9:10pm September 8, 2014

And yes, in case you’ve guessed.

That means I’m one of the infamous Silicon Valley Auties.

You know, the ones whose parents moved there to find jobs in the tech industry, and then had lots of autistic children because they themselves were either on or close to the spectrum.

My father and mother met because my mom’s brother was my dad’s roommate in technical school. My mom was 15 and my dad was 20 and they fell in love at first sight and never looked back, although their parents made them wait until they finished high school.

As far as I know, my dad got technician jobs, and my mom did things like waitressing until she put herself through community college for a respiratory therapist degree. And then she did that for decades.

So my parents were an electronics technician and a respiratory therapist who always lived either in Silicon Valley or near it because that’s where the work was for electronics technicians.

They had three children. Two of the children were flagrantly autistic, as in these days we’d have been diagnosed before the age of two, possibly earlier even than that. But as it was, we were labeled with other things entirely. The third child is not autistic, but may qualify for cousinhood, and was diagnosed as hyperactive as a child (and may have had undiagnosed learning disabilities that made school really hard for him).

Three autistic people in a five-person family, and two BAP/cousin types.

Three left-handed people in a five-person family, also unusual. (Not the same people as the autistic people. I’m the only definitively left-handed autistic person. Unless my mom is on the spectrum. She’s wondered if she’d have been diagnosable with Asperger’s growing up, even though by now she doesn’t show much outward sign of that. Whatever she is, she’s neurodivergent and so is the entire family.)

Coming from a neurodivergent family doesn’t always make things easier. Even when everyone knows they’re neurodivergent, which we didn’t. Nor did we understand the significance of our neurodivergence.

But even with all the ways our family could be messed up around neurodivergence, I see families where someone is the only autistic or neurodivergent person, and I feel like they are missing out on something.

Because when I look at my family. I see neurodivergence, and disability in general (cognitive, developmental, psychiatric, physical, etc. – everything), and chronic illness, and I see all these people, and I don’t see nondisabled people.

And so somehow. Without anyone saying a word about disability. I absorbed the view that disability is everywhere. That it is part of the landscape. That it is natural. That it is normal. This does not mean it’s always good. Take a look around a natural landscape, you’ll find plenty of briars and poison oak and nettles in addition to beautiful things, and you’ll find plenty of things that are both beautiful and poisonous.

What it does mean is that we are a part of this world, for good. We were meant to be here, we were not meant to be eliminated from the gene pool, we are in the gene pool, the gene pool wouldn’t be what it is without us. We are here, we are part of everything humanity has ever done, we are a part of the world and we will not and should not go away.

That’s what my family taught me without ever saying a damn word about disability.

It meant waking up at night to hearing my mom cough until she vomited. It meant listening to my dad have a full-scale, screaming, crying meltdown when his favorite socks shrunk in the wash. It meant watching my brother flunk some “easy” subjects in school while excelling at “hard” ones, and my mom having to explain to him that being able to spell without spellcheck would not be a job requirement for any job he was likely to end up wanting. It meant watching my other brother do weird sensory integration exercises like walking with his legs strapped to a snow saucer, and being told what my parents had been told about him, which is “Every time he walks it’s like he’s learning to walk all over again.” I doubt that’s true, it’s just what the SI therapist told them.

It meant being in speech therapy myself from the age of six, it meant being in counseling therapy from the age of seven, it meant always being sent to the counselor or therapist or someone psychiatric-like at every school or academic program I was ever part of, starting at the age of seven, and seeing neurologists from the age of thirteen. It meant freezing in place at school while teachers watched children jump up and down on my hands – “It doesn’t hurt her,” the kids said. It did hurt. It meant freezing with fixed, dilated pupils while staring straight into a light source, after becoming super overloaded, and while everyone including teachers noted the situation, nobody even called an ambulance.

It meant growing up and finding ‘support groups’ for people with disabled siblings. And trying them out. And becoming utterly disgusted at the things that people were supposed to think about their disabled siblings. And realizing that the family dynamic where there’s one disabled person and everyone else is nondisabled, bore no resemblance to my family dynamics and that it would not help me at all to be in an environment full of people who thought that sibling support groups were where it’s at.

My family is different. I didn’t know how different until I grew up. I didn’t realize that most families didn’t have a close to 100% disability rate. I realized I was fortunate not to grow up in the eugenics era, and that my family was lucky that most of them escaped it. (All but a great-aunt with “cretinism” – that’s what they called it – who met a man with a similar disability and had trouble marrying him because everyone was afraid they’d have babies like themselves.) Now there are stories coming out I didn’t know about growing up, about great-aunts forced to give up their children because they were in the psych system and weren’t considered capable of raising them properly (which may have been true, or may not have been, I don’t know). Things I didn’t know because nobody talked about it.

Disability wasn’t something you talked about in our family, much. Disability was something you lived. It would make no more sense to discuss disability in depth than to discuss hair color in depth, as far as people were concerned. Sometimes you’d hear someone referred to as 'slow’ or 'tetched’, but mostly people just got on with our lives.

There was ableism, too, plenty of it. My grandmother, upon finding out I was in the psychiatric system, wouldn’t let me sleep in the house after we’d been invited a long way to do just that. She made us sleep in someone else’s trailer. My uncle wouldn’t let me near his children unsupervised. Just because people are disabled or accustomed to being around lots of disabled people, doesn’t mean they’re not bigoted.

But my family is like the poster child for the Silicon Valley autistics. Autistic father, neurodivergent mother with a strong history of autism in her family, move there to find technician jobs, have three kids, two autistic, one 'hyperactive’, and each person in the entire damn family is neurodivergent in more than one way, and physically divergent too much of the time. I came up with the theory that it was people moving there for the jobs, long before the article ran in Wired Magazine. It was an obvious thing to think. Whether it was right or not, who knows, but in our family it certainly seemed to fit.

(My father’s family were Okie migrants to California who later moved to Oregon where they met my mother. My mother’s dad came from, I think, Arkansas to California to Oregon, and the rest of my mom’s family were Minnesota Swedes who moved to Oregon. But my parents moved to Silicon Valley specifically to find work my dad could do, and he flourished there in a rare period where poor and working-class people actually had an opportunity to temporarily climb the ladder. They lost all their money, they’re now poorer than I am, but fortunately they’ve never needed money to be happy.)

So… yep. Walking stereotype here. I’m a hyperlexia stereotype and I’m a Silicon Valley autie stereotype. Probably lots of other walking stereotypes too if I put my mind to it.

tl;dr: My family fits the stereotype of people with a history of autism in their family, or who were autistic themselves, who moved to (or near) Silicon Valley in California in order to find technical jobs, and then created this giant 'autism cluster’ of children born who were autistic. Which includes me and my brother, two out of three kids autistic, all kids, and parents, neurodivergent. Coming from a neurodivergent and otherwise close to 100% disabled family gave me a lot of perspectives that people who are the only disabled family members don’t tend to acquire.