My Mother, Myself

I chose not to repeat a pattern. I chose not to punish neurodivergence.

To be clear, I am not parenting these children. But I am their safe adult. I don’t have my own marching orders. I am always in conversation with upper management. 😉 The relationship is fairly new, as I have only had three or four days with them to myself so far. But the idea is to help Tiina be Tiina.

For real.

I’ll give you a for-instance. Tiina often asks me to go upstairs and handle things because she physically cannot. I hope that I am teaching her that I’m safe to lean on, that I won’t break. She knows I love her babies, and the fact that she trusts me with them makes me cry.

And in fact I just got a picture of the entire crew going home and teared up because my house is so, so quiet.

But the thing that is so different with me is that I am armed with a shit ton of education and life experience my mother just never got. I had to figure out that I was autistic all by myself. It was devastatingly lonely, as is the autistic experience…. because what happened is that a few autistic memes appeared in ADHD groups and I did not know they were related.

Now it’s years later and I still don’t have an official diagnosis, and that is a problem to some people. I haven’t figured out what problems official diagnosis solves, and when I do, I will sign up. But the lived reality for millions of women is that they weren’t tagged in elementary school. If you aren’t tagged then, you are unlikely to be tagged at all.

Most people do as I do, make autism their special interest and learn everything about it. Completely unmasking has solved most of my life’s issues. Having a team around me solves the rest of them. I have learned to drown out my mother’s voice and replace it with my own. Nothing anyone does is a moral judgment anymore, because I understand the world differently than she did.

I’ve learned to say things like, “the food is here if you’re hungry,” get what I need, and leave.

My mother drowned every neurodivergent trait I had. Plus, women with AuDHD are rarely identified overall because the two diagnoses mask each other. She didn’t know I was autistic, but she knew I had hypotonia and didn’t think I needed any help there, either. Every time my dad tried to use words like “disabled,” my mother would tell me that my father was exaggerating and I was fine.

I just can’t “do” femininity. It is a performance, a drag show for which I am utterly unprepared. The rules are too hard and I just don’t care. It comes through in everything I do. I am not the person who is going to tell you to brush your hair, but I will if your parents tell me to…. someone’s appearance is not generally the thing I notice.

So the kids saw me in my swim trunks, bikini top, and a t-shirt in case I fell out of it. I didn’t even bother to shave my legs and haven’t for months. I am halfway to woodland creature and that’s fine. Being extraordinarily feminine costs money and time. My time is worth more than that.

My time was better spent playing Marco Polo in the lake (actually kind of exhilarating, especially when random people joined in and I said, “great. Now I have to pick out which voices are mine, too?” Tiina and I both wore ourselves out swimming and then had drinks near the water.

It was so much fun that I cannot wait to go back. The first time we went to the lake, it was in winter, so we didn’t get to swim. Yesterday, the water was just right. And now it feels like I’ll always be invited back, because I’m a node in the system.

It’s the first time in my life where I’ve been allowed to just be too much and it’s okay because frankly?

We’re all too much.

And when you’re all too much together, you go HARD.

A kid who I have personally seen grow walked across that stage and got her high school diploma. It took time and resources to plan and I did it in hours. That’s because Tiina had invited me a month ago, but didn’t put it on my calendar. She was just overwhelmed. I was unsure if I was still invited, so I checked with her. She said I didn’t have to come, it was too far and too expensive.

My thought process was that they were unlikely to move the graduation ceremony to Baltimore for my comfort, so the only responsible option was to get in the damn car.

Meetings happened that would not have happened otherwise. I got to meet one of the kids’ grandmothers (Betsy), and Brian said something about orange sherbet punch with Sprite and I said loudly:

I knew you were a Methodist!

Tiina says that she thinks I’m secretly a Jew. No, I just try to act like the historical Jesus and not the cartoon….. who was, in fact, Jewish. Therefore, it makes just as much sense to me to go to synagogue as it does to go to church. Church is where I go to hear a message, synagogue is where I go to decode it.

I have been invited to Torah study, but I’m not sure I have the time to give it the attention it deserves. But I will continue to think about it, because that is the same study Jesus would have done. It’s just a huge commitment to drive to Fredericksburg every Saturday….. but I’m basically doing almost that, anyway. I told Tiina to let me know about next weekend, because we’re supposed to start working on the tree house.

Manual labor was my gift to Tiina for Galentine’s Day. I offered to help build a sauna. She said it was already in the works, but not for this year. This year is a geodesic dome and a treehouse connected by zip lines.

I’m also not thinking about moving to the area to be closer to them, because Baltimore is part of my identity and I like driving. But I think about it in a “five years from now, maybe” sort of way. I’m not ready to leave CBH and I may never be because there’s not an equivalent anywhere except Rockville. Moving back to the DMV seems useless because it’s so expensive….. that I would be better served going straight to Stafford than just making my commute easier….. but there’s no real equivalency in mental health programs, either, so I would have to pick where I lived very carefully. Tiina said that if she were me she’d look for an apartment in downtown Fredericksburg because it’s so walkable.

But Tiina is an extrovert. She likes people.

She’s my carer. She cares, so I don’t have to. 😉