I’ll start by saying I was the weird child at school, and still have problems understanding ‘normal’ people. I thought I was just an outlier among normal people, but now at nearly 50 I am now so sure. So I’m looking at my daughter and wondering if she needs some understanding, and whether I would have benefitted from it years ago.
Dd is 14. She is probably one of the cleverest people I know. She scores top of her class in most of her school subjects and can become obsessive about it, getting very angry if she perceives a question in her homework or an exam to be unfair. She scored 99% on her recent maths exam and the teacher told her not to worry about the remaining 1% as it was not a fair question in hindsight, and she got very cross and is still mentioning now that she ought to have got 100% but the teacher put in an unfair question. She’s happiest with subjects that offer logical solutions such as maths and physics, but biology and even the thought of it has her actually physically retching.
She cut off all her hair at the start of lockdown. She had waist length flame red hair, but wears it in a boy cut now and puts a hat on top of it when she can. All of her clothes are baggy and unisex, although she has a very particular sense of style (everything is black, combat pants, Doc Martens, science logos.) She is often mistaken for a boy, although she does not find that offensive (in fact she often completely blanks the topic when someone refers to her as ‘young man’ which happens often on holiday in foreign countries) but is clear she is a girl. She plays cricket on a girls’ team and though they are short of numbers and has been invited to play on a boys team she refuses and campaigns instead to get more girls playing for her girls’ team. She is sporty, and very focussed. She has been successful enough in 2 sports to be considered for county team on one and national team on another. The sports are considered geeky and weird by friends and family (not me, they are my sports too - very numbers and points based sports, I love the counting and strategy side of it.)
She is quite a solitary person, preferring to spend most of her time on her own in her bedroom, where she draws a lot. (She’s very artistic.) Her bedroom is filthy, and I have trouble getting her to see that. She says if I try and get her to tidy it, she can’t concentrate if there is too much order. I am the opposite - I cannot move onto a new task if there is not order elsewhere (this leads me to get stuck in endless cycles of ‘sorting out the house’ before I can move on, and frustrates me sometimes because I feel I am up against family members who are working against me in my sorting out. Dd and her hoarding tendencies, and DH who can work in a complete pit and not notice to drive me round the bend.)
She has few friends, and does not spend much time with them. She spends time with her family only reluctantly. I worry about her social life, but she doesn’t worry about it. She has said to me in the past though that she doesn’t really like other people - they don’t get her, so she is not bothered with them. When she is with like-minded people she is very animated, to the point where she does not always pause to allow other people to get a word in. She is either holding forth in a constant stream of consciousness about her chosen topic, or withdrawn and silent if the subject doesn’t interest her, and little in between.
With regard to moral codes, both she and I see only in black and white, no shades of grey. This causes both of us to end up in arguments. I have found as I get older I get more entrenched in arguments, and cannot get out of them if I feel the other person is wrong, and I would like to be able to help my dd understand herself so that she doesn’t ever get to the point I am at, where I am considered by a lot of people to be an argumentative old bat.
She said to me one time that she thought she might be autistic because she had been reading up about it, and I said not a chance. She had decided she was a lot of things at that time, because she had been reading up on them, from being non-binary to having latent magical powers! I took much of it with a pinch of salt. Now I am not so sure if I am doing her a disservice by not considering if she might be a bit ASD. And I wonder the same a bit about myself. My sister made me sit down and do an adult online autism test because she had seen one on a TV program and done it herself, and it suggested she would benefit from further testing. On a scale, I would consider my sister fairly normal compared to me, and I would consider me to be fairly normal compared to DD, however I acknowledge all of us do not act like or live a lifestyle that you would consider normal. Not sure where to go from here, or whether I just leave it and get on with things. I don’t know whether knowing anything would benefit us - I hold down a very responsible job that requires a psychological profiling as part of my medical every year. My doctor has never mentioned anything, but I look at my mostly male colleagues and reckon that most of them have ASD traits, although most people would just describe them as geeks, and they don’t have any bother. Mostly though, I just want to give DD the best approach to life that I can, so if there is anything I could help her with I would be grateful if anyone could point me in the right direction.