Why My Mother Is The Type Of Parent That I Like

When I was born, I screamed constantly. The only thing that would console me (i.e. shut me up for two ****** seconds) was for my mother to pick me up and walk around with me, or to take me out for a walk in my pram. My mother must have found this extremely stressful. She admits now that there were times when she half-seriously wished that she could swap me for her parents' cat. She did not do this. She did not think that my unceasing screams were a sign that I was a bad, burdensome baby who was a blight upon the face of the earth. She thought that I was a difficult, very unrelaxed baby, and that this was just something that she had to deal with.

When I was in preschool, I was diagnosed with high muscle tone and sent to have physiotherapy and occupational therapy. My mother did not cry about her poor little disabled child who needed to be fixed, she did not complain about the expense of these therapies: she simply went through my exercises with me and made sure that I enjoyed them and was motivated to do them.

Not long before I was due to start school, my mother was told that I was not socially ready for school. (Possibly because I spent all my time alone and rarely seemed to acknowledge the existence of the other children. (I knew that that they were there, I just didn't see what they had to do with me.)) She could have wept and gnashed her teeth at the tragedy of her child who was NEVER, EVER going to have ANY friends. She didn't. She accepted the situation and explained it to me. I was disappointed , as I had been looking forward to starting school.

I had speech therapy all through high school and some way into high school. Once again, my mother did not lament the fact that her child COULDN'T TALK PROPERLY. She knew that speech problems ran in her side of the family (she stopped talking as a child and had speech therapy, I stopped talking for a few months after a bout of tonsillitis and had a lot of speech therapy, my brother didn't talk until he was three and had some speech therapy, and my youngest brother had more speech therapy than me.) and that this was just a problem to be dealt with.

I was bullied through most of my school years. My mother did not take this as a sign that my life was one of unremitting tragedy and that I should never have been bought into the world. She read it as a sign that children are cruel and will tend to pick on anyone who is different. In her eyes, I was not the problem; the bullies were.

At the age of 21, I came to the conclusion, after A LOT of reading and thinking, that I had Asperger's syndrome, and that that was the cause of many of my differences and difficulties throughout my life. I told my mother of this discovery. She did not say
"No, there is no way you are autistic, autism is a tragedy, no child of mine is one of THOSE people, and besides, all autistic people (insert stereotype here)."
She listened to what I had to say, and said that maybe being autistic wasn't such a bad thing after all. She listened to some of the things that I had remembered from my childhood and said that she had never thought of them in that light. She LISTENED.