On Relationship Standards: Is Reliability a Necessity?

I'm on the autism spectrum, and I have kids on the spectrum and with ADHD and former partners with ADHD. I love them all to bits, but it can be tricky to navigate what behaviours should look like without an attainable standard of comparison. 

People who are neurodiverse are a minority in society. We perceive and think differently, so we will behave a little differently as well. It's a bit similar to being left-handed. We used to force people to write with the right hand which caused all sorts of problems. Now we're in a place where we accept this difference and have accommodations in place, like left-handed desks. But ND is different from left-handedness, of course, in that it affects our basic personality -- who we are, and some traits common to ND brains are overwhelmingly seen as undesirable.

Like being unreliable.

About twenty years ago, I had a partner who commonly got distracted from tasks. The only time he wasn't distractible was when he was engrossed (hyperfocusing) on something of specific interest to him. This is a common ADHD issue -- or a common way of being for a specific group of people. One day he offered to make dinner for me as I marked final exams on my front porch: fresh fish on the BBQ. I watched him leave for the market and then return. A few hours passed, and I went to get an ETA for dinner only to find the fish unwrapped and sitting on the counter, covered in flies because the back door had been left open. I found my partner under his car changing the oil. It had occurred to him on the ride home with the fish that he hadn't done an oil change in a while, and something in his brain told him it's vital to do it RIGHT NOW. Not after dinner, but immediately. When I asked him about his choice, he insisted that the problem is that I just don't understand cars. It's kind of hilarious, if we're allowed to laugh at idiosyncrasies, but also kind of annoying. It didn't always happen like this, but it did just often enough to make it hard to trust that he'd follow through. 

CAN'T OR WON'T

How do we best live with people who just can't do what they say they'll do? Part of the problem is what it means to us when people let us down. We associate caring and loving with remembering things: our likes and dislikes and what makes us feel cared for and special dates. I have a mind like a sieve, so every recipe card has a list of who likes and hates it, with many crossed out as their tastes change, and I have an ongoing list of potential gifts for people, which often end up returned anyway, so it's complicated. Our level of memory for detail is sometimes used as proof of our level of care, when it might be more of a fluke. Some people are just better at keeping those facts in mind, so they appear to be more invested in us when they might not care about us at all. It's not always clear evidence of affiliation, yet we can't let go of it as evidence.  

On Missing the Girls

"Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."
- Leonard Cohen  (Everyone's using that bit today, but they always skip the first part of the verse.)

As I started down the road towards mastectomy-ville, I wondered how weird it would feel suddenly not having breasts. I mean they been sitting there, right under my face, for decades. How would I cope with such a drastic change? It doesn't count as an amputation, but still... it's something. I mean, many MTF Trans don't feel complete without top surgery, yet here I go still being female. I've actually always wondered if it's insulting to women with minimal breasts when people insist they can't feel female without getting implants. And it's covered if it's sexual reassignment surgery, but not if you're born female but have a pretty flat chest. Curious. Anyway...

I do miss them at times. When I lie on my side at night, they're not cushioning the space between my arms. When I'm standing and I move to cross my arms, the down-scoop-up motion that nestles them atop my folded arms is now for nought. When I'm in the shower, I look straight down at my belly. When I run up a flight of stairs, I still reach up to hold them in place. When I'm waking around, if I catch myself in a reflective surface I notice the change: I seem longer in the torso without them. But the rest of the time, when I'm just milling about doing my thing, I mainly don't think about them at all. Once in a while, when I see a celeb in a beautiful outfit that accentuates their breasts, I have a tiny pang of grief, but I can still get that look as desired with external prosthetics. Except, once I'm released from this pressure camisole in another week, I expect to be excited to never again wear a bra!

At this point, two weeks post-surgery, there's just a tightness in my chest and a weird tingling sensation like a band of dull needles pressed against me whenever I get a chill (which I seem to get a lot there), or when I think about it all (because I'm still pretty grossed out by the thought of it), or maybe just randomly. From time to time I get a sudden little stabby purple-nurple feeling that usually subsides quickly. When I roll on my side at night, it's a bizarre sensation like it all shifts just under the surface. It's not really painful, but it's intense enough that I wake up every time.

I don't look that strange. I've already started to get used to it, however I've been lounging around the house in loose-fitting tops. That might be my go-to outfit for school for the first while as well. At work, I never dress to look attractive - that's subtly discouraged for teachers. I've had students ask me what to do if a teacher is wearing revealing clothes that the class finds uncomfortable: "When she bends over, we can see right down her top!" They say that in a revolted way. Teenagers typically don't want to see middle-aged booty. I'm in awe of older women who wear anything that acknowledges them as sexual beings; it's so far removed from my own experiences as a school marm. But I do try to avoid being a distraction in other ways. I don't want to gross anyone out.

I push the boundaries of taste already by having hairy legs and pits, and I wear sundresses that showcase both. I also have eczema-type areas of bumpy scaly skin that most people are good about largely ignoring. But some students are brutally honest - well, sometimes they're cruel really - and I feel like I might need to be at the ready with a comeback that's just subtle enough that I'm able to deny any intended sarcasm and insist I was giving straight-up advice. God forbid we ever take students down a notch and inadvertently hurt their self-esteem in our quest for developing a moral centre in them.

But there could also be some kind souls in the room who find it all a little unsavoury. I'm reminded of the beginning of Pay It Forward, when Kevin Spacey's character first turns around to greet his new class and his face is a mass of scars. The class is taken aback, but he soldiers on. Generally we expect that people just have to cope with our disfigurements, but I wonder if sometimes there's a call for a bit of a compassionate attitude to help people ease into radical changes.

When I was a kid, I was sometimes embarrassed by my mom because she'd do groceries in a pink pantsuit with a yellow raincoat. She didn't care what she looked like. Well, I'm not even acknowledging the idea that she might have thought she looked good!  And, as a world-weary teen, I once wished to be dead rather than care so little about how I present myself in public. Many teenagers are very concerned for people who aren't optimally attractive, sometimes to the point of anger that the broken won't better hide their imperfections.

But now I'm at the age of not giving a shit, and it's a significantly better place to be. It's not to say I've given up or grown apathetic, but that I've grown less self-absorbed. Or, at least, I'm less absorbed with how I look and more interested in what I can do.

But I still don't want to freak anyone out!

In more revealing clothes, I worry a bit about disturbing people on the beach or around town if I'm in a form-fitting tank top or bold enough to go topless. The surgery didn't leave me completely smooth. There's weird shit going on: bumps and ripples and blobs, not to mention the horizontal scar dividing the terrain in half. A buddy keeps saying it'll look better when the muscles fills in, which is baffling to me. What muscles will fill in?? If I don't suddenly start to work out (which I won't), then I don't expect to find more muscles there any time soon. I'll have to work with my tattoo artist around the new peaks and valleys of the canvas.

But then I think that maybe we're all freaks in one way or another, it's just that some people hide it better than others. That could be a rationalization on my part, but it seems to me that it's more than just for aesthetic reasons that it bothers us to see people who are a bit off. Perhaps it bothers us because it reminds us of our own broken or twisted parts that we've made such an effort to sequester and smooth over. Someone refusing to hide their flaws is like a wounded gazelle on the Serengeti. We avoid the walking wounded to keep the pack animals from noticing us too, noticing a little lump or limp or lisp that could give us away as ripe for chewing on. It takes a measure of bravery to be a bit off in this sometimes scared and mean little place. But it also takes some courage to stand with the marginalized, and that deserves acknowledgment. It might be expected of us all, but, unfortunately, it's rare enough to be praiseworthy.

Caitlin Rosberg

Munk Debates: Are Men Obsolete?

While I was waiting for the newest Munk Debate to show up on the site, I watched an old one: an excellent debate between Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens on, of course, religion.  There's little I enjoy more than watching really intelligent thinkers go at each other with carefully and thoughtfully chosen words.  The debate was run with opening statements, a series of 3-minute rebuttals, then closing statements.   They understood and followed the rules, and they remained focused on the topic without a single barb directly at anything said outside of that arena.

So it was interesting to watch four women on next.  Now, I don't know if it's because they're women, or because there were four instead of two of them, or because they're from very mixed backgrounds where on-your-feet oral debating isn't key to their livelihood like it might be, say, in parliament, for instance, but, for the most part, they didn't debate so much as they had a little conversation.  Most of what they said was previously scripted rather than a direct reaction to anything that was said in front of them.

It was still fun to watch.

On Celebrating Talent

Convalescing from a wicked cold that's beating the crap out of me, I watched a trio of movies about amazing musicians: Joe Strummer, Ginger Baker, and Sixto Rodriguez.  In the films, other musical geniuses were highlighted along the way.  What a delight!  But as Ginger, Jack and Eric talked about people with the gift of perfect time, my first reflexive response was, "How many kids are told they can be a great musician if they just put their mind to it?".

In class this week, yet another student insisted that intelligence has minimal genetic basis compared to effort.  Anybody can do anything if they try hard enough.  I suggested there are people her age still struggling with the alphabet and lamented the ivory tower effect of streamed academic courses.  I don't think it was very convincing.  I'm battling a life-time of programming.  In high-school, I struggled with grade 13 physics.  Both my parents were math and physics profs at U of W, yet with their unwavering help, and the help of my teacher, I still couldn't get my head around that whole inclined plane issue.*  It's just not how my brain works.

And that's okay.

On Categorization of Behaviours and Abilities

People are always looking for the single magic bullet that will change everything.  There is no single magic bullet.  - Temple Grandin

Some people are quite upset about the recent change to the DSM that removes Aspergers as a separate category from Autism. Now kids formally diagnosed as having Aspergers are on the Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) instead. The WHO advocates using the ICD anyway - where Aspergers is still a separate category; the DSM is more American than universal.  Whatever. I’m more bothered by how the DSM and ICD are set up to begin with.

Why do we want to label things so clearly and with finality – particularly conditions that are largely subjectively determined? There’s something nice about knowing. There’s a relief that you’ve finally figured it out and can move on. But that feeling is illusory and temporary. And I’m not convinced it helps us in the long run to have so many kids labeled with something as if they’re static beings that were completely figured out by a professional figure-outerer. As if that’s possible.