My Dad's big square pegs and small round holes...

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I suspect that my Dad has AS. I suspected him long before I even suspected myself of having AS. And he fits into nearly every single one of the categories under AS. But there's one trait about him that I am not quite sure falls under the symptoms of AS.

My dad thinks of everything in a community sense of mind. I don't know quite how to describe this, only that he thinks as the world as some unified nuclear conglomeration working as one synergistic entity. And it's not just hopeful thinking. Well, let me break it down:

My dad, who is 77, has long since thought that the world is some big senior citizen's center. As if the whole world should act and perform like a center for the elderly he has attended for decades. At “the center” as we call it, there's no lone elderly man or woman shoved back into a corner playing cards or doing some craft by themselves. All the elderly who attend this center are all huddled together in groups playing cards, playing Scribbage, Canasta or working on quilts together. All of them, all together, in groups, huddled in cellular pairings. Curmudgoendy old men all hanging out in the billiards room, hustling each other, hurling old-man smack talk at each other all day long. All of them, like ants in a colony, living within this elderly community. This is the environment my Father has lived in for so long. And this is what helps taint his view of the world.

He and I live in an apartment building that is made up entirely of the elderly and the disabled. So the first thing he sees in his mind's eye is that the building is filled with elderly people who should be just as colony-minded as he is. Somewhere in his mind he feels this apartment building should function as his senior citizen's center and a nursing home functions. After all, this building is regularly frequented by the tenant's home nurses and family members all coming and going. Very much like a nursing home. Like most of the elderly in this town, eventually some come to the point where they become too sick to remain a senior citizen's center attendee and are moved into nursing homes by his or her family. So members of the center go and visit their elderly brothers or sisters who are now in nursing homes. So living here in this apartment building, I think, confuses my father on some level. As I said, he's ALWAYS been colony minded. He thinks as everything existing as one giant colony. And when he sees this building I think he thinks of it as some combined senior citizen's center and a nursing home all wrapped in one. And he has railed on for as long as he's lived here, about 8 years in total, about how disappointed he is that no one who lives here ever come out of their apartments, interact with anyone else just as ants would in their own colony. In my father's mind, he things that everyone should be outside on the patio (as we call it) having a grand 'ole time while the rest of us are inside in card tournaments, playing Scrabble and smack-talking each other. Just like his friends do at his senior citizen's center.

I have long since tried to convince him that community or colony-minded mentality doesn't really exist around here (in the real world, as I like to think of it). “It's just an apartment building, Dad. Everyone just wants to be left alone. And the ones who are more community minded are the hand full of people you see outside sitting on the patio chain smoking.” I tell him “This is an apartment building, Dad. It's not the center.” As long as he's lived at this apartment building he has always comlained about the lack of colony minded tenants. And I am always in this struggle of listening to him prattle on every few days about how disgusted and disgruntled he is with the tenants because they do not treat their residence here as one big colony. Ant-like colony, in my mind. And I'm forever having to remind him “It's just a big concrete building where people exist, Dad. Not interacting with the other tenants is what people in apartment buildings do.” And he just nods and says “I understand, Mark. I guess you're right.” But the next week out, he's at it again. Complaining about how no one wants to do anything together here. And again we have the same conversation. It's not a disease or Alzhiemer's or dementia that keeps him forgetting. He just has inability of dealing with a world not functioning the only way he understands it. As an Aspie myself, I can recognize this last statement is what's really going on. I don't understand life around me either. But at least I have learned that life cannot be beaten in the mold I want it to fit in. It's quite the opposite. Life molds ME into want IT wants. Not the other way around. And I have learned the secret of riding the wave instead of being like my father forever trying to understand why a big square peg will never fit into a small round hole.

There's a nice lady who lives across my Father. She's a outgoing lady who I think my Dad has developed a small crush on. The problem is that she is never at home in her apartment. There are a few tenants who pay for an apartment here but who are NEVER home. They basically treat their apartments like a grand storage shed with a bathroom, bedroom and a kitchen. Obviously they have another life elsewhere. I imagine my Dad gets just as lonely as I do, since we both never date. So he sees an intelligent older lady living across from him and at once he feels that she should have the same colony-minded outlook that he does. Since she's intelligent, after all. That this intelligent lady should hang around her own apartment and become part of the community HERE. The fellow who lives next to me also is never at his apartment. He uses his apartment as a glorified storage shed as well. Only coming back to his apartment to do some odds and ends once every month or so. 15 minutes later, he's gone and went. So my Dad sees this and also feels it is a shame he does not hand around to be a part of the community here at this apartment building. “Dad this is an apartment building. That's what happens in apartment buildings. That IS the community of apartment building life. Everyone wants to stay to themselves.” And he responds “Well, that's shame.”

And what has me even further irked by Dad's colony-minded attitude is that he wants this apartment building to have a greater sense of community but he takes part in practically none of the community sense that DOES exist here. Dad spends his whole day at his senior citizen's center. And by the time he comes home he's so tired and burnt out that he just hits the sack, watches a few hours of tv in between naps and goes to sleep all in preparation to do his whole routine again the next day. So he wants this apartment building to have a sense of community that he won't even take part in. We have Bingo on Tuesday and Thursday, which he rarely participates in any more. A “special Bingo” once a month to help fund the other two Bingo nights. And I fuss at him and tell him that if he wants this apartment building to have a better sense of community he could attend our bingos on Tuesday and Thursday instead of attending his senior citizen's center on those days. His reaction? “Meh. I've been going to the center for so long.”

Yeah. There's that good 'ole Iron clad Aspie routine tendency.

My Dad continually fusses about this apartment building not having the colony sense of structure that makes sense to him but he's unwilling to participate in the things that would help turn this place into a better community.

In closing, it's this whole ant-like sense of colony-minded community that my Dad's way of thinking that has me twisted all up in a bunch. I am forever and always having to take the gentlest and most diplomatic methods of showing my Father how to look past this colony-minded reality he believes in. I am forever trying to spoon feed my Dad the real version of reality without catastrophically overshadowing his own vision of reality. And it is very, very taxing. My dad doesn't think of real life as the NT world does. Thankfully I have a better grasp of life that he does but not by very much. He is an intelligent and wise man. He's on the level about many things. He's an articulate and whip smart about many current things. But it's this whole colony-minded reality he just thinks the rest of the world also exists within as well. And it's only that part that has me forever grinding my teeth, jaws clenched and always trying to compensate by trying to live in 3 worlds: The NT world, my Father's world and my own world. Threading them all together has been very difficult for me.