimes her eyes would unfocus and I’d say “Everybody wait! _____ is having an autistic moment!” Cruelly, it turned out to be true. Later when we’d meet up, I’d place her leaden arms around my waist and hug her shoulders. She’s married now, to somebody as weirdly wonderful as she is.
To say that exposure to other-abled kids might adversely affect ordinary ones IS what’s limiting, to my mind. When I was growing up some of us had had polio. One girl in my class, who wore heavy braces on her legs, jumped rope at recess. Jumped rope. Fifty years later, when I’m feeling like I just can’t do it anymore, sometimes I’ll think “If ____ could jump rope, I can jump this hurdle.” We all have something special to share, and learn. Being average in and of itself is nothing to brag about.
And I have to add, it’s the above kind of convoluted reasoning that makes some people think that what others are doing in their own beds affects their own sexuality, marriage, country…I’ve been going my own way for years and have yet to feel poked by anybody else who might be “bent out of shape.” (Square peg in a round hole. Different. Gay…(marriage.) But I digress.
Weakly, I had breast cancer. I never think of myself as a survivor. I fully expected modern medicine to come through or I was going to kick some ass. The worst thing was the PICC sewn into my arm for chemo, because I’m a hard stick. It was a daily constant reminder for months. Because of that, I was commiserating with my “good” SIL about my brother’s cancer experience when she said “Yes, but you only had breast cancer. Everybody has that. His was different.” I was stunned. I didn’t know it was a competition. But then everything is relative and anything can become boring.
Which is why I scroll down to the monkeys and good music video links.
It used to be that breast cancer was never discussed openly, so a lot of people (mostly women) didn’t realize how many other people had had it. That’s part of what the marketing was for, to get it discussed, to get people to check their breasts regularly.
I’ve got a cousin who, many years ago, was finally diagnosed with Autism; deafness & retardation were the first options. In those days, emotional “coldness” on the part of the mother was suspected as the cause–until somebody noticed the other kids were OK. There were no treatments back then; he never became verbal & has been institutionalized most of his life. Nobody in that sad situation was “worshiped.”
The Susan Komen Pink thing can get a bit saccharine, but breast cancer still causes a lot of suffering & early death. I can remember when the disease was a dark secret, never mentioned in public. Awareness can lead to early diagnosis–which improves the chance for long term survival. If a lady chooses to wear a tacky sweatshirt after her surgery, radiation & chemotherapy–I say “let her.”
Irritating media coverage does not mean there’s no real pain involved. Most breast cancer patients are women & the OP specified mothers of autistic kids–maybe that girly stuff just bothers him. I don’t care for it myself–so I don’t watch the gushy talk shows for chicks.
If the OP feels that other issues are being ignored, he needs to speak up for them. I did not realize that IMHO meant having to tell the OP “Oh, you are so right!”
I’ve come to the conclusion it is a cultural thing, some people go and describe in detail to a herbalist how each of their organs is feeling today and get a custom tea blend, same kind of stuff.
Ha! I should like to be treated as a goddess sometimes!
My Wife’s first commandment as a Breast Cancer Goddess (upon diagnosis this June) was “No Pink!” She has been known to smite anyone who either pities or patronizes her.
It is because of people like you that parents of children with autism (and other disabilities) fight so hard.
My son is autistic. Worship services are at 9:30 and 11:00, line forms on the right.
I have taught a lot of autistic kids over the years, and there are plenty parents of autistic kids in my family/social/professional circles. There is a certain type of insanity that I associate with a small minority of mothers of autistic kids. It’s not “Mothers of autistic kids tend to be crazy” so much as “really high strung, already kind of insane people who happen to have autistic kids sometimes develop a characteristic bundle of craziness that is distinct enough to be noticed.” It’s hard to describe, but it seems to be rooted in the fact that they become the moderator of their kid’s reality and they start to moderate their own reality as well, to the point that they are sincerely insane.
The one thing I really notice about these parents (the crazy ones, not the more general parents of autistic kids) is that they lie to their kids ALL THE TIME. They way they have dealt with the emotional outbursts, the confusion, the whole bundle of issues their kids face is by lying and oversimplifying everything constantly. They basically always tell their kid whatever version of the truth calms them down and is readily understood, and once they find this level, they stay there, however old their kid gets. Then they want everyone else to join them in maintaining this sort of artificial even keel, this web of lies. They get used to lying to themselves and basically develop a very flexible sense of reality based on certain bedrock things they have decided are True.
This is not a common thing. I’ve known like three parents like this, out of dozens and dozens. But they all had autistic kids and they all had this strange disconnect from reality. They were all extraordinarily hard to deal with, and you certainly treated them with kid-gloves, because they were insane. They were the type of people that tend to stick in the mind.
I have an autistic child. I would not say that this fact has made my life noticeably better or easier*. I think my wife would agree. I am not aware of having acquired any worshippers.
*Than having the same child without autism. Just having her at all is, of course, wonderful.
Yes, there are parents who get over the top about their special snowflake, and how their special children makes them so totally special by association, but not all parents of autistic children do that though, and some sadly do the opposite. I remember my Mum getting pretty upset at work about a family coming to the entrance till for the zoo and cheerfully asking for tickets for ‘two adults, two children and points one autistic one’.
The kid was pretty high functioning too… Utterly dehumanising. You’ve got to wonder what that does to family dynamics with the other kids too. I think I’d rather deal with the special.
Regarding breast cancer- I got a bit of an insight into how much the campaigns have helped a few years back- I was in a shopping centre in Malaysia, and there was a breast cancer awareness stand, with photos of breasts in the end stages of cancer- truly terrifying photos, and signs saying basically ‘If your breasts look like this, please see a doctor’.
Growing up in an environment where checking for lumps and changes has been drummed in to the extent it seems totally obvious, I find it pretty mind boggling to think that in a society that talks about it less, women could seriously let things get to that stage and still not do anything. It’s easy to underrate the awareness we have, though I agree we could do with extending that focus to other diseases.
We could have done it without so much bloody pink as well.