Writing Prompt #3

Write a letter of advice to a child thinking about running away from home.

Forget the letter- I'm not one to ask if you ought to run away from home. I'd say yes. What you really want is someone to talk you down, tell you not to be silly, tell you to be wise and forgiving and patient. I'd tell you to split as soon as you have a plan to keep you safe and warm at night.

The year that I was in fifth grade was a bad year for me. I was ten or eleven, I guess, I don't remember. I only know that it was my fifth grade year because that was the year I stayed home. Previously I had attended a small private school full of kids who didn't like me, possibly because I was a snotty little aspie know-it-all, and for whatever reason my parents though it would be better for me to study at home.

I don't fit in at my parents' house. They're good people, and they do love me, but I don't fit, and it was worse then than it is now. Everything I was supposed to be to fit into their world- submissive, peaceful, respectful- was the opposite of what I am, and at that age, I didn't know how to deal with all that weight of tradition telling me that who I was wasn't Right. I felt confined, and crushed, and I retreated into stories about other times and places. The books weren't enough, though, and I went for long walks and bicycle rides, trying to think of someplace else I could reasonably expect to be. Sometimes I would sneak out at night at and jog around the neighborhood by moonlight, just to get away, to be part of a world where there was no one else, none of these expectations that, I now know, are perfectly crazy.

There are a set of old train cars on a track near the road in the town next to the one where I grew up. They're relics of a time when the train was the main connection our valley had to the rest of civilization, but now we have I-90 and the trains sit by the side of the road, windows boarded up with slimy plywood, rusting. Here's a picture someone else took of them:


Every time I passed these trains, I would wonder how difficult it would be to break into one, and if they would keep the rain out, and if anyone would notice if there was a ten year old child living in one. I had several hundred dollars I had saved, and I thought about what I would pack when I left and how to keep people from knowing where I had gone.

In the end, I didn't go, not to the trains anyway. I decided that I wasn't willing to drop out of school in order to get away -I knew this would only land me in an even more crushing situation in the long run- so once I started high school I researched my options and decided to homeschool again. This time, I was in charge of the classes I took, something I got away with because I elected to take as many classes as I could fit into my day. I finished high school five months after I turned sixteen, and moved out of my parents' house and into a dorm room at university.

There were a number of consequences of this decision that weren't what I wanted when I made it, and sometimes I wonder what my life would be like now if I had gone instead to a public school and goofed off and smoked pot and convinced myself that it didn't matter that I didn't fit. Sometimes I get to feeling sorry for myself, but every time I pass those trains I remember what it was like when I was ten and I felt like running was the only way I could survive intact, and I know that as much as it doesn't seem that way sometimes, I made the right decision. I am as intact as can be expected, because I knew when to run.

look me in the eye

I was wandering through the library the other day and, on the New Books shelf, I noticed look me in the eye: my life with asperger's, by John Elder Robison (and now I see Mr. Robison has a blog, which I will have to add to my reading list). The book is, obviously, a memoir that focuses on life with Asperger's Syndrome. I've been interested in autism and autism-spectrum disorders for awhile now; oddly enough, a lot of the crackpot alternative "cures" for things like fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue are also billed as cures for autism, or are closely related to the "cures" for autism. Techniques like the elimination of metallic tooth fillings, or candida, or mold in your house, the use of acupuncture, or massive doses of the vitamin of your choice, or eating only organic whole food, or positive (magical) thinking, are all sold as cures for both autism and fibromyalgia. There was even a scientist on the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome forum I used to frequent who hypothesized that a regimen of dietary supplements developed for autistic children was actually the cure for CFS (registration required). (As a side note, the Methylation Protocol did seem to have some effect, as it made some people feel slightly better before making them horribly ill. The world of alternative medicine is a disturbing place.)

Some of this overlap is no doubt due to the thinking of the sellers of these "cures," which is "medical science can't solve Problem X, so the solution for Problem X is clearly this bit of quackery that makes me so much money." But there is also this sense that both autism and fibromyalgia are somehow caused by significant systems in the brain going subtly wrong, and this, to me, is very interesting. This kind of connection makes me wish I could stand formal schooling long enough to have a chance at becoming a scientist on the cutting edge of research into these questions; how typical of the world that the pain that motivates me to ask these questions is the very same thing that keeps me from being able to find the answers.

The science of pain isn't the only thing that interests me in autism-spectrum disorders, though. Robison's stories of growing up with Asperger's reminded me very forcefully of what it was like for me growing up. Not that I think I have Asperger's; I know how easy it is to read a description of anything like this and self-diagnose, simply because the mind is complicated and diverse enough that whatever it is you're looking for there, you'll probably find it. However, so many of his stories that focus specifically on what Asperger's is are things I can relate to that the whole idea of Asperger's intrigues me.

For example, he writes about being yelled at for not looking people in the eye during conversations; no one ever really yelled at me, but I certainly agree with him that looking people in the eye is unnatural and weird and uncomfortable. He talks about learning to drive, and then having problems driving and talking at the same time; when I'm in traffic and my husband is sitting next to me and he tries to talk to me, even to give directions, I ask him to stop because the distraction makes me panic, and I even have to turn down the radio so it's quiet. I relate to his description of how being petted- constant gentle physical contact- is so soothing to his nervous system that it keeps him from fidgeting without even noticing it, and some of what he says about how he relates to machines reminds me of the way I used to relate to political ideas, before I got hurt. The usefulness of training oneself to converse in ways that other people will find normal is something that I discovered as a teenager. Also, the clarity of focus that he describes as part of his savant-like ability to work with sound circuits is something that I have experienced. The single-minded abstractness required to work at a certain level of brilliance is something that I had, on occasion, but that I've lost since fibromyalgic fatigue clouded my thought processes.

The most emotional parallel between my life and Mr. Robison's life, though, is his stories about making friends as a child- or rather, failing to make friends. The bewildering emptiness of being unable to connect with the people around you, the desperate loneliness of knowing that the people you want to be friends with think you're weird and alien, all of that is very familiar to me. My childhood was, if my memories are accurate, thoroughly unhappy. It is tempting, as my brother said in comments on this post, to blame that unhappiness on my external situation, on the church or the school or the kids at school or my parents, but if I am quite honest with myself the truth is that nothing in my childhood, including my parents' religion, did quite so much damage to me as did my failure to make friends.

It's enough to make me wish that when I was young, someone had told me that I had Asperger's, even if that diagnosis wasn't justified. If I had had a diagnosis to explain why I felt no connection with other people, would I have believed for years that there was something wrong with me that made me impossible to love? I don't know. It's impossible to know what things would be like if the past was different, but I can't help but think that if someone had just recognized that I had a problem I could have been a whole lot happier.

I just finished reading Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, by Jon Krakauer, a history of Mormon fundamentalism leading up to the murder of Brenda Lafferty and her baby daughter Erica in Utah in 1984. Its a complex book, and has started me thinking on a variety of subjects, from the nature of religious belief, to my religious upbringing, to the priorities of human rights groups that condemn inhumane practices in other countries while our own government turns a blind eye to the sexual slavery of girls in polygamist communities in Arizona. Unfortunately, my mind works slowly enough that I don't have anything very coherent to say on these topics at the moment.

I will say, though, that this book reminded me that secular people who get hysterical about the Quiverfull movement, or who see it as some kind of right-wing conspiracy to take over the country by breeding little fundamentalists, are way overreacting.

I'm not saying that people who refuse to use birth-control because God Said to Have Kids aren't crazy; they are; they're also incorrect. If you're not allowed to use birth control to regulate pregnancy, you shouldn't be allowed to use vaccinations to regulate child deaths, or cars to regulate how your legs hurt when you walk ten miles. Trusting the Lord to decide the size of your family by doing nothing about it yourself makes no more sense than trusting the Lord to feed you when you refuse to raise your hand to work at growing food. The racism that proponents of these theories often spout is also disturbing. Hectoring white women to have more white babies to save the white race before little brown babies overrun the world is the stupidest reason to have a child that I've ever heard. And people who say things like "They don't believe in God, so they think we have to conserve what we have. But in my belief system, He's going to give us a new earth," to explain why overpopulation isn't a problem, are tragically detached from reality.

However, I've read the Bible, and I'm somewhat familiar with the history of the church, and it seems to me that the one thing you can count on about kids is that they're going to do things that you don't expect, particularly when it comes to religion. Great prophets throughout the Bible are shown again and again to have no control over what their children believe, say or do. Krakauer tells the history of numerous Mormons who decided that their leaders were wrong about essential doctrines, leading to more sects of Mormon fundamentalism than I think anyone has counted. He also tells the stories of girlchildren who grew up brainwashed to believe that they were supposed to be married off as a third or fourth wife at 13 or 14 in order to save their souls, but instead of cooperating talked back, called the cops, or ran off.

I guess what I'm saying is, if you're trying to produce a religious army, having children is a foolish way to do it. Children have a way of growing up and becoming their own people. It's no easier to convince your child that what you say is true than it is to convince anyone else; sometimes it's even more difficult, because children live with you, they grow up in your presence and they know all your mistakes and weaknesses and lies.