Excerpt from A Little Austistic

(A memoir about an autistic childhood in a family of autists, soon to be available on Amazon Kindle).

A Big Girl

When I was a kid, I remember how highly my parents seemed to value independence. Who can blame them, really, given how quickly they had eleven children, and how old they were when we were all finally out of the house (Mom was 66 when Peter graduated and Dad was 65)? Anything that was “childish” was teased out of us.

“You’re a big girl. No more kisses at bedtime,” I remember my mother saying to me when I was about four years old.

From all accounts, I was a very physically affectionate child. I loved hugs and kisses from my parents and from my older siblings. I loved when my younger siblings were born and I loved helping to take care of them. I loved when my older siblings had babies, so I could babysit them, too.

But I got used to not being hugged or kissed as a kid. It seemed unnatural to me, even. When I married into a family that did a normal amount of hugging and kissing, it took considerable effort for me to steel myself at first to being touched.

“Have a good time,” my mother said to me when I went off to Germany for a year. No hug. No kiss.

No hug or kiss when I graduated from high school.

No hug or kiss when I got married.

The only times my parents would touch us were when we were being punished, which was probably why we learned to flinch when they came too close.

And then there were the occasions when there was forced hugging and kissing for public consumption. This was almost worse than being physically hit. The extended performance of being given a kiss on the cheek after getting a boy scout award (for the boys) or at a daddy-daughter dance (for the girls) or when my sister Ann was presented with her junior high school graduation certificate by my father, who was on the school board.

Ann warned him that if he tried to kiss her, she would be upset. She was true to her word. She stomped her foot, shouted “no,” and then escaped him, and ran off the stage, just as she said she would.

We were exactly the children that our parents deserved, I think. I suppose most children are.

“Don’t you think it’s strange that your parents never touch you?” one of my sisters-in-law asked years later.

“No, I don’t. That’s what’s normal to us.”

It was difficult to tell what was normal when you grew up in a family of this size, when mostly you spent your life judging your behavior by that of the other kids. Considering that my parents were both probably undiagnosed autists and most of the children were, it was no wonder we didn’t learn social behavior. Instead of seeing our flaws, we judged other more social kids as lesser because they “needed” other people when the rest of us did not. They were shallow and didn’t spend every minute of their time at school trying to get perfect grades and perfect test scores. They also didn’t make the teachers their main friends.

Being smart was the only thing that mattered as an Ivie. “Stupid” was the only insult any of us took seriously. Even being “pretty” became in our family a kind of taunt. It meant you were shallow and superficial, and often — stupid. If you cared about such frivolous things as your looks, your clothes, or your place in the social pecking order, something was wrong with your moral compass.

I don’t ever remember having a comfort object as a child, no stuffed animals, no blanket, nothing. As a teen, I thought this was, of course, the only natural way to live. Teens who still had comfort objects in their rooms were just baffling to me.

When I needed comfort, which was often, I just used the thing that was always around and no one could take away from me: my thumb.

My parents both hated thumb sucking, but I find it sad and telling that they never offered us anything that we might have used to find comfort other than our thumbs. No pacifiers, no bottles, no hair twirling (when Rebecca did this, she got her hair chopped off on one side in retalitation for her need to play with her hair), and not even gum was allowed. We were all supposed to hit age three and somehow not need anyone or anything anymore. No crying, either, of course.

I remember listening to lectures on the terrible results of thumb sucking.

“You have those terrible bucked teeth because of your thumb sucking,” I heard from my father over and over again.

“It’s just so dirty, sucking your thumb. You have no idea where it’s been,” my mother said.

When I was in first grade, I remember everyone in my family trying to get me to stop sucking my thumb.