Prepare to enter the wild and wooly world of an adult with Aspergers Syndrome, a form of autism characterized by intellignce, quirks, social difficulties and downright strange and oddish behaviours.

People with Aspergers generally are high functioning in everyday life but have great difficulty connecting with others due to the inability to read faces, body language and subtle verbal clues. They also tend to take words literally and have a hard time multi-tasking.

Oversensitivity to touch (clothing has to be soft and often the tags removed), light (do not leave home without the sunglasses), sound (loud noises and noisey places are avoided), taste (many Aspies have quite a limited diet and are frequently very picky eaters) and smells makes the everyday existence more of a challenge.

Fasten your seatbelts and come on in...
To find out more about what Aspergers is..please check out my earliest blog entries

Friday, November 11, 2016

When you are mom to a disabled kid...

There is a certain look that people get on their faces when they notice my son's disability. For months I haven't been able to identify it even though I see it every month, oft every week.
I noticed it again today when my neighbor came up to me, all excited and enthusiastic. His eyes, his eyes were very different. His lips were different too. His smile was a wee bit forced and never varied from an over wide grin. He was offering my son and I free tickets to a local big college game.
His smile never wavered when I stated that I was autistic and couldn't handle crowds. Okay, his eyes got a bit vacant like "what does That mean?" but his smile remained.
It's like...he had a tear or two hiding behind his eyes. A certain sadness that I can now summarize as the thought, "I'm so sorry."
I saw it in the eyes of the waiter who brought us the takeout, in the eyes of his teachers as they talked about him and I see it frequently in those glances standing in line somewhere when someone notices he has no left hand.
It's okay, though. I guess I see it as a silent admission that they too realize my son's life has a few challenges.
Sigh. It's wonderful to be able to finally identify the look I've been seeing for over 13 years now.