Originally posted on Random Reminiscing Ramblings.
My mother often expressed her frustration over the fact that I very seldom complained about things that (she thought) were bothering me or asked for things that (she thought) I wanted, thus forcing her to constantly ask me about them instead. She couldn't understand why I (apparently) almost never expressed discomfort or desires, since my sister did so all the time.
The fact is, I was saving it.
It seemed that the fulfilment of requests was a limited resource, since if I asked for too much, I only got a part of what I wanted, or in some cases nothing at all. The same rule seemed to apply to complaints, as if I complained too much, people started to ignore me. Thus I seldom wasted it on unimportant things like toys. Not that I never asked for a particular toy, but it had to be a really special one for me to spend precious 'request fulfilment' on it.
Instead, I tried using as much of this precious resource as possible on really important requests, like asking her to not touch me in ways that hurt, to not make painful noises, to help me make sense of my room instead of yelling at me to clean it up, to not change things for no particular reason, to leave me alone instead of deciding that I was sad whenever I relaxed and demanding that I explain why, to let me avoid noisy and crowded social gatherings and a lot of other, similar things.
However, it didn't work.
Even though I rarely asked for anything else, those requests that were actually important to me were dismissed as unimportant, strange, impossible, manipulative and hurtful. Wishing to be left alone was the greatest offence of them all, and on at least two occasions, she had her new husband force open the door to my room when I was upset and overloaded, because I couldn't be allowed to "do that to her". I'm still not sure how one can spend time alone against someone, but I guess they did.
In the end, I gave up and stopped asking for atypical things altogether, to the extent that I could tell which ones were and which weren't. The lesson I learned from this, reinforced by many other events, was that my mother didn't care about my comfort or well-being. What mattered to her was her own fantasy world, where she decided how things should be, including how children are supposed to react to things.
Thus my actual experiences were ignored, since they didn't fit her fantasies, and thus I was conditioned not to ask for or complain about things by the very person who lamented the fact that I never asked for or complained about anything. That is quite an impressive display of denial.
Much later, when I confronted my mother with these things, she claimed that she "didn't know", something I still find truly fascinating. For example, I probably spent ten years or more asking her to "not rub my arm, because it hurts", and yet she says she didn't know that it caused me pain. In fact, the thing that finally made her know this wasn't me confronting her, but that she read that autistic people can in fact experience touch as pain.
In other words, a single paragraph written by a person with the proper degree accomplished what ten years of pleading by her own daughter couldn't, and the words I had repeated during those years had been dismissed so thoroughly and automatically that she "didn't know" that I had experienced what I did.
Unfortunately, this sort of behaviour is far from rare. Just join a support group for parents of autistic children, or a mixed group where the moderators are non-autistic, and you will likely (and sadly) find plenty of examples of people who are more interested in stopping expressions of discomfort or distress than they are in actually doing something about its source, or who ask what perfectly simple sentences mean, since they don't fit their world-view.
This may often be due to ignorance instead of rampant uncaring, but that makes no difference to the child in question. I'm now fairly certain that my mother did in fact care, it had just never occurred to her to actually listen to what I said, but that didn't make the things she did any less painful back then and I don't see it as a valid excuse now.
Therefore, I'm going to propose an experiment to those who have an autistic person in their lives, whatever that person's age, and yes, I count children as persons. The next time ey claims that something is bothering em, try listening to the words ey says (or pay attention to whatever other means of communication ey uses), instead of immediately dismissing the message and replacing it with what you imagine that ey really meant.
I think you will find that this method works far better.
© elmindreda