I have a friend - let’s call her Grizelda but that’s not her real name - whose close family have all either recently been diagnosed as being on the Autism Spectrum or ADHD or suspect they have these conditions and would like a diagnosis, which takes a long time with our NHS in its current, sad state.
The diagnoses are unsurprising, and the people with the conditions or who suspect that they have these conditions take a lot of comfort in them not least because they now have explanations of why they have felt alienated from neurotypical society their whole lives and why their reactions and interactions with people have been as they are. Grizelda, however, has been knocked sideways by the revelations and is now looking back over the whole of her family life in the knowledge that her interpretations of family relationships and reactions have been wrong all along.
Grizelda is largely sympathetic to the past and current struggles of her family members and is pleased that the explanations for their behaviour bring them such comfort. She is glad that that they have embraced their new-found neurodivergent tribes with such relish and can now be their true selves without having to mask, but feels that this is not without consequence for her.
One of Grizelda’s adult children lives overseas and recently came back to visit for a couple of days. Grizelda’s husband, hoping to make some space in their messy and ovcercrowded house, showed the son the mementoes box that she’d kept for him since his birth. She listened calmly as he explained that his foetal ultrasound scan; his school reports; his baby teeth, that she’d kept so carefully, carried little or no meaning for him. She was quietly heartbroken but that was his choice and his right. It dawned on her subsequently that these were her memories to keep and not his but it was too late and that special mementoes box, or what remained of it, was now tarnished with indifference.
Many parents assiduously keep these boxes of baby things, it didn’t seem an odd thing to do, but her husband and son seemed mystified at the sentiment and emotion attached to the hospital baby bracelet and the first shoes and it was then that the stark loneliness of being an empath in a non-sentimental family hit her harder than anything that had gone before.
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