My stepdad being a martyr...

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He doesn't think I'm more autistic than him. He thinks my mum is more NT than him... He thinks me and him are autistic. And I do too tbh which is why I struggle to think of a polite way to tell him to stop (mum leaps in and says I'm rude as soon as I say something blunt enough for him to understand. He never just takes a hint.)

But it's like he sees us as dolls.

Whenever we want something which might in some conceivable way be imperfect, he steps up. Asks us what we'd like 'in an ideal world'. And does it if we don't stop him.

Or he gets up and does things we say we're about to do. Or that someone asked someone else to do.

For eg tonight I'm having a lazy tea cos I'm tired so I'm having cereal cos I can neither be bothered to cook nor bothered to eat anything major. He started the whole 'what would you like in an ideal world'... Some nights just aren't Sunday dinner nights imo. And if I said 'Sunday dinner' mum would say 'that's unrealistic'.

Or at dinner time, mum asked me to do the drying up after dinner while she did the washing up. He said 'ok I will'. She asked me by name...

It's like he has to do everything. Nobody asks him to do everything. Then he throws whatever he did back in our face during arguments or just randomly brings it up. Stuff I can do. Mum can do nearly everything he can do. Things we can't do are cos he's manufactured it that way, so he's the only one who can fix the internet or (when I was growing up but could do this at my granddad's and mum def could & I can now...) draw the curtains cos he put a load of wires up over the curtain...

This week's obsession was shutting doors. Apparently nobody does it quietly apart from him so we should leave him to shut every door even though that makes the house cold esp cos he keeps forgetting.

I know this sounds like humble bragging and like he's helpful deep down. He is very helpful in the short term. But it's also long term not helpful. It makes people dependent on him cos he doesn't like not being in control.

When we lived apart from him he didn't believe anything got done when he wasn't there. So he'd say stuff like 'who clears the dishwasher?' even though all three of us did and the only reason he did it most when he was there was cos he insisted.

It's actually really annoying...

It sounds you are describing your stepfather as a "control freak".

A quick search of the Internet lead to a book review of a book written by Rudy Simone:

Your Aspergian will take "control freak" to a fine art. This is pretty understandable once you realize that anxiety is the platform from which they operate. Control is their way of bringing safety and sensory comfort to an unpredictable, unsafe, uncomfortable world. They are also very particular about what stimuli gets into their brain. Perhaps you have fights about the temperature in the car that have nearly come to blows, or have dueled over what program to watch on the television. Maybe they will literally scream at times if they don't get their way. Spoiled brat? Probably not, They probably just came that way, straight out of the box, no assembly required.

Yeah, that makes sense.

I think I fit that too which is one reason why we clash sometimes.

But I leave other people alone. I recognise other people aren't Sims. If mum's having cereal for tea, I leave her to it. I only bother other people with my 'control freak' side if what they're doing will get in the way of what I'm doing.

The curtain thing is cos of his specialist interest at the time (and in general) which at the time was the subset of 'buy sky tv for one room then figure a way to broadcast it into three rooms'. Quite impressive in the 90s. Nowadays, they get around it by offering a subscription service to the entire house - so I see it more as 'technically illegal for the time' than as bad.