PART ONE - Autism, Arrogance, and Allocation
On Family and Unwinding Another Weird Obsession
My nine-year-old is brilliant, a rare blend of spit, fire, and analytical dissection expressed through a university professor's lush vocabulary and unyielding rhetoric. And when I say she’s brilliant, I’m not bragging in the way most parents envision their kids.
She’s certified Mensa-level brilliant. More importantly, she’s not an asshole.
Which means she has to get it from somewhere.
“And let me tell ya’. It ain’t me.”
My daughter is brilliant because she carries my wife’s genes. I’ve been told I’ve helped as a mostly nurturing SAHD. While I appreciate such compliments, I understand the sentiment is a soft declaration of my wife’s intellectual superiority and dominant genes.
My wife is brilliant because she possesses exceptional self-awareness and a unique, sometimes creepy, but always beneficial expertise in navigating the complex emotions of our collective neurodivergence and the lingering residue of being parented in the 1980s (me) and 1990s (her).
Throw in a nine-year-old cosplaying as a middle-aged adult, and you can see how her deep love of psychology becomes handy.
In other words, my wife’s the peacemaker and arbiter of rational, healthy communication, especially when my daughter and I play a round of “who’s more stubborn?”, where a young bull battles a broken-down ox to see who can score more rhetorical touchdowns.
As my wife often tells us, my daughter and I can be rigid and obstinate. I’m not sure I agree with this, but I at least acknowledge that what I’ve learned from her has shaped me into a better husband and father.
The exact same thing can be said about my daughter, who has absorbed a lifetime of invaluable lessons.
Emotional regulation during my daughter’s “can’t find the words” Big Toddler phase was challenging. (Let’s just use that word.) Now, she gently carves us up with precise and sassy meaning, but back then, it was vicious kicking, punching, rocking, and biting.
As a family, we lovingly refer to that time as her “Wolverine” period. Using words has proven easier on our bodies.
My daughter takes all lessons to heart, but I’m guessing the volume of ones devoted to emotional regulation, compassion, and empathy are the ones that truly stuck.
Because of my wife, my daughter can navigate the tricky existence of what I call “code-switching” (which is probably the wrong term), where she translates the thoughts burning through her extraordinary brain into bits that her audience can digest.
I think I’m pretty good at this skill, or at least can exchange passable, surface-level dialogue—the kind people in my wonderful small town require to affirm I’m not too weird.
Jury is still out on that one.
I can talk about truck tires, planting, or debate which type of grass makes the best hay. (The answer is Timothy if you’re particular, and any combo of grass and weeds if you’re not.) Or, if anyone is up for it, I’ll talk your head off about obscure 1960s Italian Folk Horror cinema.
No takers on that one. So far.
Of course, my daughter’s social circle presents many more challenges. Her online school is a magnet for all types of neurodivergent students, most of whom are gifted and socially maladapted but typically sweet and well-parented, if not a bit overmothered.
Her childhood has been unique, at least to an analog soul like me who got a B minus in my high school Windows 95 class.
While I made friends based on physical proximity and stratified educational groups, she navigates two distinct worlds.
Her real and virtual friends (I assume these kids are sentient beings ) divide along sharp lines. Her school friends spend huge chunks of their lives online, including scheduled, small group Zoom role-play gaming sessions—something we occasionally call “play dates.”
That phrase wouldn’t fly in our wonderful, small rural Kentucky town. Here, role play means wandering through muddy, tick-infested woods in search of wild mushrooms and stepped-on box turtles.
Her “in the flesh” friends are wonderful, inventive country kids with outsized personalities steeped in their family’s strong moral fiber. Our throwback town may not produce much in the way of technological advancements (they finally finished installing fiber internet), but families here tend to stick together and not raise assholes.
Our town has a sizable per capita homeschool community, a loose structure I initially hesitated to consider, but I’ve learned to embrace. 4H and fun library events (think Tween D&D) attract homeschool kids, most of whom bring their own wonderful, neurodivergent quirks.
Like many people my age, I grew up barely knowing homeschool was a thing. Back then, public school was still considered safe and decent, and homeschoolers were typically catalogued as weirdos who started churches in their basements.
The homeschoolers here are also weird. Just like my daughter. And wife. And I. But most exhibit beautiful, adaptive minds sometimes hidden under heavy neurodivergent layers.
In other words, you’re just as likely to meet a homeschool kid who never speaks, followed by three who will talk your head off about raising Rhode Island Reds and Cornish Crosses (those are meat birds for you city folk).
Most of these kids know how to hunt and grow food. When the collapse comes, they’ll likely thrive (so will the recession-proof Amish). Like my daughter, we travel a few different social paths. We love living in the country but exist on the hippie, “leave me alone” side of the horse fence rather than the “my baler cost more than your car” faction.
Back home in Northeast Ohio, I’m referred to as a “farmer,” which is hilarious and probably offensive to people who do it for real. The best descriptor I can come up with is “homesteader,” a fairly flexible term for gardening, collecting chicken eggs, and mowing eternal fields of thick weeds.
It’s an interesting, wonderful life, but weirdly seamless for my daughter.
Regardless of which world she resides in, my daughter enjoys talking to older people more than kids her age. Yet, she knows how to “play” like a nine-year-old until she gets overstimulated or bored.
At all times, a thousand thoughts are pinging around her brain, and while her impulse is to quote Monty Python, she has mastered the art of restraint (at least in public), recognizing which people she can “be herself” around.
And then, she’ll get on Zoom to play Steam RPGs and role-play dragon school drama with her online friends.
I’m always amazed by these transitions. Pulling off what she does takes immense skill and awareness, yet it usually looks easy. She’s already achieved what many adults never will, and it is a direct result of my wife’s emotional intellect and keen understanding of how neurodivergent brains work.
I’ve benefited from a lifetime of lessons. I like to think I have a Bachelor’s level of neurodivergence awareness. I hope I’m now more aware of how my brain functions straddling the thin cable of the autism spectrum.
At the least, it helps explain my weird obsessions, such as the strange, pervasive phenomenon of loyalty, which I will explore in PART TWO.
My DEBUT NOVEL, SPECTRAL VENGEANCE, is now FREE on Amazon Kindle. Go “buy” it.