Mere om Autisme- dansk side, en af mange
En rivende god bog som giver en hurtigt overblik samt forståelse!
Different Kind of Boy. af Daniel Mont:
Different Kind of Boy.
Bogen findes elektronisk på ebrary samt ved Århus handelsskole.
Don't Mourn for Us
by Jim Sinclair
Parents often report that learning their child is autistic was the
most traumatic thing that ever happened to them. Non-autistic
people see autism as a great tragedy, and parents experience
continuing disappointment and grief at all stages of the child's
and family's life cycle.
But this grief does not stem from the child's autism itself. It
is grief over the loss of the normal child the parents had hoped
and expected to have?
I invite you to look at our autism, and look at your grief,
from our perspective:
Autism is not an appendage. Autism isn't something a person has,
or a "shell" that a person is trapped inside.
There's no normal child hidden behind the autism. Autism is a way
of being. It is pervasive; it colors every experience, every sensation,
perception, thought, emotion,and encounter, every aspect of
existence.
It is not possible to separate the autism from the person? and if it were possible,
the person you'd have left would not be the same person you started with?
Therefore when parents say, I wish my child did not have autism,
what they are really saying is, I wish the autistic child I have did
not exist, and I had a different (non-autistic) child instead.
Read that again. This is what we hear when you mourn over
our existence. This is what we hear when you pray for cure.
This is what we know, when you tell us of your fondest hopes
and dreams for us; that your greatest wish is that one day we
will cease to be, and strangers you can love will move in behind
our faces.
Autism is not an impenetrable wall. You try to relate to your
autistic child, and the child doesn't respond. He doesn't see you;
you can't reach her; there's no getting through. That's the hardest
thing to deal with, isn't it?
The only thing is, it isn't true.
Look at it again: you try to relate as a parent to child, using
your own understanding of normal children, your own
feelings about parenthood, your own experiences and intuitions
about relationships. And the child doesn?t respond in
any way you can recognize as being part of that system.
That does not mean the child is incapable of relating at
all?
It takes more work to communicate with someone whose
native language isn't the same as yours. And autism goes deeper
than language and culture; autistic people are "foreigners" in
any society. You're going to have to give up your assumptions
about shared meanings. You're going to have to learn to back
up to levels more basic than you've probably thought about
before, to translate, and to check to make sure your translations
are understood. You're going to have to give up the certainty
that comes of being on your own familiar territory, of knowing
you're in charge, and let your child teach you a little of her
language, guide you a little way into his world?
Yes, that takes more work than relating to a non-autistic
person. But it can be done? Unless non-autistic people are far
more limited than we are in their capacity to relate? We spend
our entire lives doing this. And then you tell us that we can't
relate?
Yes, there is a tragedy that comes with autism: not because
of what we are, but because of the things that happen to us. Be
sad about that, if you want to be sad about something. Better
than being sad about it, though, get mad about it? and then do
something about it. The tragedy is not that we're here, but that
your world has no place for us to be?
"say to yourself: " This is not my child that I expected and
planned for. This is an alien child who landed in my life by
accident. I don't know who this child is or what it will become.
But I know it's a child, stranded in an alien world, without
parents of its own kind to care for it. It needs someone to care
for it, to teach it, to interpret and to advocate for it. And
because this alien child happened to drop into my life, that job
is mine if I want it.?
If that prospect excites you, then come join us, in strength
and determination, in hope and joy. The adventure of a lifetime
is ahead of you.
Mont, Daniel. Different Kind of Boy.
London, , GBR: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2001. p 175.
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