Ransom Notes and Separation Anxiety

There's a fair amount of reaction to this ad campaign at NYU (describes children w/autism as being "kidnapped") from people I respect and admire (Pat Schissel, Kristina Chew). I think it's over the top, personally, and I agree that it's part of this changeling mythos around autism.

I remember talking to a friend of mine about the flareup of hoopla around Soma Mukhopadhyay and Rapid Prompt Therapy, which was featured on network TV and then forgotten. I said that it feeds into a parent fantasy, which is that there is a wonderful person in there, trapped and waiting to get out, as in Dibs: In Search of Self and other miracle accounts (including Bettelheim's, I suppose--the notion is that this is a strategy of self-protection). And he said, correctly, that there is a wonderful person in there. Which is true, but there's a wonderful autistic person in there, and as I've gone around and around with over the years, I can't separate my children's wonderfulness from their autism, the same way I can't separate my own skills from my shadow tendencies.

Except: I have my two responsive, bright, talented, affectionate kids, and I can't separate my own take on this from my children's comparatively mild deficits. There are people whose kids smear feces, stay up all night, and get physically aggressive. That's autism too. Maybe I'd be thinking kidnapping if I were a parent in that situation. Maybe I'd need to separate disability from person to save my own sanity and love for my child. As humans and as parents, it's asking a lot for us to be infinitely understanding and accepting (I'm not saying there aren't parents who can accept and love, just that to me it seems entirely reasonable that some of these parents might feel trapped, or that their children are trapped).

And as I've said way too many times, the feminist in me gets concerned about the backlash against parents who DON'T infinitely accept, the parents who appeared in Autism Every Day, the parents who are honest about the difficulties of their lives and their own desperation. We are not, as parents and especially as mothers, supposed to have these negative feelings about our children. We are not supposed to be angry or resentful. And I am willing to believe that some of us aren't, but I also believe that it is natural and not at all sinful to have some of those feelings. When I met Emily Perl Kingsley this summer, she was, besides being lovely and patient with me, honest about her own feelings of sorrow and worries about her child's life after she's gone.