as small as a world and as large as alone

9:16pm June 9, 2013

josiahd:

Dear Autism Organizations,

Encouraging parents to resent their autistic children makes their lives harder. Please, knock it off, for everyone’s sake. Parenting is hard enough without that kind of nonsense.

Sincerely,

An autistic adult

Also encouraging siblings of autistic people to resent us and believe that it’s so bad having us as siblings that we need support groups for it. And, more rarely, when they acknowledge it at all, being the child of autistic people, same deal.

I’m autistic. And I’m the sibling of an autistic man. And I’m the child of an autistic man. And none of these things make me resent having had to live with them. Nor do I blame every problem in our relationships on autism, the way many support groups want me to do. I can’t last longer than a day in a sibling support group without offending people with my total lack of giving a crap that my brother is autistic.

Mind you, my brother molested me. But that’s not autism, autism doesn’t cause adult men to molest 10-15 year old children 14 years younger than them. But you can bet if I was not autistic and was in a sibling support group they’d be asking me to blame his lack of social skills. Rather than his lack of ethics, his using me to get back at the world in a vindictive and nasty manner, etc.

I actually have a half decent relationship with him now. But the molestation (and emotional abuse that went with it) was the biggest problem in our relationship and you can bet it wasn’t caused by autism.

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