I am so depressed and terrified for my young adult daughter

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I am a terrible mother. Trust me, I am. I spent most of my daughter's childhood trying to get her to be "normal". We home schooled, so there was no one to help me figure out what was going on. I read a lot, and eventually I found the book "Pretending To Be Normal" and starting to think maybe my daughter was Aspergers. She was a teenager then, so I bought the book "Girls and Aspergers". I wound up throwing it in the trash in anger, declaring that the things in that book would NEVER happen to my girl!

Well, they did. Long story short, my daughter went to college and joined AFROTC. She barely passed field training, and honestly I didn't expect her to make it. I was all prepared to comfort her on her return home, though I never told her. She wanted to try, and I didn't want anything to hold her back.

But as happy as she was then, she became that much more miserable later. I think it is called adult ASD burn-out? Anyway, she just graduated cum laude (yay) BUT she is in big trouble, facing her first failure and boy is it a doozy!

She gained thirty pounds this last semester, and failed her physical assessment test to be an officer. She signed a contract two years ago, right off the high of field training. She owes the AF four years active and four years reserve, and she was supposed to go to Intelligence Officer Training School in October.

She does get to restest Friday, but seriously what can change in a week? I am crying and I want to kill myself. It's my fault for not getting her diagnosed, then they never would have accepted her and she wouldn't be in this mess. I can't hurt myself of course, that's the only thing that could hurt her worse. I know she'd blame herself, and I don't want that.

But I just can't stop crying. Why did I have to be in denial? Why did I encourage to go AFROTC? I didn't know about ASD, I didn't know she would get depressed and fail out. How can I help her get through this?

I hate myself so much right now.

Stop. You didn't do anything horrible.

I have AS and was diagnosed in my 40's and I'm thankful I wasn't when I was young. I wouldn't have ever thought I could do anything then. That's how I think, I'm pessemistic. You don't know whether or not it would have helped or hurt your daughter to get a dx.

From what you said it sounds like she's pretty high functioning and gets along ok usually.

Every kid fails in something sometimes. It may be because of the AS or it may not.

Do not blame yourself. I spent my whole life pretending to be normal and it was only after my dx that I found out that no, other people don't think and feel like I do or process stuff like I do. By then I had learned to fake it. Not everybody can. I was lucky and also determined to be normal, which I was far from growing up.

Encourage her, find out about postponing the test, etc. Help her by making it possible for her to work out and by watching the food in the house. I don't think there is any treatment or therapy for AS that involves military level physical training, so that probably wouldn't have done anything. She wanted to join up, she did, and reaching her goal or even just putting in the best effort she can is important. That happens to some people without AS too.

If you are bound and determined to blame yourself, then put it off for right now. Focus on helping her. Once you have done what needs to be done and the crisis is over, then sit down and blame yourself, cry, everything else you want to do. But not right now. Set aside one hour a week for that stuff. It doesn't do anybody any good anyway, but if you feel like you need to do that, it will help to have a time set aside to do that. You won't feel like you are turning a blind eye. But I bet the more active you are in helping her now, the less you will feel the need to blame yourself.

And btw, a terrible mother wouldn't care about her daughters feelings. A terrible mother would just be angry with her and never ever second guess herself. So therefore, you aren't one.

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I'm giving it another shot. We will see.
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Have you told your daughter, or does she otherwise know about the possibility of aspergers? I think she deserves to know, so then she may be able to learn about it, find some coping strategies, understand herself better, etc. Don't have any other advice to I can offer you, but I hope you can both get through this okay.

Hi, I was in high school ROTC my freshman and sophomore years. I got a lot out of it and later wished I would have stayed longer.

Because the social 'rules' of the military are more cut and dried, the kidding more obvious perhaps, I can see a person on the Spectrum actually doing pretty well.

The weight gain could be any of a number of things. I remember when I got my first girl friend at age 26, just eating out at restaurants more often caused me to gain weight. And same for later on when I worked at a restaurant.

Please try and go easy on yourself. In poker terms, it might still be a 'winnable hand.'

PS I AM NOT A PARENT. But I do live life on the Spectrum and I try and be a pretty good guy.

And Welcome to Wrong Planet! I think our group is really pretty great!

The worse thing that you can do to someone with AS is to try to get them to be normal. That person might think that you hate them. This isn't an attack on the OP. This just a fact that I'm stating to WP.

To the OP: How does your daughter feel about you trying to make her normal. Does she wish to be normal? Did you ask her if she wants to be normal? Does she feel that you don't love her unconditionally because she's not the normal that you want you to be?

I think that you should talk to your daughter and ask her these types of questions and to tell her why you've been doing the things you have.

Another thing to remember is that she's going to have AS for the rest of her life. Her brain is different from yours. Not in a bad way, but just different. You're going to have to be as positive as you can when you tell her, don't show any tears.

Acceptance is the best cure.

I don't think you did anything wrong. Did you do everything you could for her with the information you had? Remember, heindsight is always 20/20.

The best thing to do is encourage her to hit the gym, and take advantage of every minute of the week she has to retest. The military isn't a bad deal, there is a lot of order and routine that can be good for people with AS.

Everyone has failures in life, and as much as we, as parents, want to protect our children from all of them, we can't. And we shouldn't.

When you describe how far your daughter has gotten, I don't see how you could have done much of anything more than you did do. You home schooled and she thrived; homeschooling is perfect for so many kids with AS, and no one even had to twist your arm to do that one for her. There are many, many different roads that can lead to the same place. I know you feel bad that you encouraged her to act normal, but to some degree every parent of an AS child has to do that, at least for some of the public face the child presents. My teenage son AS is free to be as quirky and unique as he wants at home and with friends, but when he took a summer camp job, he had to act normal. And he knew how to do it.

Every parent has things they wish they had done differently. I have some doozies that burn in my memory. But failure is part of life, and our kids learn from how we handle ours. We pick up and move on. There isn't much else to do.

Your daughter is experiencing something common with many young people. Growing up and having to take on responsibility is tricky and scary. Everyone reacts differently to it. Her burn out may or may not be related to the AS, and whether or not she is AS doesn't change how you have to react to it: with love and support. She is going to be hard on herself, and will need your empathy, and also your strength. She'll need you to be her guiding beacon on how to pick herself up, dust herself off, and figure out where to go from here.

it kind of sounds like if you'd known, you would have infantalized your daughter. That would have been bad.

Owch. It is so hard to watch the little birdies try to fly, fail, fall, try to fly, fail, fall-- wash rinse repeat, in a flurry of flying feathers. Honestly I don't know how my father survived my 20s. Maybe the good rote memory helped him out-- he remembered his own young adulthood, remembered that he survived and I would too.

If you had known...

...then what????

I'm with Olive Oil Mom-- I'm glad I wasn't born 10 years later. With the misconceptions and stigmas that have dogged AS since the mid-90's, she probably wouldn't be as well-off as she is.

Tried to make her normal??? What does that mean??? Tried to suppress all the little weirdisms and forced her to have two dozen friends and act just like everyone else??? Or made her do as much for herself as she possibly could and encouraged her to give everything her best efforts???

Cause, if you did the first one, yeah, that's kind of asinine. Be glad she still talks to you as much as she apparently does, say you're sorry, and try to do better. You still have lots of life left.

And, if you did the second one, you might not have known it, and it might still fly in the face of conventional wisdom about Asperger's...

...but my opinion is that the conventional wisdom about Asperger's sucks and that you basically did, without knowing it, exactly the right thing.

Tell her she's not a failure just because she has failed that this thing this time. Help her pick herself up and try again, or figure out what comes next.

Stop kicking yourself. Nobody gets through life without messing something up royally. That goes for parenting too. This isn't fatal-- growing up being told, "You have AS, you can't do that, don't try" might have been. God knows it's been one of my greatest liabilities.

First of all, please take a nice, deep breath.

All parents make mistakes, even those of us who have known something is different about our children from day 1. So you are really no different than the rest of us. The only way you can fail your daughter is to stop loving her and stop trying to help her. You very clearly love her and you certainly seem committed to helping her.

I was in the military for 6 years. I can tell you that looking back, I served with a number of aspies, though I did not know it then. The military provides a very nice structure that doesn't exist "in the real world" so this might not be as horrific as you are feeling right now.

All you can do for now is 1) stop beating yourself up. No good can come of it, and 2) be there for your daughter no matter what happens. She will be able to get through whatever happens, because you will be there helping her.

Very few mistakes in parenthood are irrevocable. This is not one of them.

Thank all of you for responding! I got online to panic and cry precisely so I wouldn't freak out on her. To all of you who repeated that I need to show confidence in her and support her, no matter what, thanks.

To those of you with military experience, thanks for sharing your story. I appreciate knowing that Aspies do well in the military.

To those who acknowledge that trying to get her to just be normal was flipping ignorant and cruel, yeah, I know! I was in denial, and believe me, in the stupid religious circles I was running in at the time, conformity was everything.

It is to my credit, than when it did finally become clear that my daughter was not ever going to be the way I or anyone else thought she should be, I did determine to love her as she is. It just took my some years to get there. And until I started doing internet research, I hadn't even heard of Asperger's.

I resisted the truth, but mostly because it didn't sound like a very bright future for my daughter in the book "Girls and Asperger's" especially the part about multiple sexual partners and easy prey for sexual predators. As a religious person at the time the first offended me, as a mom the second terrified me.

Thank everyone who responded, all of you. I really needed to hear it. It is so heartbreaking to watch your child suffer in any way. Shoot, I'm crying again. I want to take all of her hardship away, but I know I can't. I just hope that I have given her enough love, support and good advice that she can get through this. I do love her so much, and I do feel guilty that I didn't recognize her special needs earlier,but like someone posted, it's possible this is not even Aspie related. Other young adults deal with anxiety by avoidance and denial too. Life is a learning process, right?

Again, thank you, thank you for all who posted. I have flirted with joining the forum for years now, but I didn't because I kept hoping she would join. No such luck.

For those of you who pray, pray for her! Her name is Sam. Thanks.

Everyone here has been saying pretty much what I think of the situation. You're not a bad mom, everyone fails sometimes and it's how we deal with the failure that matters. And we all make a lot of mistakes as parents, there's no such thing as a pefect parent, we're all human with our own needs and desires and thoughts. You seem like you raised a successful girl despite her problems, this is just a small hurdle. These things happen to everyone, AS or not.

Well, I certainly wish that I had a mother who cared as much about me as you obviously care about your daughter! My mother was actually horrible and abusive. I believe that the only reason that my mother had children was because it would make her look like a normal person who has their life together. I have come to the conclusion that my mother is mostly likely suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder (this is in the same 'cluster' as a sociopath, to give you an idea of the magnitude of her problems), possibly combined with schizophrenia. I was brain washed from a young age to believe that God himself would strike me dead if I ever even spoke against my mothers agenda's. My mother psychologically tormented me by allowing me to watch television, listen to the radio, date, drink, go to public school, etc. and than telling me that I'm displeasing God, or even going to hell, for doing these (normal) things. I was neglected and forced to live in a filthy and unsanitary environment in which I was only allowed to shower once per week. I'm now 27 years old, and today I believe that my mother is trying to start a cult. In retrospect, if my mother could barely manage to feed and clothe me, expecting her to notice signs of AS was not really a possibility for her. Despite the fact that I had teachers telling my mother that I needed to be evaluated for ADHD and had behavioral issues, my mother chose to believe that I was just disrespectful and obnoxious, and she asked me to speak less because I was an embarrassment to her. Instead of acknowledging that I was gifted, my mother either ignored my gifts or tried to convince me that they were not there. When I was 11 years old, I won a medal for singing a solo. Within 3 years, my mother convinced me that I was such a terrible singer that I dropped out of chorus. She threw out all of my art projects in school, except for the few that I managed to hide from her and discouraged me from continuing my education. Many years later, someone offered to BUY one of paintings that I did manage to hide from her (they saw it hanging on my wall), so I know that they were good. I did my best to ignore my mother and latch onto healthy maternal figures who encouraged me. Now, I'm 27 and have a bachelors degree and am married to a successful man. My mother takes credit for all of my accomplishments and brags about them to her social circle constantly, but will go for weeks or months without calling me. To this day, she has no idea that I (most likely) have AS.

A few years ago, my mother admit to me that she had to force herself to give me hugs. I'm not sure that any part of me believes that my mother is even capable of loving me, or another person. There's no doubt in my mind that you love your daughter, and I'm sure that she's never questioned that. Despite the fact that my mother was/is so horrible to me, I believe that if I could only feel like she loves me, it would over ride all of the abuse.

My point is that, being a mother isn't about being perfect (although, I don't think that you did anything wrong) - it's about loving your child. It's about making them feel like they have worth and value, and that no matter what happens, they always have a mother who is crazy about them. You're obviously crazy about your daughter, and that's what she needs the most.

lady_katie,

If you were my daughter I would brag about you every day. You have overcome such hardship! That's amazing that you were smart enough to find other maternal figures to help you heal and learn. Plus you graduated college! AND you are in a healthy relationship! I applaud you. Wow.

Seriously wow. I am so happy for you. <3

McAnulty, thanks for bringing the perspective that this is a small hurdle. I'm starting to believe that.

The test was moved to Tuesday. That's three more days to train. Who knows how it will turn out? My daughter has amazed me before, and if the effort she is putting in came too late to help her pass this test, I am still really proud of her for pouring on the hard work here at the end. I have decided to spin it in my mind that if she doesn't pass, God/the universe knew she would be happier enlisted.

But I really hope she passes. I want her to experience the thrill of accomplishment and get a good reward for her efforts. Also, another good thing to come out of this is that she did get the anti-anxiety meds filled and they seem to be helping already. So there's that.

Thank you all for your input. It has been most helpful.