Grieving myself
I've read a few stories, all heartbreaking, of parents of autistic children who refuse to let go of the non-autistic child they were supposed to have and the life they had planned with that child. If the parent doesn't get through this the results can be awful, at best trying (with love and good intentions) to shape the child they have into the non-autistic child they expected, at worst blaming autism (and by extension the autistic child) for “stealing” “their” child and leaving something broken in its place. It's easy to see how the myths of changeling children, stolen and replaced with an evil spirit by fairies, could emerge.
This process seems inevitable to an extend because to a parent expecting a child, that child already exists in a very real sense and learning that your beautiful child may experience significant challenges in life must be devastating. The parents who seem to put this aside and go on to raise healthy autistic people are the ones who are able to grieve properly the child that never was, while loving and supporting the child in front of them.
Why am I writing about this? I'm not a parent and don't intend to become one, though I love being an uncle to two brilliant niblings. My parents never knew I was autistic — none of us did until my mid-30s — but loved and accepted me for who I was, never trying to make me into someone I wasn't yet giving me the skills I needed to live in a world not quite built for people like me. But I've come to realise that my relationship with myself has had some aspects in common with the parents who can't let go and love the child they have. I've spent most of my life trying to fit myself into an abstract concept of what I should be, largely based on detailed observations of what worked for others and how things I did were received. I've always had a thing for self-help books, especially productivity “systems” like Getting Things Done and Bullet Journal. I've often had a feeling of presque vu (from French “almost seen”), of being right on the edge of an epiphany that will finally make me into that person.
But now, I think I've finally started the process of accepting that person does not, cannot and never did exist. I'm so powerfully attached to that person that the only reasonable way to move on is to properly grieve their loss, while focusing my love on the person I am, the one who has been here the whole time. It's taken me a lot of work to reach this point, but while I'm not really sure what happens next I suspect the hard work has only just begun.
There are a lot of emotions to process as part of that grief: anger, sadness, frustration yes, but also hope and the beginnings of forgiveness. There are still good days and bad days, but I'm OK, perhaps the OK-est I've been for some time.