I understand-- which is why I said that it
can be a strength in some respects. Not that it "is" for every person who has ASD, because it isn't. More that we can be open to the possibility that not all disabilities are 100% bad (as a package) or that the goal SHOULD be to eradicate the differences that make up the disability
for everyone who has that disabling condition. There ARE people with Asperger's who would NOT want to become NT if they could. I have to respect that.
I'm also going to point out, here, that acknowledgment of disabling conditions' occasional/serendipitous up sides does, just as I noted, invite comparisons, just as MumOfThree has done. I presume that she was
not suggesting that my family's experiences are "less like disabling" than her family's with their ASD child. I am unsure if she intended the comparison between life-threatening food allergy and her other child's dietary restrictions, but it would be relatively easy for me to take offense at that... given that I've lived with both the kind of thing she describes, and with my daughter's reality... and there is NO comparison--
in my experience. This is not to minimize-- at all-- what she has stated. Just that my experiences led me to quite a different conclusion, but that those experiences differed in other fundamental ways that neither she nor I have mentioned (or, perhaps, even COULD mention in under 10K words or so)!
But it's a very easy perceptual error to make, and one that is (naturally) incendiary, this business of "my problems are The Worst Ever, and certainly far worse than {problem I don't live with}."
Look at how my words resonated with her-- not
what I said, exactly, but what she thought that I
might have intended, which is to say that (which, please note, I do not believe) ASD
always comes with fringe benefits, or that EVERYONE with any spectrum disorder enjoys some special abilities along with the challenges. That's very clearly not
everyone's experience with autism.
Pretty much any potentially disabling condition exists on a similar spectrum, I suspect. To add complexity, individual quirks and additional diagnoses/factors also profoundly change the overall impact of a disabling condition. Another family might well find MumToThree's younger child's dietary restrictions a terrible burden... whereas she does not, because she is comparing that to a set of challenges that she finds MORE burdensome in their lives.
I know people with technically life-threatening food allergy who are really not living the same life that we do, and they are, in fact, the MAJORITY of people with food allergy. They do pretty much everything that normal families do. We don't live anything close to "normal." Our lives are, in fact, far LESS normal than life with a type I diabetic was, and less normative in
some ways than that enjoyed by close friends with a trisomy daughter. They have freedoms that we can only wistfully dream about... but we have freedoms that they do not, too. It probably all comes out even in the end, and I certainly do not feel qualified to judge others. (And-- to be clear, I'm pretty confident that MumOfThree didn't mean it that way, either. I choose to think that she was referring to her own family's experiences, and not in any way seeking to minimize what others are facing.) It's a sticky conversation because we always feel a certain amount of parental guilt for our inability to "cure" our kids' disabilities, maybe even angst that we resent the limitations thus imposed on us... and we're VERY defensive about being told that we "choose" to see things that way. VERY. It's largely because we've been sensitized by hordes of people judging us from day one on this forced march. If I had a nickel for every ignorant, but sunny, thing that a friend, family member, or relative stranger has said along the way.... OY.
However, that
is my point, in the end. Only the people LIVING with the person who has the condition really know how disruptive it is, and how negative/positive balance becomes within their particular circumstances.
I truly wish that were more accepted. The same diagnosis does NOT the same life make.
There is a very good reason why IEP's and 504 plans don't come with
mandated, prepackaged accommodations which go with particular disabilities.
I think that the commonality between giftedness and disability is, fundamentally, the story of what it means to be an idiosyncrasy in a world which seems to value only what can be categorized and labeled and understood in sweeping generalities. That just isn't what it is to be disabled-- or non-NT.
I also suspect that SOME families
do see a PG child as presenting many of the same challenges as a disabling condition-- but one which has some positive aspects. Other families don't really see it as having a negative side. (I mean, I guess-- I have trouble thinking of it that way because our reality has been so different, but I suppose that there are some families in which a PG child just "is" without any real problems as a result...)
