Poppy Field in Argenteuil, Claude Monet, 1873.
Sometimes, it is not a question of remaining calm and equinaminous; sometimes, as a mother of an autistic child you have no choice.
All day, every day, you have to keep things stable and organised; be the strong, silent backdrop to their anxieties, willful escapades and particular compulsions. Guide them back to their normal and through our normal. But sometimes the ice cap covering their middle-man threatens to crawl in upon your own inner space and your own heart fires up to counter this plan to freeze you between their millstone brain and their churning hash of will.
If you have a child with so-called high-functioning autism, it’s always the deficient “theory of mind” that will break you up in the end. I have it in my sister (worse) and my father (less), too. It is truly almost untennable to live amongst such thrashing blades of their internal logic that has no inkling of another I's feelings: the sparks that fly off their one-track shears, a mind stuck in the mud of me, which ploughs on and on for me, me, me.
I try to cling onto wisdom and beauty in this bed of insanity but in the dark of night it makes for a migraine. For to live without true empathy (not the adopted mannerisms of common courtesy) is to be as a frost giant. The loving heart may then, upon occasion rage to toss this monstrosity over the cliff into a bottomless ravine. Such a force of the head does not belong on the shoulders of Man. It’s not the child one hates, but their autism. And yes, for a few moments it is seething hatred, for it comes with a passion that is driven to make people shine with the beauty of spirit, not the veneer of a mind-programme.
Then it all bubbles back down into the reduction of your failing self. Somehow you got yourself into this mess, and somehow you are going to have to find an elegant way out. A line of a song comes to mind and seems cuttingly appropriate, "stuck in the middle with me." ... There is always to be getting on with getting unstuck yourself.
So back to work on me! Remains the truth about autism that it's never fair.
The parents, and mothers, daughters and wives - the women especially - who live with carriers of autism, however, tend to find themselves bitterly alone, and unsupported at the centre of the heart. Even autism-support groups are about more talk and remaining sensible.
Even so, all by yourself, you have to take heart and keep on walking through the fields of hope, with pain in your pockets and your true mind under your arm.