If only Beethoven’s mother had avoided Tylenol
What a strange few days it has been. I didn’t want to talk about it but I’ve had many DMs so I figured I may as well toss my 2 cents into the fetid well.
Heres how it all went down. Donald J Trump (the J is for John, my son tells me) teased his autism announcement at Kirkamania: The Final Rumble (the funeral extravaganza of a podcaster who saw school shootings as necessary).
Yesterday, with the podcaster looking up at them from the depths of Hell, Trump and RFK Jnr revealed their belief that autism could 1) be cured 2) should be cured 3) is caused by Tylenol and vaccines.
You might scoff but there’s nobody better to conjure up this thoroughly debunked new-truth than a man who once had a worm in his brain that ate potentially a lot of it.
As I read about this nonsense that will be slurped up by so many hungry little brainwashed piggies, I was interrupted by my ten year old. He wanted to talk about The Roosevelts again.
Someone once told me of my ten-year-old that I should not “reveal” that he is autistic. They felt this was a great protection to hide him from the world, to “value his privacy” as if he doesn’t introduce his superior brain proudly at first meeting.
Why would my son want to hide his neurotype? Perhaps a better question is - why do you think an autistic person should hide that they’re autistic? Is it dangerous for autistic people to be openly autistic? Is there some kind of stigma? Are fascists gunning for autistic folks or something?
And what are you doing about it other than trying to get people to encourage their ten-year-old to hide who they are?
Anyway what was I talking about? There must be a neurotype that is always struggling to say focused…but I can’t remember what it’s called…
Anyway, yes – my ten-year-old. He didn’t speak or walk or crawl or sleep the way other children might so we packed him off to the paediatrician to work out what was going on.
We were actually caught off guard by his diagnosis at four years old, and we made the child development service registrar tell our son directly. He said “is that why I’m smarter than everyone else”.
And so we took his lead. We really had no choice. He drags us around on great adventures and we try to keep up.
From then on, it was learning that we could keep up. There were the same ups and downs any parent goes through – in the sense that every up and every down feels unique to a parent.
Mostly we found that people don’t like it when your child says they are disabled. And they especially don’t like making the environments they inhabit accessible to disabled children.
Shit Neurotypicals Say
Neurotypical people love to say "sorry" if you say your child is disabled or autistic. Perhaps it’s some kind of scripted response? "Neurodivergent" confuses them, I think. They try to work out if it’s good or bad. They love binaries as much as my child does. Ironic!
They don’t bother to get to know your child. They do like to send you bad poems about Holland. And, get this, they assume ‘noises’ aren’t language. That joy can’t be found in a row of stones lined up. That there’s not something delightful in a seven-year-old knowing every Eurovision winner and their points deferential since 1956.
They’re quite limited, you know, in what they know. (Some of them don’t even find the history of flags exciting).
And surely that’s the worst fate? To be so closed-minded. To pursue a beige life, a life where your child is a handbag or a pair of shoes — a reflection only on them. Something that has to fit with their lifestyle. Something to suit them. Not a vibrant human being who will teach them things they could never imagine being so lucky to learn.
Goodness gracious me, it must be hard being a neurotypical.
They’re not all bad — I guess — the people you meet with those normal-volume neurotypical brains. Plenty of them throw out the garbage that’s been fed to them about autism and neurodivergence and disability and just talk about Ulysses S Grant with your child (the S was a typo, they tell you proudly) and hold their arm to help them up stairs...
But others don’t. And sadly, it feels like the time of the others.
When the “vaccines cause autism” debate trickled down to my son he said to me that RFK Jnr (the F stands for Francis) has always said stuff that “makes no sense about autism”.
I bit my lip and sat on my neurotype that demands I speak first at all times and said “Mmhmm?”.
“Before he said vaccines cause autism, he said phones do!!” he said.
I said, “That’s very silly”.
And he laughed and said, “You need to say sorry to Eddie for not using your phone enough because he missed out on autism. If it was true every parent would be using their phone so much to try to have autistic children!”
He had said something similar about vaccines some years before. If vaccines indeed caused autism, wouldn’t we have a higher vaccination rate?
I am still thinking about that.
About how hard it must be, being a mother who didn’t take Panadol during pregnancy, wondering if that’s why your kids are neurotypical.
I kid! I kid!
But you see eh? If I said:
“WARRIOR MOMS 🙏 I SEE YOU! Please do not blame yourself for your children being neurotypical! 😩 it must be so hard, you must have so much grief! But we need all types of children - even neurotypical ones 🥺 DON’T BLAME YOURSELF having NTs! GOD CHOSE YOU to have a child like THAT 🥯 I don’t know how you do it but you’re amazing 🤩 stay STRONG 💪 I will wear a beige flag in honour of your child 😴”
…you ahhh… maybe wouldn’t love it.
Yes we know Panadol or vaccines or phones don’t cause autism. Putting down your phone and banging someone with the equipment required does. Or maybe getting vaccinated and then getting IVF does. Or having maybe Panadol to stop your headache so you can bang in the ads to Game of Thrones does.
But it’s not really the point is it? The point is that evangelical white supremacists are always looking for a bogeyman. And they’ll sacrifice children to be the required aberrations. (Then ‘disappear’ the adults that those children turn into, because they’ve become inconvenient.)
They ignore the fact that they wouldn’t have the things they love without autistic adults. Bible translations, television, milk, the Internet. Their mean children wouldn’t have Pokemon. But still they turn themselves into beasts to cover for their own inadequacies.
Well, I hope we can all figure out who the real monsters are. People who turn those other people — queer people, trans people, Māori, Arab people, neurodivergent people — into scapegoats for every real and imagined societal ill.
Until we realise that, I’ll just pray for a cure for being like they are.
