How 10yo AS son deals with news of move

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I mean no disrespect for you or your situation, but my life hasn't been a barrel of peaches either. My father was AS and a substance abuser, and guess what...that made him abusive. My childhood was anything but pleasant because of HIS issues. Don't get me wrong. I loved my dad, warts and all. He wasn't perfect, he had his demons, but who am I to judge. All I can do is forgive and move on with my life.

My first marriage was a bust, and for a long time I was a single mom with an AS son. So...how nice was life to me to sandwich me (all by myself with no help) between two very distinctive AS people (my father and my son) who are major players in my life? How wonderful life is to have to deal with THEIR issues and THEIR differences, and just forget how I feel about the whole mess because I am a daughter and a mother and my opinion doesn't really matter because I'm supposedly the "normal" one, so it's MY responsibililty to make everything alright? So...I get to deal with the tantrums and the social issues and the ADHD and the OCD and the ODD because I'm the only one who could possible understand, but then they get mad at me because I'm the mean one when I don't agree with their point of view. Didn't life deal me a load of garbage?

So my point is, we (you and I and everyone) all have our problems, and we have a couple of choices. We can choose to get mad and hate life and feel sorry for ourselves, or we can choose to get over it and try our best to make the right decisions and try to find some happiness along the way. We can try to be positive and try to look on the bright side of things.

Sorry for the rant.

My parents split up when I was 9 and my mother took me and my brother and moved 300 miles to be closer to her family. I had a typical meltdown over the news, but only because I thought it was my fault and I didn't know how to stop it from happening. I won't bore you with the details, but I had no solid "theory of mind" at that age and therefore thought everything was about me. The actual move was no big deal. I've never had a strong sense of attachment, so I didn't have any anxiety about leaving the things/people behind. My point is that it's not enough to wonder whether or not your son is internalizing his feelings about the move, but to know what those feelings are because they might not be the ones you expect. In my case it would have been reasonable to assume I was internalizing separation anxiety or fear when I was actually internalizing strong feelings of guilt and loss of control. After the move, everyone thought I was adjusting quite well since I didn't seem to miss my old home (I never get homesick), but I carried around feelings of guilt and vulnerability for a while. On the bright side, that event was the catalyst that lead to the formation of "theory of mind". Over the next few months I figuratively "woke up" and realized that the world was full of people who reacted to things I knew nothing about.