Raised by Aspergers parent

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Agreed.

I don't know if some of the posters have any idea whose "home" they've just entered. The search for those words takes them straight here. And people searching those words do so because there is something they need to resolve for themselves.

It is and will always be a delicate situation, for the flip side is that it is hard to keep people who might be hurt by some of the comments from reading them. I have a balance in my head that I consider acceptable and that is where I try to keep things. Sorry I missed the conversation that got acrimonious; I try to forestall those situations by being the first one to respond and, thus, set a tone. I don't always get that tone right for both sides (as you, *ahem*, recently pointed out), but my experience on this thread tells me I have at least some chance of it because, for one thing, I did grow up with an ASD parent and was actually surprised to see (through stories in this thread) how much of my life may have been colored by that, sometimes for good and sometimes for worse.

Oh, Lord, as a member of several when my kids were little, you are so right. I remember feeling the need to play unofficial moderator so many times, which creates new problems, because unlike most members here, they don't accept attempts at peacemaking, because if they are fighting, they WANT to fight. I made some wonderful friends on those boards, and loved the community, but there was always this huge swirl of people we just had to ignore for our sanity.

Yes, education is a HUGE part of the mission here. We see it as our DUTY to get more accurate and complete information out there. If we don't, we fail our own kids.

Do some of us have our own exaggerations and biases? Of course we do, we are human. But if anyone knows how to facilitate an NT - ASD interaction, it is going to be an active and caring parent who has had enough self-knowledge to seek out and discuss information like we do here.

tarantella64, I realize that you are still working out your own issues and feelings not just with respect to your parents but also with respect to the situation you've found yourself in, being a single parent and having complications thrown into the game at that. For all that, here is a big, warm, sincere ((((((((((((((((((((((((hug))))))))))))))))))))))). You don't have it easy, and we can't make it easier for you, even if we wanted to. You are so over-loaded that getting through anything beyond "today" is going to have to be done in tiny snatches of time.

But please understand, no matter how much I feel for you and want to give you time to figure things out as you need to, I can't, on a public message board with who knows how many lurkers, not consider the future of our kids and what the body of information out there looks like. I can't focus just on you and what you need without considering everything. Everything here becomes the public face of how people will understand Aspergers, and I feel like we have a duty to be aware of that with everything we write and say. It is how people will perceive and react to our kids that is at stake. Pretty heavy to consider when one has their own stuff to get through, I know.

You gotta love mommy wars. All the self righteous moms come out and some act all mighty about their techniques and think anything else is wrong how others raise their children and look down on others. I also find them hypocrites too because they are not perfect either and have also made mistakes but yet it seems like any mistakes they have made are okay and if you have made a mistake they have never made, it's not okay. It's okay to forget to pick your kid up from daycare or forget to take them there but it's not okay to forget them in the car. It's okay to forget to do laundry but it's not okay to forget to feed your kids. That's how crazy it gets.

Why do they want to fight? I don't get it. May I IM you when I get a chance?

I really shouldn't be talking here at all, given how much I need to get done, but I will try to summarize and I feel OK posting it here, because the dynamic might exist in the relationships being discussed here, as well.

A theory: I think parenting is, for most people, a difficult subject to feel the master of. Pretty much everyone has an opinion, and pretty much all the opinions are different. And in today's world we KNOW how much damage can happen if we do things "wrong." So modern parents spend a LOT of time considering approaches and options, and by the time they've figured out which one is going to work best for their family, they are very invested in it. Thing is, to master this subject, they've also had to pick battles, and decide that other things they might care about just don't matter as much. And all the while they've been experiencing the high stress and fatigue of being a "new" parent, which deepens how they integrate events and choices. So, basically, they get to the point where they no longer think it is opinion, but fact, and no longer an option or choice, but essential. What they believe in becomes part of their core, who they think they are. And they are going to want to sell, sell, sell that position to everyone they can, and take criticism of the position as criticism of who they are and how they parent. It's bit like being an ardent atheist or an evangelical Christian: "I saw the light! I need you to take this path with me!"

Cubedemon,

There are many reasons, I think.

Aspies are not the only ones who have issues with ToM and rigidity and sometimes it is because of that. People were either brought up a certain way, or like DW_a_Mom said, carefully researched a position and then once married to a decision, cannot see how someone else would think differently. Compounding this, anything having to do with babies (and children in general, but especially babies)becomes a very fraught thing because they are vulnerable and cannot make any decisions for themselves. So you also have the added weight of that to deal with.

In addition, people who have nagging insecurities about their positions can also be vulnerable to this (as can people who are overly certain, like in the above paragraph.) Some people need a lot of outside validation. If everyone else has made the same decision, that tends to inspire confidence in a person and makes her feel that she chose wisely. It is an example of argumentum ad populum, which is a logical fallacy; but emotions do not care about logical fallacies. It inspires confidence. So in order to get validated in this way, people often feel they must convince others' of their position, even if they do not know them or their kids.

Then sometimes it is that people do feel very strongly that one thing or another is harmful and therefore a danger.

So, basically it varies, but there are so many possible reasons, that you end of with a critical mass of people like this about any fairly weighty mommy subject on mommy boards. Also women tend to wrap up a lot of their identity/self esteem into parenting for different reasons, maybe some hardwired, maybe some via socialization--which would be tangential to discuss in detail. So women tend to be the ones doing this, which is why these boards really do tend to be "Mommy Boards" rather than parenting boards.

One of the few benefits of not being socialized very well, or to this extent, is that it is easier not to get caught up in this. I never had any questions that I needed to ask that could not be answered via research, and reading, so I never signed up for any of these things. I lurked and read, but stayed the heck off. In all fairness, not all sub-boards were this bad. The topics I listed in my other post on this were the really bad ones. Any thread that had to do with any of those subjects tended to degenerate fairly quickly.

I didn't join the ones I joined for information, really; it was just where I gravitated when I found myself with a crying baby that wanted me to rock her to sleep in a dark room for extended periods, and I just needed to do something to keep myself from going nuts. That baby loved the clicking of computer keys, lol. And it felt like an effective way to distract myself. But it definitely is an interesting study in the dynamic of moms.

DW_a_Mom,

Yeah, that makes sense. I was lurking when I was pregnant as kind of a preparatory thing. By the time I was really in the weeds there wasn't anything the Mommy Boards would have helped with because it was autism kind of stuff. Then I ended by lurking here for a year before I was brave enough to post anything.

Eventually, I could be a father so this is why I'm here preparing and being proactive. One thing though that you're good at is you don't let people bother you. If I am to be an effective father I will have to quit letting people bother me.

I wouldn't say that I don't let people bother me. It depends on the circumstance and it varies in magnitude. Some things I have had to learn to get past. When you are the parent of a kid who doesn't act in a typical way, it is just something that it really helps to be able to moderate. If I got upset every time we got stared at, I would be a really miserable person. The AS helps here, I think, but it still takes some self-talk to keep it under control.

It took practice and experience. I wasn't as good at it, even a few years ago.

Edited for poor syntax.

Last edited by ASDMommyASDKid on 28 Feb 2014, 8:31 am, edited 1 time in total.

Hopefully your spouse can help balance things. The fact that you are aware there could be issues there will help you mitigate the problems. The parents discussed in this thread usually sound like they had no awareness and had sub-consciously built a self-protective bubble, instead.

I reread this and I need to give a reply again. This is where the issue lies. It would be more helpful to all of us as a whole if you linked and spelled out the threads to us. You will not hurt our feelings and this is at the heart of the matter. Your techniques to consider and sparing someone's feelings is a detriment to us because a number of us can't read in between the lines. Unless something is blatantly obvious to me and if it is not told to me I will not know.

Some of us have different personalities. For me, it isn't just enough for me to know. I have to understand the underlying reasoning why something is. This enables me to know what I am supposed to do in different situations and why especially if I think I give a proper response and it wasn't proper. When you do all of this emotional couching, hemming and hawing, it will read like hieroglyphics did for the archeologists.

If you show us examples then I can try to go through and analyze why they do it. I think I do it as well but I need examples to confirm what you're talking about. If it is what I think it is then I may have an answer for you but unless I receive examples as confirmations I can't give you a satisfactory answer and neither can skillpadde.

cd, unfortunately, I still have to demur. I don't know who might or might not be hurt by being used as an example, and it's not something I want to risk, given how important being able to speak freely here is to many. I understand the need for concrete examples. It just isn't something I can do by using examples of other people's conversation on WP. I'm sorry. If you want to give me examples of things you do, that's fine, though.

Tarantella, I can accept this compromise. I did not even think of it. Yes please, go ahead.

Without digging back through the whole conversation (I bugged out of this thread about 6 pages back, lest I hurt some bleeding NT in trying to help)...

This is something I worry about A LOT. I don't socialize any more, unless kids' social opportunities force me to do it. I don't do PTA, I don't do Mommy and Me, I don't talk to other parents at soccer practice unless they approach me and then I give short, polite answers. When I have to show up at school events, I sit alone, focus exclusively on my kids, and leave ASAP. I make every effort not to have friends. I guard against new friends, and try to keep the old friends I have remaining on a telephone-only basis as much as possible. I do it because I KNOW that sooner or later I will do it wrong (stick a foot in my mouth, make a fool of myself, let someone get too close, whatever) and I don't want Hubby or the kids to have to deal with the fallout (losing friends, embarrassment, whatever).

I mind, but-- someday they will be out of the house, and then I can go back to living more or less like a non-parent. I worry about the no-friends rule-- they say that level of isolation isn't healthy, and I worry about the social skills opportunities that my kids aren't getting (like hanging out with kids they don't necessarily like, or how to amuse themselves without getting in trouble in an adults-first environment, or how to interact with non-family, non-teacher adults).

I figure those things are survivable.

The one that REALLY scares me is this: When K was little (like for the first two years), I didn't have any interactions with her that I didn't have a script for. I could feed the baby, change the baby, burp the baby, rock the baby, walk the floor with the baby-- I had a script for that. I could not play with the toddler-- I did not have a script for that, and I was afraid I would do it in an autistic way, so I just left it up to other people.

Somewhere around her fourth birthday, I stopped. I decided that doing it wrong had to be better than not doing it at all, that I probably wasn't that messed up, and that kids aren't as fragile as experts think they are and whatever I messed up we would work out.

We had some really good years. We had a lot of fun. We had two more kids. We had a lot of fun, too.

And then I got sick. And I learned that Asperger's DOES, INDEED, mean that I am a monster who is not capable of having any kind of correct interaction, and anything I do with them will probably mess them up.

So I am back to not wanting to do anything with my kids-- not because I don't enjoy it or because it's not "my thing," but because I am afraid I am going to do it wrong and hurt them.

What would you rather have-- an obviously autistic parent who says the wrong things and keeps up with a joke too long and is outspoken and embarrasses you sometimes, or a parent who does not make those stereotypical textbook "jack-aspie" mistakes, but other than hugs and kisses and bedtime stories and "help" (read: giving you answers) with homework and the occasional absolutely necessary "please don't do that," doesn't interact with you very much??

Please don't say, "Don't have kids."

I realize now that I should never have had children, that there is one right way and a whole bunch of wrong ways to do it, and that I'm not capable of finding the right way or doing it. But IT'S TOO LATE. The kids are here; until I talk my husband into hiring a nanny and getting rid of me, I'm their mother.

I want to minimize the damage from the stupid thing I did when I was young and did not realize how hideously disfigured I really am. So what's better-- a warm, involved, stupid Aspie mother?? Or a cold, distant one who does everything in her power to imitate a typical mom (or at least avoid acting like an Aspie mom)??