Raising Autism 202
Athena got a job. Her first. She works at a “doggie day care” and spends her days watching and walking dogs, feeding them, cleaning up their messes. This may seem a normal “next step” for an 18-year-old, but Athena is on the spectrum. She does not recognize the emotions on people’s faces, nor does she know the socially acceptable words to say. Someone’s parents are just awful, she will joke, “do you want to kill them?” The recipient freaks out when it was truly a joke. All they see is a possible psychopath who may take extraordinary actions to solve common human solutions. They miss the real person with the enormous empathy and heart.
She has excelled in this job. She understands dogs. Close up or from a distance, she sees the details: The angle of the eyes and ears, the activity of the tail, the muscular constriction, the stance. She can guide- don’t look at him in the eye. Walk this way as if you don’t see him. Throw him a treat and say, “good boy.” And she is right every time,
I marvel at how she sees the details in dogs but is unable to do so in humans. Autism is about microscopic sensing- noises, tastes, texture, movement. But what is it about animals that makes her incredibly astute while she struggles with humans?
Athena wasn’t diagnosed with ASD until she was 14 years old. This is common with girls and autism. Due to misunderstanding between ASD representations in boys and girls, boys are diagnosed correctly while girls are given mental health diagnoses. And such it was for both my daughters as I have written about before. The diagnosis was bipolar disorder. Except none of the bipolar medications worked. For years, I insisted the diagnosis was wrong. It took another daughter in treatment 5 flight hours from New Jersey, to find a good psychometrician who could diagnose Athena correctly.
I’ll never forget the moment the doctor took me aside after five hours of testing and said, “I don’t know how anyone could have missed the diagnosis. It’s so obvious.” Then he said, “Mom, it’s not your fault.” That did it. I sobbed as if a pin had been poked in my emotional balloon: a sad and high-pitched screech that lasted much longer than expected.
All life incidences fell into place. How she came home from school every day and raged for hours, relentlessly. How she punched an au pair in the stomach. How she told all of us, always, “you talk too loud.” How she raged when plans changed at the last minute or when she didn’t get to do what she wanted. Once, when we were shopping for a Christmas tree, she told us if we didn’t pull over and let her out of the car she would “break my (her own) finger.” She was serious. She held her left pointer finger in her right hand and pulled it back fiercely.
The diagnosis was a check mark to what I already knew. What I knew since she was five months old. I had gone into New York City to pick up my then husband. She was asleep in her backseat child seat, rear facing. She started crying, and my immediate thought was that she was hungry. So, I pulled into a side street at 8th avenue and 16th and scooted into the backseat to feed her. I put her to my breast, already leaking from her cries, and she looked at me. It was the look. That look was connection with no connection. She needed me because she was hungry. But she didn’t connect with me. At that very moment, the word “autism” popped into my head. I pushed it away.
Now, she’s working at doggie day care, a star employee with astute doggie awareness. She sometimes works 6 days a week. For me, this is fearless. This is claiming one’s talent and pursuing it in a world that doesn’t accept differences or digressions. It’s taking a path “less traveled by” so that she can find her own way. It won’t be the high school, college, work path. But it will be her own path, and I am trusting her to find her way, against all the world’s odds.
Walk the Moon 