I sent the family a letter, and called my mom. Mom is coping in a strange way herself (I think she is AS too)--she blames my aunt for not eating right and getting cancer. I think she's trying to ward off the fear that she'll get cancer herself, because she's fascinated with nutrition. I think it makes her believe that she can protect herself somehow. I only barely convinced her not to lecture my cousins on nutrition, because she would probably have made her points somewhere along the line of, "Don't eat the way your mother did or you'll die the way she did," and that would not have helped them in the least.
My mom is more independent than I am but she's in deep denial about her likely AS and my autism diagnosis. I wonder if just knowing and accepting I'm autistic has helped me learn more than she did, because it was pretty obvious to me that telling people that it was their mom's own fault she died of cancer would just make them feel sad and angry and betrayed. It wasn't obvious to her. And yet her traits are, on the whole, milder than my own. I wish I could tell her it's okay to have a disability but she's just so scared of it I don't think she'll ever understand.
Mom just describes it as being very tired. I guess that's her way of expressing sadness. She always did go to her room and lie on her bed when things got to be too much.
27 Jun 2013, 2:34 pm
