"Tolerating" Asperger's Syndrome

Someone left a comment on one of my Michael Savage posts saying "I don't think there is such a thing as ASD, its just a natural variation that is not tolerated by parents who want it easy."

I think they meant to say that they don't think Asperger's is pathological. In other words that it's not a "disease". Of course that would potentially put this person in the same camp as the "Neurodiversity" crowd and John Best won't like that I tell you.

I will tell you this though - Asperger's Syndrome is very real and can be VERY disabling.

No - I've never been able to get The Old Man an "official" diagnosis. From what I can tell, one of the symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome is a reluctance of the patient in many instances to have his or her atypical behavior labeled as being pathological - the result of a disease.

But I think such language as "natural variation that is not tolerated by parents" is language that is too trivializing.

Aspergian behavior is "not tolerated" very well by adult children of those afflicted either.

I'll give you an example. I was an only child but I have two first cousins who I am very close to. One of them got married in Middletown and I got The Old Man to go to that one by arranging for one of the very few people he trusts outside the family to pick him up and take him home after the ceremony because he can't tolerate the "noise" and activity of a wedding reception. A couple of years later my other first cousin got married in Dayton and The Old Man freaked. I mean straight out freaked. If I understood him correctly he was saying that there was no way he could go as far as Dayton out of the mortal fear that he was going to get stranded there. He also was terribly upset that he had gone to the first wedding because now he was afraid he would think he was showing favoritism towards the cousin who got married in Middletown.

Now, I never thought I was going to get married myself, but Mrs. Axinar had other ideas. We planned on getting married in Key West and then having a reception here. Obviously The Old Man would be unable to travel as far as Key West. He can't even go to Dayton any more he's so freaked out by travelling. And of course he couldn't make it to the reception because it would have been too loud for him.

I was really torn by what to do.

The only logical thing I could think to do was to not tell him we were getting married. I figured if I didn't tell him, he'd have no decision to make and it would be physically possible for the circumstances to come about that my Old Man was SO f*cked in the head that he would not show up at his own son's wedding or reception. If he didn't know, he couldn't diss me.

Of course particularly my wife's family started freaking the f*ck out that I wasn't telling my dad. Then the peanut gallery started chiming in that my in-laws might interpret this that not telling my dad would be interpretted by my in-laws that I was "ashamed" of them or something of the sort.

I swear to God I got to the point that I thought of calling the whole thing off.

Pretty much you don't get much more Aspergian than my Dad without needing to be locked the f*ck up for the rest of you life, and you don't get much more neurotypical than my wife and her mother without needing slapped silly on a daily basis and how in the world I could do right by everyone simultaneously I still don't know.

But Asperger's is real - very real. And, in some ways, it's almost WORSE than severe autism. At least with more severe autism people tend to NOTICE that something is wrong. With Asperger's you can be very, very impaired in all sorts of relationships, but because you may be very articulate and have a very high IQ, people tend not to even take you seriously ...