Asperger Families

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I've been obsessing over the geneological angle since my son and I received the diagnosis. I can trace back five generations of AS or related symptoms.

My great-grandmother never left the house after age 40. Not once.

My grandfather was a mathematical savant. He could multiply two 4-digit numbers in his head. Of his generation, none of his first cousins (the children of his mother's sister) ever married because of their belief that there was a "ret*d gene" in the family. I don't know where that belief came from and I'm not sure there's anyone still living who knows either.

My dad is pretty classic AS/OCD although he will never admit it.

I'm the only one in my generation who is diagnosed. But (not sure if there's a tie-in), there's one case of cerebral palsy and a lot of ne-er-do-wells who I don't know that well on a personal level.

At my son's generation, the fifth, he has AS. There's a girl who is clearly AS (no social skills and quite obsessive about her interests) and two boys who have been diagnosed with ADHD. Not sure if anyone has looked at AS for them. There's another cousin who displays autistic symptoms due to a medically-confirmed case of agcc -- agenesis of the corpus collosum, which is the lack of the membrane that connects the two hemispheres of the brain. I believe there may be some connection between this agcc and all the cases of autism/AS. I haven't had an MRI done on my son to confirm it, but I did have an irregular sonogram when I was 14-weeks pregnant -- there was a grey mass in the middle of his brain. The doctors at the time were concerned that he might have Trisomy- 18, but amnio showed nothing out of the ordinary. I knew something was different about him by the time he was two.

I grew up in a rural area and nearly everyone from the first four generations stayed within a five-mile radius and went to the same school. I see the ones who moved away on at least an annual basis. There are some other family quirks that could be tied to the agcc -- for instance, nearly all the men are ambidextrous -- and a lot of AS-ish symptoms. We're known as an "odd" family and stick pretty close to each other. I recognized from an early age that my family, the people and the dynamic, wasn't like what I saw at my friends' houses. (I think I was fortunate to grow up in a very small community because there I didn't have the huge amount of social problems I've heard about people with AS. I was accepted more or less unconditionally because there were fewer than a dozen kids in my class and I knew all of them from the time they were born.)

Next time I'm around the family, I will look at everyone through different eyes.

Well my mom and my sister both have extreme social problems and stimming habits. They both talk about nothing but themselves also. If they aren't officially on the spectrum, they might as well be due to the fact that they struggle with the same problems. I'm actually diagnosed PDD-NOS myself, the first one in the family to actually get a diagnosis. When I tried to explain to my mom why I was diagnosed she said, "Those things you do aren't a big deal, I used to do that stuff all the time too." It's because we're the same, she just doesn't get it. Or she doesn't want to admit it.

I've recently been coaching my sister on how to have a reciprical conversation with other kids. I'm teaching her how to ask other kids questions about themselves and not to talk about her interests all the time (she's . I said don't you like it when people ask you about your interests? She said, "No, I hate when people come up to me and talk." hahahahaha, I think this is so funny because she's just like me.