Well then. I apparently started to write a blog and then completely failed to post it? Like a month ago? Something like that? So... there is a lil more catching up to do. But there's plenty to catch up. So be prepared! And here I thought a blog without covid was just boring these days!
So, let's just zip through the last quarter a year or so and then get down to business... I'm not sure what kind of business. Maybe crypto? I hear that's popular?
Allan finished first grade in July. Yes, super later because of the teacher strikes earlier in the year. And, that's not all bad. Two months is plenty to be out of scheduele and off routine.
To celebrate, we had ice cream. This was before she noticed the cracks in the wall near the ceiling of Huskey Deli and has decided to never ever go back. Which is a bit of a shame because they have really good vanilla ice cream. I asked if it was ok if I picked ice cream up and we had it somewhere else. This is still up for debate. But there's another ice cream shop in White Center so all is not totally lost.
In other exciting summer news, Allan hit an anxious patch a few weeks after school wrapped up. Was it related to mommy's covid dalliances? Anxiety about the coming school year (when summer is only two months long, the dread starts almost immediately) Something about turning eight and officially skirting "big kid" territory? Just that way the mind suddenly hits little snags and bumps? Who can say for sure. But it was a summer of problem-solving and patience all around.
Also a summer of being extraordinarily tired!
We also seem to have lost "Pam's House" as the ultimate Allan Fantasy Land. I wish I could say I understand what happened, but all I know is that shortly before school started, Allan was supposed to have a week at my mom's, but she insisted on coming home after half a day there. I am still sad about this. Both because it seemed like such a cool big thing for her (she was ALWAYS begging to go there and ALWAYS saying how much better things were when she was there), and because as a housebound "introvert" (more on that later) with significant sensory sensitivities, having a cleaned up and quiet house to myself and occasionally my husband was sort of a big pillar of my chill. Thank GOD for school... but it's not really the same as having an entire weekend.
Pam- Allan weekends are still sacred. My mom is now just staying with Allan in her room for her "Pam weekends." I love this on the one hand. I love spending time with my mom. I love Allan to pieces.
But also.
I feel even more overstimulated (more noise, more mess, more sensory input period) with an additional person in the house, and less able to self medicate the ills of the world by (1) cleaning the damned house and (2) binge watching trashy television/reading a book for hours on end until I collapse in a blissed up bookish heap. In other words, the covid cave may need to be resurrected as mommy's official she-shed. Or I could borrow Allan's tent I suppose...
Regardless, I'm glad we're finding ways to make things work together.
Summer summered pretty well with lots of learning and adusting for all. Also a few great camps. Allan had maybe one or two difficult days peppered in with a lot of big successes so I'd say our strategy of spacing the camps out to every second or third week was a great idea.
Just to wrap it all up with a bow, both mommy and daughter decided to take the leap and age:
Allan's dream birthday was to have her bestie Yael over and for me to hide all of her presents so she could find them in an epic treasure hunt. DONE! I love it when it's feasible. Yael and her sis Chaya (not to be confused with Good Chaya and Bad Chaya, the twins who ran away roughly around the time Allan discovered her real name, and who still sometimes pop up outside in the trees) showed up and obliged with some partying and some serious hunting.
I also got some activities, an obscene number of party favors and gluten free cake slices (Yael is celiac and Allan needed to share "cupcakes" with her or her birthday would not have happened) that none of the girls liked really but at least they liked the frosting. Fortuitously the adults... they liked it a lot... it was actually really good just not white cake texture.
It was a grand birthday haul all around.
Eightyears old suits our little moonshadow elf. And while it was not the "best birthday ever" (that would be year seven), it was still met with approval.
I figured i might as well age too
Balloons were had and cupcakes were eaten in my honor.
For a while she couldn't stand to be alone AT ALL during any point of the day. Except when she wanted to hide in the covid cave downstairs because it was less scary there. And when she wanted a tent. And most of the aternoon when she was on her kindle. Ok, so at night.
But she problem-solved it out. Noises scared her and not hearing them means not being scared, so our six different sets of noise muffling headphones are proving their worth. Then we added some bedtime podcasts to the mix and, well, she still won't fall asleep without one of us in the room, but she will hang out in her room on her own while mommy and daddy tend to our evening ablutions And she even consents to stay in the house, which was not quite where we were a few months ago, so I'll take it.
I think it didn't hurt that school finally started and... turned out ok...
Pretty awesome even. She's been having playdates - real post pandemic playdates! We all love her teacher. Gym class is still the best except for her two art classes and, of course, recess which are also the best. The new building is just basically awesome. It's back in our neighborhood, finally, so we can actually walk to school every day. Stuff is pretty good.
And hopefully getting better with a little clarity and some extra options for accomodations where they might be needed.
Four years after her first neuropsychiatric evaluator utterly kiboshed even finishing the autism assessment because Allan made A LOT OF interpersonal contact (like climbed into her damned lap and started playing with her hair if I recall correctly)...
A year or so after her journey through "maybe ADHD?"because her therapist is ADHD herself, and saw some similarities in the areas that overlap with autism traits, and heck the neuropsych also suggested maybe ADHD (just not autism, seriously everything but autism) way back when...
After getting that all evaluated and coming up with nothing except maybe anxiety (ya think??)... after everyone at Allan's school decided to just operate off the working assumption that she was probably on the spectrum anyways...
after Allan's OT also decided the same thing and recommended a second evaluation...
we finally came full circle and graduated from neurodelicious not otherwise specified to Autistic!!!
Which is awesome. Because Allan is Allan and Allan's pretty awesome, so Q.E.D. etc etc. And, well, now we know, we can help her embrace who she is and at least try to avoid forcing her into the lil machine that wants to staple a mask to her and call her typical. A lot of people in the prior years have said that she could be _____ (positive sounding word that mostly means meeting somewhat normative expectations ) if she just applies herself or whatever else and well... yeah she probably could pretend to be _____ but when was the last time a typically behaved normal kid became an astronaut painter then morphed into a uni-kitty to bring about the apocalypse on a dragon?
If Allan needs to process by doing her route across her couch for a few hours a day, well.. so be it.
And if any other teacher's aides tell my girl that crying in school is for babies, they are getting a full grown up meltdown full of righteous justice... just saying.
Honestly all this rigamarole has yet to make much of a difference for Allan. She was already in with a great group of professionals who thinks she's cool the way she is and is more interested in working with her instead of trying to change her. But that could defnitely change in the future, so having this piece settled will be helpful.
It might've been a bit more of a moment for her parents.
Even though I've wondered about Allan's spectrosity for four or so years, and even though I have read tons about autism in girls (and therefore women), it felt different somehow with the official diagnosis and... well...
I mean she's kinda her own person and also totally holy crap we are so flipping much alike. In diagnostically relevant ways... And well.. it's not like I haven't wondered...
"They" say that if you are wondering if you're autistic, you probably are.
I dunno if I go that far. I think I've wondered if I'm a ton of things that ultimately I'm not (for instance, turns out I'm still a straight cishet human woman born of two identifiable parents and not actually an orphaned alien princess destined to save the universe with latent magical powers... BAH!!), but if you are wondering and you are have wondered for maybe a decade and have mostly unmasked about your occasionally severe sensory sensitivities mixed with a good heaping of semi-socially acceptable stimming, a dash of general rigidity and a heaping of happy hermititude ...
... I'm not saying every parent whose kids have autism prolly does too, because trust me I've met neurotypical autism parents, and boy jeezus they are so incredibly shockingly amusingly neurotypical!! (You have to attend a panel on parenting autistic kids with a token neurotypical mom in a sea of ND parents. It's like an SNL skit)...
...
I am saying that a month after Allan's diagnosis, I'm reading probably my 40th book on the science/history of autism on my phone while pacing my little circle in the kitchen and twirling my hair against my lips and you should see my volumes of notes and timelines and charts that I made instead of having lunch earlier...
...and oh is that what they meant by special interests? I thought they meant like trains and strings of mathy stuff. I mean trains are cool, but... have you ever had a heavily annotated and cateogorized collection of several thousand tango songs, some of which you had to acquire by going to a specific store in a specific barrio in Buenos Aires and that you absolutely have to tell the story of how it was conceived produced or written to somebody at some point soon or you will explode?? Oh or the several hundred pairs socks you collected, until they gave you hives to wear and losing them still feels like the loss of a limb?? Or... well let's just say Red Dwarf and leave it at that...
But trains are nice too. Sometimes kind of loud. And bright. And maybe they can smell too much because people always fricking have this obsessive need to bury themselves in sickening levels of fragrance when I'm on one.
...
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| Something in between? |
So, needless to say, the idea didn't hit me from outta nowhere. But, I never quite knew how to take the "sppech and social deficits" aspect of it all. I mean I'm a socially awkward "free spirited" weirdo and all, BUT: I get sarcasm (though I prefer a lighter kind of whimsical glibness personally, thanks). I am not remotely literal. I am a logophile and I put things real niiiiice according to people. I read people pretty well... I think? Maybe? I'm empathetic to the point some might say hyper empathetic. If anything I have to restrain myself from being overly expressive most of the time...
As much as I've actually met many autistic people (if you've met one autistic person, you've met... one autistic person... if you met tons of autistic people, you've met tons of autistic people) I somehow still kind of had a pretty narrow and inaccurate picture of what any of it meant
It does kind of put stuff in perspective. Especially reading about masking in women. And what happens to your mental and physical health when you do mask hard for a long time (ta da!! wonk body for the win!).
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| I'm normal. Everything is normal. You are convinced, right?? |
Which felt so eerily familiar through my life, that I went back and reread many of my old journals. And well then. Could be that not everybody spends most of their childhood reading articles about communication styles, relationships, conflict resolution, psychological types, body language (optimal eye contact is 3 seconds on 2 off 3 on... try having a normal conversation now that you know that).
Could also be that women look different than men and it's kind of a problem because all anyone is looking for is what men look like...
Could be that social interaction is just a series of patterns and anyone with an eye for patterns can start to "count the cards" of average conversational ebbs and flow. But maybe doing it that way it a little more tiresome even when you're pretty darned good at it
Could be that I'm jumping the gun and could be that I'm actually just part of the broader autistic phenotype, but the same issues and reflections come up.
There are ways that I've ignored parts of who I am in order to fit in a make other people comfortable. More so when I was young. But even when I was happily a weirdo, there were habits. Ways of denying my discomforts or confusions. Ways of smoothing situations out to make people feel at ease. And there are ways I've pushed myself that were beyond my actual limits and my body felt it hard. And there are ways that I will never recover from that.
And there are ways of honoring not just my boundaries (demanded by physical ailments already) but also embracing my quirks in ways that go beyond the ways I already have. So that's cool.
I'm still weighing what a diagnosis would mean and hwo to pursue that when the journey is particularly rough on late diagnosis heavy masking women. But regardless, there are lessons to be learned damnit.
I'm sure I'll have plenty more of mulling to do. I haven't really gotten all philosophical on this blog recently, but it may come to that! It may come to that!! Brace yourselves...
And somehow it's more heartening to talk about my weird brain than my angry immune system, so breath of fresh air!!! Whoo!
And somehow October seems like a wonderful time to contemplate masks and all the fun and challenge they can bring.
We have big plans for Halloween... you'll never guess what Allan's going to dress up as... never! (ok it's the same cat costume as last year and it'll probably last another several years, so sweet!)
Wishing everyone an ooky spooky good time
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