I’m overdue for a blog entry, but I’ve been feeling generally defeated these last few weeks and unable to come up with anything eloquent or meaningful to say.

Instead I’ve obsessed over maintaining a spotless kitchen floor, and fighting to lose those last 12 stubborn pounds that will put me back to my “college weight”.

I haven’t smoked in 8 days (hooray for me…whatever) and have raging PMS. The quips that slightly irritate me other days are full fledged fighting words today.

Anyway, I thought it might be a cathartic exercise to write about the word I hate most in the world.

Autistic

Main Entry: 1 au·tis·tic
Pronunciation: o-’tis-tik
Function: adjective
: of, relating to, or marked by autism

Merriam-Webster’s Medical Dictionary, © 2002 Merriam-Webster, Inc.

Main Entry: 2 autistic
Function: noun
: an individual affected with autism

Merriam-Webster’s Medical Dictionary, © 2002 Merriam-Webster, Inc.

It’s not so much the first definition that get’s under my skin. It’s the second. Just as I don’t see the relevance of identifying myself as “brunette” or my husband as “hispanic”. It’s not that these attributes aren’t components of who we are, it’s just that they possess no warrant of our worth as a person.

I am a woman, wife, mother, daughter, writer, etc. who is also (incidentally) a brunette. My husband is a man, father, son, engineer, computer ‘genius’ who is also (again incidentally) hispanic.

In a similar vein, my son is brilliant, comedic, diverse, and also has Autism. It’s certainly part of his identity, but no more than his trademark curls, fascination with Sesame Street or aversion to peaches. Our society would solely rest the identity of one who suffers from diabetes on that basis, so I am curious as to why it’s acceptable to identify our children that way? It’s ever-present, in the media, the education system, the healthcare system, and unfortunately even in the Autism community itself.

We must be incredibly beat down and weathered when we, as parents, can not see our children as anything other than merely “autistic”.

Peter, can Mommy have a kiss? I’ve been asking this question for well over a year…

Today, I got the softest sweetest kiss on my lips. It was absolutely the most precious and remarkable thing I have ever experienced. Anything wrong in the world drifted away and I was simply a woman in love.

I’m not particularly in the mood to write anything profound, having just been assaulted with a talking Elmo potty chair (thank heavens he hadn’t figured out how to use it first)! Anyway, I’ve nothing to do while I wait for the cat-puked-upon duvet to finish up in the dryer. It’s not that I couldn’t be filling out paperwork for respite, or applying for preschools…it’s just that sometimes there is so much spinning around in my head that even the most minute task is daunting.

So here I sit, the potty chair has definitely left a bruise on my shoulder. Actually, upon inspection, where the hell did all of these bruises come from? And when did I start looking like crap all of the time? I went in public today in two different color gray sweats that were two sizes too big. Shameless. And to think I’ve lost all of this weight and now don’t have the time or energy to fix myself up.

Sometimes I think I might be a little bit stupid. Not that I started out that way or anything, but just that I’ve developed some sort of Mommy-brain that has replaced any true knowledge I had with songs from “Yo Gabba Gabba”. Shudder!

I get so confused with all of this sensory and autism information. Our therapists are awesome, and so smart, and have heaps of advice. But the practical implementation of all (or any, sometimes) of this can be so difficult. Sometimes I feel so inept that I pretend like I fully understand what the hell is being said to me. It’s like another language these “medical” terms, I google a lot. I’m quite often still confused after.

It’s just that (most) people with Autism are such concrete thinkers and I am such an extreme abstract thinker…it’s virtually impossible for me to put myself in such a vantage point. I recently tried to read a book by Temple Grandin, a woman with Autism that is famous for creating tools for the cattle industry. I literally had to read each paragraph three or four times, it was so factual and devoid of…for lack of a better word…life. She’s a genius in her own right, but I need that slice of humanity, of margin for error, subjectiveness as my security blanket.

I wonder if Peter truly thinks that way. Or if he can see and comprehend the “gray areas” in life. I wonder if he’ll ever be able to explain it to me, and if he does, I wonder if I’ll be able to understand.

PS: Twenty four hours till the polls close…what will our world look like this time tomorrow evening?