Raised by Aspergers parent

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Actually it is hard. People are offended by so many different things it's hard to not offend someone. Someone may be offended by one thing but yet another person may not even be offended by it so you do not know who it will offend. You can say something none offensive and someone will still get offended. It's really impossible to not offend people and I have seen people get offended by so many different things I don't even find offensive and can't even understand why they would be offended. I mean if this offends someone and that offends someone, geez what else offends them, only way to not offend anyone is to not talk at all. Be shy, be an outcast, don't socialize, don't participate on a forum, that is how you don't offend someone. Heck someone may get offended with people not liking the affordable care act or someone getting offended someone does support it. Heck some people even get offended seeing kids in public so does that mean parents should no longer bring their kids in public because it might offend people? See what I mean how hard it is to not offend? Someone may be offended by the color pink so does that mean no one should wear it or say the color? This is how it all looks to me when people get offended.

League_Girl, I see your point.

In general, I think that the people on this sub-board are pretty tolerant and there is usually a wide berth given to people and opportunities to clarify what was said. I am not claiming I have never accidentally offended someone on here or that I have never taken offense when none was made. We all have different hot buttons. It happens.

I think (in general) we are especially accommodating of newbies unless they immediately appear to have an agenda that seems morally suspect in some way. Politics is a quagmire of offense, but as a general rule that rarely comes up on this part of the board. We have had various dramas, though, so I agree that it can be harder then it seems, sometimes.

However, I guess what I meant to say was that I think we keep an open mind more often then we do not (at least I feel that way, you are free to differ) and that IMO we were very patient with the complaining poster for quite some time, and I think showing respect or at a minimum not showing disrespect goes a long way here.

Your mileage may vary.

I am rarely on the other sub-boards so I cannot intelligently comment on how things go over on other sub-boards. I would venture that it varies with the level of controversy inherent to each sub-board.

Real life is a whole other ballgame, and that varies with the temperaments of those with whom you associate. I manage it OK unless I am dealing with my in-laws b/c I don't really socialize all that much beyond my immediate family and the occasional social gathering.

Thank you, League Girl, and than you and apologies, DW - when I wrote my last post I had missed your two very engaging and reflective most recent posts. I will try to respond to these later today.

Many thanks ASDMommyASDKid, you've expressed much of the heart of what I had intended to bring to this discussion today.

Jenufa, please understand, the post in which I offended you began with a quote from you, but the rest of it was not actually personally directed at you. I had just read the entire thread. There is a lot of pain, suffering and anger in it and more than one voice crying out

I heard you loud and clear, but do you realize that you are shouting in a room full of people? And demanding that you get to set the conversational agenda?

The reality is that you don't get to determine what THE POINT is any more than the person whose position was (forigive my bad paraphrasing, this is the way it struck me) "I want to discuss biblical justifications for child abuse" or the other one who started with "I want to sterilize schizophrenics, aspies and pedophiles" or --well, that whole extended riff culminating in

These are among the many things in this thread I was responding to. It honestly, really, truly wasn't just about you.

I do apologize for not making that explicitly clear and in that lapse hurting your feelings.

DW, your wisdom and compassion continue to enrich and inspire me. I see you deftly navigating a lot of heated passions and turbulent thoughts through the years and posts of this thread and I am amazed by you. You are the soul of moderation and far more effective simply by being yourself than any powers the title "moderator" could give you.

DW, in the light of the whole span of your contributions to this thread, I am in awe of you.

DW, thank you again for your open, inclusive attitude - it is encouraging and helpful.

About perfectionism/ high achievement: In my current job, I have a lot to do with very high achievers (internationally successful classical musicians). I'd say there's barely any soloist or conductor I've met who has "made it" who has NOT suffered from some kind of approval deficit (for want of a better term) as a child. All of them are driven out there in search of applause and affirmation night after night, despite the basically awful lifestyle (a life on the road), because they NEED it - there's some fundamental level of self-doubt. Sometimes I've wondered if the best thing you can do to ensure that your kid will go on to become a high achiever is to not give it enough love. If I were a parent, I hope I'd want more for my child to be well-balanced than for my child to become a high achiever; though of course the parental wish for a child to be successful is surely natural and good. I think the real problems start when it begins to feel as if love is conditional on performance. And in my case, as in some other accounts I've read of children of AS parents, the problem is that although I tried hard, I always came away feeling that my best wasn't good enough. I remember changing to a selective school where there were some 350 kids in the year and they published your place within the group on your semester report card. I'd never experienced that before, and as I looked at my results (second, third, fourth, or first in many subjects) I decided to try for first place in everything in the following semester, hoping with this to win my mother's approval. When I brought home the report card, with a 1 at the end of every subject, she looked at it, said in a flat voice, "that's nice, dear," and put it aside. End of topic. I was devastated. If doing the very best that it was possible to do at school didn't impress her, what would?! Years later I asked her about it, and she said, "Oh, but I didn't want you to feel that it was overly important to have to do well at school." So I risk being shot down in flames here to say that this seems to me a fairy typical AS-NT disconnect - her motivations were caring, but she hadn't understood or correctly read my emotional needs. She didn't have any clue that she had any cause to question her behaviour, and I thought it must be my fault.

DW, you observe that you can't go back in time to observe what happened to you when you were a very young child. In many ways that's exactly what I'd like to be able to do. My aunts report that my mother seemed overwhelmed by the task of parenting, and unhappy. I could imagine that for an undiagnosed AS parent the experience of these small, needy, noisy beings could often be frustrating and/ or bewildering. My sister's response, a bit like yours, was anger, anger, anger, right from the start. She always rebelled, often with uncontrollable rage. I was the opposite; I turned inwards. As a toddler, I would hold my breath until I fainted rather than screaming (which my mother TRULY hated - "You were manipulative from the start," she said). Later, I tried with all my might to be good, to compensate for my sister's rages, for my father's withdrawal, for my mother's headaches and depressions.

Later still, my sister and I became best friends, and I think gave each other much of the social context that enabled us to develop functional relationships outside the family. My mother hated Christmas, and generally got sick, so my sister and I took over more and more to create the sense of festivity that we wanted and needed, and we often had a pretty good time of it.

I would postulate - again at the risk of incurring displeasure - that a sibling can provide some of the emotional support that is missing when an AS parent is unable to read social cues.

Again, DW, reading your thread made me, for the first time, consider what it might have been like for my grandmother, as a very young mother, rather isolated in her significantly older husband's family home, to find herself the parent of my AS mother. They had a fractious relationship from the start; my grandmother went on to have many other children, some of them bipolar, and all of them felt a bit neglected at one time or another. My grandmother could always reduce my mother to tears, and I've often suspected that their bad relationship was one of the reasons why my mother was happy to move with her husband and two young children to the other side of the planet, away from all that. It did mean we kids missed out on the outside perspective than an extended family would have afforded us, though, and one of the pleasures of being old enough to get to know my extended family as an adult has been gradually regaining pieces of that perspective. My grandmother and I got on very well, but she more or less said, "I never really understood your mother." That is probably a small tragedy in itself, though it was eclipsed by the larger tragedies of suicide, depression, and cancer amongst her other kids. Perhaps I should omit the "though" - probably having your small tragedy eclipsed by bigger tragedies is a tragedy in itself.

As you intimate, DW, the chain of parent-child-grandchild must stretch much further back, and will stretch further forward, than we manage to imagine in the course of everyday life. Looking backwards, bemusement and disharmony seem to have become repeating patterns; looking forward, it seems fair to hope, as you do, that better knowledge and support will make for better understanding and more harmonious, healthy relationships.

Many AS parents seem (no doubt understandably) averse to whining stories from (ostensibly? smugly?) NT kids about their bad experiences. Even so I feel moved to pen two (nobody has to read them).

As a teenager, my anorexia reached a critical point. I decided to leave home, much to the disapproval of my parents, and my health immediately began to improve. Within a year, I was a normal weight. "You just did that because you wanted to show the world that I was making you sick," my mother said, in fury. She saw my return to health as a personal slight.

Writing it down like that makes me feel sad for her.

When I was in my late 20s, my older sister's husband and the father of her three young children was killed in a traffic accident. My mother came to "help", but was overwrought and increasingly difficult to manage. We sent her home to our father (who had said he couldn't come to the funeral because he had some marking to do), and I told him that we had our hands too full to be able to take care of our mother, and that he could do his part by please taking care of her now.

My sister's parenting style is sometimes quite loud, which her kids have always taken in their stride, but which my mother can't cope with at all. She was very offended at having been sent home, and retaliated by writing to my brother-in-law's parents and to the family doctor, accusing my sister of abusing her children.

Not yet having any framework in which to understand my mother's behaviour, I was wildly upset and angry. I wrote to my parents saying as clearly as I could why I felt this measure to have been utterly inappropriate, and said that if the motivation had been to help, there WERE ways in which they COULD be helpful - for instance by sending a bit of money to tide my sister over during the difficult time.

My mother reacted with fury. "Even the pool attendant says I look terrible," she wrote. "Even my physiotherapist has commented. Why doesn't anyone care about me? Your sister doesn't need money. She's a rich widow now. She can afford to go out to coffee-shops whenever she wants. Your father and I have to save for our retirement! How can you even think of making such a suggestion?!"

I remember actually crumpling to the floor and howling like a hurt animal when I got that letter. Not only was my mother no mother at all, I suddenly felt - she had in fact never really been one. The full weight of her self-centredness came crashing down on me, and I could finally see something that I'd never really understood before: that she is not normal.

It was in the wake of this fiasco that my sister and I began reading around Asperger's and started to piece together a picture that helped us to understand why our mother had acted as she had. Not out of malice, not because she is a bad person, not even because she doesn't care - but rather because she doesn't know how to be any other way.

Perhaps, as is repeatedly stated around my posts both by those angered by my comments and by those defending them, I don't really have much of a clue about AS, but I did spend all my formative years living with it, and I am still living with it, so in some ways, actually, I do have a clue - I have a lifetime of clues. It is piecing those clues together into something understandable that I had hoped to attempt here - and those who are supportive are greatly appreciated.

Adamantium, at least that's something we can agree on! I share your admiration for DW.

Thanks also for the conciliatory comments. I can understand how what I wrote may have seemed like an attempt to hijack the thread - it wasn't what I was trying to communicate at the time. When I wrote that it was because I felt that responses to my comments had been based on fundamental misunderstandings - that what I was trying to say was not being heard at all as I had intended - that was the frustration I was trying to express, but I can see how it might have come across as selfish, and I apologise for that.

Yes, those I-hit-my-kids-because-the-Bible-says-I-should entries on this thread were both wildly off-topic and deeply disturbing - I'm very glad the thread recovered and returned to the main topic.

Also, by the way, I admire you very greatly for taking care of your AS and Alzheimer's mother; "I don't know how you do it" is no doubt a very unhelpful comment - a friend of mine in a cynical mood once said that when people say "you're so strong!" what they usually mean is "I'm glad it's not me!"

To be honest it's one of the things that I fret about. I know what caring entails - I looked after my young husband throughout his long illness and death from a brain tumour - it is intense, it is intimate, it is bone-breakingly hard work, it is exhausting, and it is heart-breaking, and to be entirely honest, I'm pretty sure that I couldn't do what I did for my husband for either of my parents. It was clear to me, with my husband, that the only reason it was possible to shoulder the burden of care to such an extent was that we had a superb relationship with each other; even so it pushed us both to our limits. I don't have that kind of relationship with my parents, and I'm certain I'd hit my limits way, way sooner. I could care for my uncle, or my flatmate, or my cousin, but not, I fear, for my parents. For this, I'm very much in awe of you.

Thank you for the kind words, Janufa.

The reality is that my mom drives me and my wife up the wall and we have to periodically get away in order to stay sane and we know that there will come a time when we can't do it anymore. The advice we have received is that she will become less and less connected and more and more irritable and even violent as the illness progresses. Our first duty is to our children, so this is an untenable situation.

The memories of your mother that you just shared are really horrible to read, your mother's solipsism sounds so extreme, it's painful to think about. How terrible that you have had to live it. I don't know what peace you will be able to find, but I hope that sharing your experiences is helpful to you.

I don't think I am like that. My mom is a little like yours in her self-centered focus, but not as extreme. I have heard tales of my great grandparents generation on my father's side that are maybe in the same league.

Run with your instincts, Adamantium. Your first duty is to your children, and your sanity is essential there. What's best for you is probably best for your mother in the long run, too. I remember when I made the decision to move with my husband into a hospice - by that stage, thanks the the medication, he had gained so much (he was VERY tall) that he weighed 120kg, and I just couldn't lift him or keep him comfortable on my own - for the sake of quality of life, we needed medical back-up - and I had to overcome the peer pressure of a number of people in a "similar" situation who said, "I could NEVER abandon my husband to the care of others!" I wasn't abandoning him - I was just admitting that the situation had become impossible, and seeking appropriate professional help, and I'm really glad I did - it improved the quality of life for both of us, significantly. So take whatever help you can get, and don't feel shy about admitting your limits.

Thanks for the supportive words. My mother's not that bad, really, and she has many fabulous attributes -- those were just a couple of incidents where things got out of control... and until I had an idea about what AS was, I felt pretty awful about the whole situation...

- - deleting because I hadn't finished reading all the conversation - -

Last edited by DW_a_mom on 10 Nov 2013, 4:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I agree, it is impossible to never offend someone. And I think I do pretty well most of the time with my diplomacy in writing, but I STILL can blow it. In my experience, the best response is to accept the idea that they have a right to be offended whether you meant to offend or not, and work backwards from there. I NEVER start with the idea that someone is being too sensitive; once you do that, you have no chance of resolving the problem. And I like to RESOLVE my conflicts.

Oh, wow, not sure what to say to that. I've always been in awe of the membership here, because everyone really does want to do right, whatever that may be.

Jenufa, I think the first thing to clarify is that I don't think my response was to become angry, but more to become STUBBORN. I was pretty withdrawn as a child and my father did come to see me, as your mother did you, as being quietly manipulative as a child. I think he changed his mind on that later, though, and realized that I, just like him, was always trying to figure out what was right, and just saw it differently, and had a different way of getting to it. Or maybe that all was the rose-colored glasses he put on because I gave him a grandchild

Also, reminder, I am not the one who started this thread, just someone who has commented on it practically from the start, and the author of the moderator note. Which, per ASDmommyASDkids suggestion, I may have to propose a rewrite to.

Anyway.

It seems to me like your family actually has a mix-in of quite a few other issues and, that of course, is common: ASD doesn't usually occur in a vacuum, as much as in families and individuals with a whole assorted history of conditions. That complicates things. One of the cool things about my son is that he, surprisingly, does not have any other emotional or mood disorders, just a physical co-morbid, so I feel like we see how the ASD works on the mind quite purely in him. And it was never instinctive for him to react emotionally defensively like your mother has - that is what my NT daughter with possible depression/anxiety/bi-polar does. Lets just say I have always been grateful I didn't get the two in the same child. My son is, simply, not in the least bit sensitive. Seeing things from his own perspective and missing yours is natural for him, but I can't imagine him reacting as your mother did with the death of your BIL. Although my dad ... he did get really sensitive about things; I think he just hadn't ever learned any other way to react.

Your family has also had a lot of hardship to deal with, and you can't expect anyone to escape all that without a little trauma.

How you describe your family reminds me a bit of my husband's family. To me, the big thing is that they don't know how to TALK to each other, and they spend this insane amount of time speaking for each other, and reading into each other, without anyone ever saying what they mean or asking directly what they want to know. Try to do that, and they bite your head off, so I'm so incredibly at a loss as to handle that group. It's like this complex set of social rules they believe in that just end up destroying them. Even though my ASD father would get upset and run out on us when we were straight up about things he didn't want to hear, we still were allowed to do that, and we all eventually talked it out and got over it. OK, and he'd throw in accusations of us attacking him just for disagreeing with him ... but, still, it was TEMPORARY, and we knew it was just his way of being upset. In my husband's family, when disagreement hits, everything just stops. They spend a little time screaming abusively at each other and before you know it some pair has decided they aren't talking to each other. Yes, there is ASD in his family, but I don't see that play out as caused by the ASD: it is caused by some screwed up social norm they all subscribe to combined with a little ASD and a little anxiety and a little depression and so on. I want to say that underlying social norm is a New England thing, as that is how my MIL describes it, but since I haven't sat in any other New England families I really don't know if she's got that wrong, and it was just what she learned in her own messed up family. I realize all that is a little different than what you describe, but the similarity is in the sense of DRAMA that just goes on and on and on. In my family, it was always over within 24 hours, as in RESOLVED, not pushed under the rug, and that is true with the one I've built for myself, too. And I have no answer for the drama, because I just don't understand where exactly it comes from, and I have no practice in trying to solve it (I am not allowed to even talk to any of my husband's family about anything serious, because it is seen as interfering and overstepping my place, but I've done OK coaxing my husband through it; we've gone a decade now with none of them deciding they are no longer talking to him).

I'm curious, when your mother responded as she did, what did you say to her about it?

I am sorry to hear about your anorexia. I was wondering why you were interesting in finding out if there was a connection.

As for taking care of parents - sometimes the best way to take care of them is to write a check. Difficult relationships are a two way street: what doesn't work for you, doesn't work for them, either. There shouldn't be any guilt in it when you hire a professional to take care of your mother. Unless she's let it get stuck in her head that is "supposed" to be you, she'll be happier with an employee/caregiver. My MIL is.

Thanks, DW. You're quite right, cultural context and family culture can mess things up right royally. Whose in-laws are not complicated?! (That was a classic from my nephew when he was 8 years old and my sister was trying to explain to him about one of his friends being on the spectrum... "But Mummy, everybody's family is complicated!")

For all my gripes about the stringent Catholicism of my own family, the Calvinistic stiff unforgiving joylessness of my in-laws was ultimately even more bemusing. My family might be mad, but there's an underlying assumption that if you can be emotionally generous, you will be - several of my family members flew half way around the world to help when my husband was ill, while my in-laws generally couldn't manage a train journey of three hours. For their own brother/ son.

My mother always had a particular affinity for Lewis Carroll's White Rabbit: I'm mad... you're mad... we're ALL mad here! Maybe a bit of AS and bipolar is not as bad as a stiff dose of Calvinism...

Forgive me. It was the Cheshire Cat.

At least she recognized there was something off

My son as born when my marriage was in a rough period, and connected to that we had uncovered quite a history of what is basically abuse in both our families, although not covert. We were determined to break those patterns, and we've done pretty well.

But the weird thing is, new issues arise. You fix A and now B is a problem. For every mistake that my parents made but I fail to make, I make a different one. I don't usually realize it in the moment; life leaves us to reflect on it later.

All I can conclude is that while it is important for all of us to keep trying to change and improve and do right, life isn't meant to be smooth or easy. No one gets it right all the time and no one gets out without scars. So while searching for connections has its place, the most important thing will always be letting go and forgiving.

I forgot what you've written about your father; I'll have to go back and check. One thing that I think helped in our family was that my mother was naturally very warm. And actually very strong internally. There was a yin and a yang to my parents that kind of worked.

Also, in rambling off in various directions based on various things in the conversation and seeking to help you move forward, I've failed to comment on something very important. I am really, really sorry for the loss of your husband. I can't even begin to imagine how difficult that all must have been.

Checked back. Your father didn't know how to connect, either. But, since that was common with fathers back then, you probably never saw it as a huge issue.

But you never got to see a yin to the yang. To have a parent that really was WARM. I did, at least, have that with my mother.

But I am glad you found some of that in your sister. I don't think that is uncommon, for siblings to find some of that balance with each other.

One thing to share, I don't know if its relevant at all, but it is angle that one must always look at to eliminate if nothing else.

One of my SIL's was extremely hurt when she needed a temporary place to stay and didn't get a warm, open invite from my MIL, who (best we can ferret) just didn't feel in a position to offer it at that moment and on very short notice (understandably, in our eyes). For my SIL, that rejection was the sense that her mother either didn't really love her, or wasn't capable of being the mother she needed; she was stunned, and she was hurt. This was the trigger was the latest round of not speaking to each other and hours of lament to my husband. But as a third party looking in, I feel I can see them both acting exactly as I could have predicted, based on their emotional needs and abilities. If my SIL could have sat back for a moment and seen where my MIL was coming from, instead of rushing to hurt, she could have made enough minor adjustments to her request to turn it into one that was very welcome. But she can't see that path. So, as people go, they both have their imperfections and issues, but don't seem to be able to accept them in each other. I don't think, long run, we can ask anyone to be more than they are, and at some point you accept that X is what they have to give and stop expecting or even hoping for more. I feel like my SIL allowed this interaction to pierce her, when I don't think it needed to. And I think my MIL didn't try to understand why my SIL got hurt because, in truth, she hadn't done anything wrong. But if she had just thought to say sorry, it could have made a world of difference.

Perhaps it is the war of having to have others see that you are right in a situation ends up being the most destructive, because rarely is there a single truth. One minor modification to how either handled that situation, and the blow up would never have happened.

Different tangent - I think the reason there isn't accurate and good information out here on how ASD in a parent affects children is because you can't isolate the ASD from all the other variables in a family. Religion, culture, other conditions and, of course, personality. People with ASD aren't copies of each other, although they share a few traits.

And .. probably should get onto some chores and dinner for my kids. They HATE it when I spend time here, they don't understand at all what draws me to talk with people I've never met instead of giving them my undivided attention all the time, even when they'd be ignoring me during all of it (they are teenagers, after all). So, I've got to keep things in balance best I can figure out to.