So there's this movie that's been making the rounds of various websites that was featured on Imus, and I'm too tired and lazy to look up the name, but essentially it's showing viewers just how difficult life with autism can be. At one point a parent says that she'd considered killing herself and her autistic daughter in a car crash but stopped because of her other, neurotypical child. And some parents really, really hated the film, especially that part.

In some ways I probably shouldn't even really pass judgment, because I have never lived through what these parents go through, or rather I went through about a year of tantrumming scariness, as opposed to thinking that my child was never going to grow out of that stage of incomprehension and anger (okay, I did worry about it, but realistically, I had a kid with tons of language by age two--there was never much question that her intelligence was within normal limits). Many of the parents who have commented on the film seemed offended that the view of life with autism was so bleak, and many of them seem to be dealing with children whose impairments are closer to the children in the film than my child's were. So in short, how dare I comment.

And of course blabla it's a marketing tool, and to convince people of the seriousness of the issue, the footage is important, visceral reaction, yippity yap. Which is all true. But I also think the responses I read were a kind of Rorschach test for the way you approach parenting, or maybe any other trial in life. There are some people who will feel very unpleasant things and then are incapable of or unwilling to sublimate these feelings. Call them neurotic or depressive. I happen to fall into this camp. You can also call them, or us, narcissistic: they are focusing on their own reactions rather than on, say, their child's point of view or the gains that can be made, etc. And I accept, really, that the parents who claim never to have felt such despair really never did feel such despair, though frankly I don't understand it (it always reminds me of Martin Seligman talking about depression and saying that one of the most annoying results of his career was that depressives were usually more realistic about the situation than the optimists were).

I don't know: I don't think despair is particularly adaptive, but I suppose I do believe very much that women are conditioned not to express any negative feelings about parenting or their children, let alone children with disabilities, and it's a nice direct line to Woolf's Angel in the House by way of Coventry Patmore. And in some ways reading angry responses to the mothers' admission of their own hopelessness reminded me of that crippling cultural archetype.

Children who are disabled are more likely to be abused than are developmentally typical children. Are we better off acknowledging the greater possibility for hurtful anger, on the off chance that maybe government agencies or other groups will consider helping the parents? Or are we better off reframing how we see our children? Because I very much appreciate the beauty and joy these other parents see in their children (and communicate to their readers), but I have a real problem with demonizing the women in that film.

Wonder if this makes sense....