What is the meaning of this? When ASD diagnosis throws up more questions than it answers

So my sweet, shy, funny little girl is autistic. Really? How can this be? It’s finally official. She meets criteria, say the panel of people that dissected her last week, drilling me for information from her dim and distant past – did she point?… did she mouth things? – that seem so irrelevant now, when she is who she is and nothing can change it.

I write this after a day in which she jumped over the wall at a friend’s BBQ to play with the children next door, who were more her age than the wall-to-wall babies in attendance. To the adults, unused to children her age, that she is confident and polite is proof enough of her normality – perhaps not realising that her reluctant hello and her preference for Pokemon is a sign of something more than my parental laxity. Yet for all the reports from teachers that corroborate my suspicions, I too find I still question myself at every turn.

Should I even be bothered – a veteran of diagnoses – my eldest now a child to be proud of, for all he can sometimes fixate on his screens? Perhaps then, it’s nothing – after all, the reaction from friends and family has been, by and large, nonplussed – we all know, like her brother, she will be fine.

So she might sometimes jabber about animals to no one in particular, prefer jigsaws to fairy wings and often, YouTube to human contact. Who can blame her? Perhaps it’s modern life that’s to blame, when it’s so easy to retreat into one’s shell, and we’re all so replaceable: a swipe right here, a redundancy package there. It affects us all. As parents, we are dragged away from our little ones by schedules and inflexible workplace demands, and place our precious ones with those to whom they are simply a paycheque. How can anyone grow empathic under such a regime? And yet does empathy really manifest as showing concern for others, or it is a deeper,  analytic sensitivity that is less concerned with how one comes across?

My easy peasy kitteny girl, who actually doesn’t care what people think, or worry how she looks; who has never given a moment’s trouble, except maybe about her shoes – her itchy scratchy sensory skin making tight clothes reassuring – a minor way to control her surroundings. And her hair, that’s always in unbrushable knots. But don’t we all have our quirks?

My brilliant girl, who I’ve never pushed, yet she aces maths as though I’ve been drilling her like a game show contestant, for all her writing looks like spider webs. How can I improve her self-esteem when she knows she finds some things inexplicably difficult, for all some things come so easy. Of course, she’s going to have more confidence in the things she knows she’s good at.

I read through the lines of the psychology report – she needs to know it’s okay to make a mistake, they said, with judging eyes. It’s not like I punish her for getting things wrong, although perhaps I punish myself – the roots always go deeper than we might like to admit. She’s seen me sobbing my eyes out when I’ve been unfairly reprimanded by an unforgiving workplace for a minor mistake. Being tough on herself might not be such a bad trait out in the real world that’s hard on those who can’t help themselves.

Sure, she might need help turn taking – she’s not yet eight – but since when was it sensible to teach girls to give into what others want all the time? So what if she directs play? Getting her to talk about her feelings and those of others around her is not really going to help her comprehend them. This feels like that old chestnut about teaching girls not to be bossy. I sure know a few inflexible women who get their own way in the workplace – should we be trying to make her more amenable to please others, when this most male brained of ‘disorders’ has simply stripped out the ‘fluff’ from interaction and made her more direct?

And the appealing things about her, her dreamy, innocent eyes, her inability to take a joke, her skittishness – all the things that make her her; well if she’s diagnosable, we all are, but I’ve said that all along.

So, then, what does this mean, this diagnosis? It again thrusts into spotlight the challenges I’ve faced – from the difficult personalities and sometime lack of support in my family, to the fact I feel so unliked so much of the time – the fact I’ve shown tremendous lack of judgement in some of my friends –  from the godparents who’ve not seen my kids since they were babies, to the bridesmaids who’ve never introduced me to their own other halves. Perhaps there is more to it, then – the fact I spend so much time forgiving people for how they are to me, and yet am rarely extended the same privilege for words clumsily put, or an anniversary that’s slipped my mind. I may be too together to get a label as an adult, but it doesn’t mean I’ve not suffered for my flaws, whatever others perceive them to be. 

That was the crux of it, then, the diagnosis, on which the brutal two-hour long assessment hung, the unanimous decision of adults who’ve known her all of five minutes, whose own lack of perception in some facets was to me, glaring, before they labelled my daughter for life. Forgiveness – adults are forgiving of her, they said, but her peers are not. That’s why she prefers their company – that and the unquestioning adulation of the three-year-old that latched onto her for part of yesterday’s event. My daughter can suffer others when she’s in control of the situation, but cannot understand why children her own age sometimes find her hard to play with.

What happens when your peers are adults – do they stay forgiving? – Not, it seems, so much, when relationships seem to boil down, so much of the time, to who has more power. Yet, I bend myself over backwards to accommodate people until I’m tied up in knots and still I somehow manage to upset them. And I spend so much time forgiving them – I question why I bother at all. So is this her fate, to always be disappointed? Because it has been mine and it doesn’t sit well in someone who can’t see what others can – that I am the problem, not them. Perhaps then, my expectations are too high: of myself, my kids, and others. Or perhaps, just perhaps, other people are just a bit difficult too.