A friend was on Facebook the other day, complaining about the screaming kid in front of him at the store. Most of the people who responded were right there along with him, expressing their own frustrations with those kids and their tantrums and how they needed to be disciplined or get the hell out of the store.
I found it amusing, didn’t think much of it. I know my friend is a sweet, tolerant man and meant nothing of it. I let it go, until I read the response of just one person. A fellow autism parent, offended by the comments.
You never know why that kid is crying, he said, they could have autism. And my friend replied, I know autism, and this wasn’t autism.
Chances are he was right. But still, I smiled a sad smile, for all the people who thought that if they knew one autism child or five, they knew them all. I wondered how many times someone had said that about my child. How many times they had been annoyed by my daughter’s crying at the cash register. How many looks I got when I opened a can of soda and whatever else she threw at me just to get her to calm down enough for me to get our groceries.
Now that she’s a teenager, it’s pretty obvious she has the disability. She’s taller than me, and I’m always holding her hand, and she’s usually smiling and swaying as Barney or Sesame Street is blasting on her iPad. She’s loud as hell and I’m constantly asking her what she wants, praising her, running after her or asking her if she has to go to the bathroom.
At restaurants, I usually juggle two plates at the salad bar, mine full of actual salad and hers full of pasta, bacon and ham.While I fill, she dances. I always accompany her to the bathroom and we squeeze into one stall so I can help her do her business. She will jump up without warning and run across the restaurant, or jump up and down as her music plays.
It’s amusing to me now. You laugh, or you cry. I stopped caring a long time ago what people think about me and her as we do our thing. If they stare, I stare back or ignore them.
Yes, I will agree, my friend knows that kind of autism. It’s pretty obvious, and as the years go by, people seem to be more aware. Most people know that autism.
That guy who responded knows autism. And he didn’t find my friend’s comment amusing. And even though I knew my friend meant no harm, at that moment I felt passion for a fellow member of my autism parent club. I didn’t want him to feel alone like I had so many times. I didn’t want him to think it was the world against him. So I responded with a simple: “Amen.”
Ten minutes later, I went back to see if there were any more responses. My friend had deleted the post in its entirety.
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