Portrait of an Autist, pt. 4

So, most of the stories I’ve shared about what it was like not knowing I was autistic growing up focus on the impact it had on my life, things I suffered, my personal triumphs, that sort of thing. This story is a little different. This one is about the effect my autism had on people who loved me. This story is about my mom.

My mom and I had a contentious relationship, to say the least. In her defense, my dad was always away for work, so she had to do most of the raising of us four kids by herself. Now, my brother and sisters were exceptionally well behaved kids, polite, well mannered, quiet, easy on our mother.

I, on the other hand, I was a problem.

I didn’t mean to be. I just didn’t really grasp what was or wasn’t acceptable behavior if there weren’t clearly defined rules. Like with my brother. We would play together, and he would go along with whatever I wanted to do. This frequently resulted in him getting hurt. In fact, before I went off to college, the story of every scar on his body began with the words, “Well, one time my brother . . . “ I wasn’t malicious; I wasn’t trying to hurt him. I would just want to see what would happen in a variety of circumstances, and it happened to end up with him getting hurt.

My mother, who grew up on a ranch with a strict father, came up with the policy that whatever I’d used to injure my brother she was going to use to discipline me. For example, the time I tied him up in a hose and left the water running on him, I got disciplined with a hose, which doesn’t seem like that big a deal until you remember that little brass fucker on the end whipping around to tag my ribs. When I dropped a bookshelf on him from the top bunk, I got disciplined with the shards of a broken bookshelf. The time I was obsessed with Arthurian legend and decided to play knights of the round table and almost put his eye out with a garden rake, I got disciplined with the rake. The wooden handle, not the curved metal part. She wasn’t a monster.

I’m not allowed to tell most of my childhood stories to my nephews, by the way, for perfectly rational reasons.

Needless to say, this discipline policy didn’t exactly endear my mother to me. Things got worse after I discovered the joy of rule breaking in my sixth grade civil disobedience foray. I started treating all rules as optional, which set the stage for a very interesting experience of high school. This exploration of boundaries led to a moment my senior year where my mom confronted me and said, “I love you; you’re my son and I have to. But I don’t like you, and if you were someone else’s child, I wouldn’t let you around my children.”

Like I said, it was a contentious relationship.

This story, though, takes place when I was in high school. Now, something you need to understand is that I absolutely loved N’Sync. Like, knew every word to every song, memorized the dances on the music videos, loved N’Sync. I bought a thick turtleneck sweater like they wore for their holiday album. I bleached my tips because they looked so cool with their platinum tips.

My friends gave me no end of shit about liking N’Sync, because they all had refined musical tastes, liking bands like Incubus and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, so I mostly kept my love for N’Sync on the low down. At home, though, I didn’t reserve myself expressing my fandom. I would walk around the house singing the songs, I would do the dances in front of the tv in the game room. I was so excited about their second album, I must have talked about it for months. I had just gotten myself a job in the first semester of senior year, so with my first paycheck I bought the cd, maybe two weeks before Christmas.

Fast forward to Christmas day. Now, usually, on Christmas, my parents would bundle up on the couch and the kids would distribute the presents, then we would all go around opening and showing off our gifts. This Christmas, however, my mom got up and grabbed a present to specifically give it to me, then she sat watching me with a big smile on her face as I opened it. I tore off the wrapping to see . . . The same N’Sync cd I’d just purchased.

I looked over at my mom, tossed the cd to the side, casually, dismissively, and said, “Mom, I already have that,” and I turned to my next present.

I don’t know how long later I looked over at my mom again, and I saw her wiping at her eyes, not opening any presents. I didn’t think anything of it, but it ate at me, like there was something I should have figured out that I just wasn’t getting.

Years later I put it together. She was so excited to be able to get me something she knew I actually wanted, really wanted, and I had just tossed it to the side without a second thought. I had made my mom mad dozens, maybe hundreds of times, but that was the only time I made her cry.

Our relationship got better after I moved out of the house and she moved across the country and we only spoke once a year or so. I never apologized for the Christmas. By the time I was mature enough and knew what I had done and was ready to apologize, she was dead, far too young.

I think about it all the time.