7/16/13
I want to address the news I got last evening from my dad: We cannot see them this summer. They are moving and it just cannot happen in time to be back before school starts. So I am faced with trying to come up with a Plan B for a vacation of some sort before I tell Dalton. Otherwise he will be devastated!
But I woke up thinking about Nancy and what she must be going through, knowing my dad and all the times my mother had to endure moving with him. And I think about what I am learning about Aspergers and about myself and my childhood. I actually have a lot of my dad in me.
And it suddenly occurs to me to wonder why I have never kept in touch with Nancy; she is my stepmother, I have never had any problems whatsoever accepting her and I’ve always enjoyed seeing her and talking with her. It makes no sense. It must be that my failure to communicate with her is related to the “disconnection” I have always experienced with my father.
But I am so grateful for her – if not for her, would I ever have come to understand my father or be able to get to know him at all and to share him with my son? That is HUGE. I feel the need to write to her. To tell her what she means to me. And who knows, perhaps she might have some ideas about what I might do with Dalton for a vacation this summer. But besides that, I want to TALK to her.
This is all just HUGE. I suddenly can make sense of so much that has troubled me my whole life! Wow.
When I first woke up, I suddenly had all this clarity, the words that I wanted to write to Nancy came to me so clear and succinct. I hope this clarity will come back to me when I actually sit down to write. But as so often happens, that clarity seems to fade upon full cognition, when waking up. That narrow focus becomes harder to find. Somehow, it seems that writing comes easier when half asleep.
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7/18/13
And yesterday I did write to Nancy, and I also took Dalton to dinner and told him that we can’t go to L.A. to see my dad this summer, but that I promise we will do something. And he took it amazingly well. I also wanted to talk to Dalton about another issue, one concerning his father and the fact that the man has been continually calling Dalton and Dalton has not been answering his calls, creating some stress and guilt feelings in Dalton. But he indicated to me that he has decided on his own how he intends to deal with his dad in order to get rid of the guilt plaguing him. My son is growing up.
I came home feeling much relieved. I decided to watch The Hobbit by myself in my bedroom (since nobody else seemed to ever want to see it with me). I enjoyed it.
And I am going to share here part of the letter I wrote to my stepmother and sent today. And it occurs to me that I want to somehow convey to my brother all of this stuff about our dad, so he can come to terms with it all and begin to heal. My sister and I have discussed it at length, but I am thinking that our brother needs to deal with this too. It just puts such a different light on our childhood, when seen through the lens of Asperger Syndrome. But it isn’t a matter of instantly making everything “right.” It requires much thought and a lot of emotion.
And maybe I should try to write something – about growing up with an Asperger parent, about how it was and about how I can look at it, and my father, now. It doesn’t have to be a book (which idea overwhelms me); and actually if I also look at the thing I have wanted to write about my mother ever since her death (“pharmaceutical hell”) as an article, rather than a book – that might make that project seem less daunting too. There’s no reason why I couldn’t write articles. Just write it for myself and see how it comes out. And this also would help me with writing my “bugwump” memoirs – if I ever manage to get that into clear form.
Well, as usual my mind has a lot to chew on. But for now, here are excerpts from my letter to Nancy:
…I want to tell you what has only recently started becoming clear to me – and I owe it to you, and am and will be eternally grateful to you for this gift:
When I started thinking about coming down to see you this summer, I suddenly realized that I had never gotten around to reading the book you loaned me last summer about Asperger’s Syndrome. I decided I should read it now so I could return it to you. And as I read this book, it led me to research the subject more, and many things have started to make sense that have never made much sense before.
I know that you made the determination that my dad has Asperger’s quite some time ago and the little I then knew about it, I simply accepted that it did make sense. But I never really thought about it very much nor did I process how it might affect me and make sense of my childhood.
First of all, I want to tell you that I have so much love and respect for you for the long and difficult road you have likely endured in staying with my dad and endeavoring to learn and work at making things work. That means a lot to me. And I know it cannot have been easy. But in sharing with me what you have learned, you have essentially given me my dad – after all these years of pain and anger and sadness and confusion. That is HUGE.
I can finally start to understand my father, and I feel only love and compassion instead of confusion and distress; and instead of GUILT. Not only does my childhood start to make sense, but all my years of personal struggle now starts to make more sense too.
I have been working for a number of years on trying to come to terms with my own challenges, which can be understood fairly well through the perspective of ADHD. But I never before thought about the relationship of my ADD to my father’s Asperger’s. I do not like or really agree with applying labels to all the varying differences among human beings. But I do understand the necessity of using them as a frame of reference in order to speak of such things.
And I am seeing a lot of my father in me. Formerly I would have been horrified by that. But I now begin to understand, and it makes sense.
There is a book about ADD/ADHD, written by a doctor, which I have been reading off and on over the last year or two. And in it, he writes about how he believes these types of conditions come about. There is a genetic link for a certain kind of “sensitivity” in some people, a trait that in the right conditions is a positive one. But the fact is that most of our brain development occurs after birth and how we ultimately develop neurologically depends a great deal on our environment in early childhood. It is this predisposition for sensitivity that actually gets passed on. ADD is thought to be a lack of certain neurological development. There are many similarities between ADD and Autism/Asperger’s, although not to the same degree. Nobody really knows what causes these things to occur, and I do not know where my father’s Asperger’s came from, or what his early childhood was like. But I can see what might have happened in my case.
I believe that whatever genetic link contributed to or caused my father’s Asperger’s very likely passed down to me the predisposition for whatever it is. And as a small – and sensitive – child, how might having a father with Asperger’s affected me? I certainly experienced a sense of emotional “disconnection” with my father. And then there was the added element of a very restrictive and stifling (and baffling) religion, coupled with the dysfunctional relationship between my parents. To this day I suffer pain over how it was for me growing up. It affected who I am in many profound ways.
I have been working hard in recent years to understand myself and my challenges and to learn and grow. I have learned many things about myself and have changed for the better in many ways. Knowledge is everything really. But now I can finally see the bigger picture and feel a sense of connection with my dad for the first time in my life. I can now see my father’s challenges in light of my own and vice versa. This is all extremely profound to me. I can finally connect the dots and see how it all makes sense. And now I can heal and grow without this confusion and unresolved emotions.
….
(P.S. I did receive a reply from Nancy a few days later. She said that she was very glad to have helped me to understand my dad. She said that my father loves me very much even if it has not always seemed that way to me. And I cried a little bit. I look forward to the next time I can spend time with my dad. And I am grateful – for everything.)