Journeys with Autism

In my last post, I discussed my commitment to move ahead with my life in the knowledge that I have no extended family. That reality is still very clear to me, and I got a very vivid reminder of it last night.

As you might have noticed, I have a rather large extended (former) family, with many, many cousins. At this moment, I’m turning my attention to a cousin I’ll call Boris. I haven’t seen Boris in 30 years or more. I never knew her well, but over time, a couple of people in the family made remarks to the effect that she might have been abused as a child. As cousin Ralph might point out, I have no way of knowing one way or the other. Boris herself has never said anything about it. If she did, I would believe her, but we’re never going to get anywhere close to that conversation.

Read on for details.

After I had scattered the ashes of my hope for an extended family, my conscience started to bother me about Boris. What if she were another survivor? What if she thinks she’s the only one? It didn’t feel right to simply go away without saying something to her, but what should I say? I stewed on it for awhile, and I finally realized that all I needed to do was to give her my contact information, in case she ever wanted to get in touch with me. (Please stop groaning.) So, I sent her a message that was as benign and as neutral as I could possibly make it:

“Hi, I’m your cousin…I now go by my Hebrew name of Rachel, and I’m married. If you ever want to contact me, you can reach me at rachel.vermont@comcast.net.

I hope that all is well with you.
Rachel”

I knew that the family lie had made it to the outermost reaches of my (former) family, so I knew it was entirely possible that the lie had made it to her door. I felt good in my heart for having done the ethical thing, and that was all that mattered to me. And so, I was prepared for her to ignore me, or to simply say “Fuck off.”

But no. Nothing is that easy in my (former) family. I’ll paraphrase Boris’ response. She said:

1. She doesn’t have a cousin anymore.
2. Her losing me as a cousin was my choice.
3. I have to live with my choice, so go to hell.
4. If I ever contacted her or any member of her family again, she would seek out a civil harassment restraining order.

I will never have to get all “Aspie-and-wordy” again to describe the toxic nature of my original family system. You have the whole family dynamic in a nutshell, right here: shunning, blaming, distortions, lack of compassion, and unprovoked threats. There it is. All on a platter, along with my head.

And why? Because I offered someone I barely know my email address and said I hoped she was well.

Okey dokey.

So, then I got to talking with Bob and with a good Aspie friend of mine about this latest turn of events, and I suddenly realized that I was being bullied. Moi, bullied? I thought. Moi, with a blue belt in karate? Moi, with 25 years of therapy under my belt? Moi, the mama bear who has been known to risk reputation and throw social graces to the wind on behalf of her (now nearly grown) little cub? Yes, I’m afraid so.

And then, I thought, wow, that’s exactly what happened with my parents and with my brother. They bullied me. My father bullied me with physical pain, with unwanted touch, and with threats of harm. My mother bullied me with lies, ridicule, and manipulation. My brother once pinned me to a car because I disagreed with something he said, and he shunned me when I broke contact with my parents. And then there was Uncle Sylvia, and our disastrous conversation of three years ago, in which he ridiculed me for asking for love and compassion over what I had suffered. And come to think of it, every single family member who has heard the lies about me and believed them has been bullying me with their silence and their rejection ever since. It’s absolutely amazing to finally realize it.

All this bullying, all directed at me. Innocent, good-hearted, clueless, Aspie me. But why? I have a few ideas. (Feel free to add your own).

1. I walk into every room thinking that people are all set to receive love, attention, and goodness from me. I just have to be clear and non-threatening, and we’ll all get along, right? What could be simpler? Ha ha. It’s not bad to want to be loving and attentive, but the expression “pearls before swine” keeps coming to mind.

2. I am very childlike. I have a kind of innocence that all the abuse in the world has never been able to take away from me. So, I figure that people feel powerful bullying an innocent person. Or something. I have no idea. It’s just a guess.

3. For much of my life, I tried so eagerly, so earnestly, and so innocently to figure out the rules and play by them that people began to see me as defenseless. And, as a kid, I was defenseless, just as any other kid. But for me, there was an extra element of defenselessness, because little autistic me could not understand lying, cruelty, social rules, and social hierarchies. I just kept trying to make sense of them and be everyone’s friend. That made me more than a little vulnerable.

4. Despite my once-unquenchable desire to figure out the rules, fit in, and be normal, I have always been the Achilles heel of the family. Why? I’m an Aspie. I speak the truth. I break illusions. As such, I am the person who is the ever-present reminder that the family ain’t nearly as perfect as everyone would like to pretend it is.

5. I am the person who left the bullies behind. A dysfunctional family system cannot tolerate people leaving just on account of they’d rather not be bullied.

So, I reach out to someone genetically related to me, on the off chance that she might need it, just to feel that I’ve done the right thing, and the whole family system comes roaring right at me.

God, I’m having a serious autism moment. The gig has been up for a long time, and I’m the last to know.

Comments and hugs both appreciated.

© 2010 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg

On more than one occasion, friends and loved ones have shared with me the following definition of insanity:

Insanity is the process of doing the same thing, over and over, while hoping for a different result.

Personally, I think that’s a fine definition of insanity, so I’ve been looking at my recent debacle with my cousin Ralph and trying to decide whether my behavior meets the criteria. Certainly, after countless disastrous interactions with my original family members, my willingness to toddle over to my father’s side of the gene pool, hoping for a civil and productive conversation, might seem a little, well, nuts. But was it?

I don’t think so. I’ve begun looking at the disaster with cousin Ralph in a more spiritual way, using the Jewish idea of teshuva, which means “return.” Generally, we talk about doing teshuva when we’ve done something wrong; we acknowledge the wrong, we make amends, and we pledge not to repeat the mistake when the same situation arises again. If we can do those things, then we have returned, both to our original pure selves and to a state of harmony with others.

So I’ve been thinking: Why was I creating another cycle of return to the same place with my original family? What had I done wrong before, and what was I trying to do right in this interaction with Ralph?

My last less-than-ideal contact with a family member had taken place about three years ago. I contacted my uncle Sylvia (not his real name), hoping to reconnect. I was unsure of how or when to bring up the abuse, but I figured I’d find an appropriate moment. Unfortunately, as soon as Sylvia got my first email, he did an Internet search on my name and found a post I’d written about being an abuse survivor. As a result, the proverbial shit had hit the proverbial fan before we’d even begun.

At first, Sylvia questioned the idea that my parents could ever, ever have abused me, but a short time later told me that I had taken revenge on them by breaking contact. Revenge for what? I asked. For stuff that didn’t happen? No matter how many times I told him that I was interested only in my own survival, and that revenge had never been part of the equation, he couldn’t hear it. With each iteration, he got nastier. By the end, I pretty much broke down in a mass of tears and self-hatred, waved a white flag, and ended the interaction feeling like a victim. Again.

This time around, with cousin Ralph, a similar dynamic occurred, although to her credit, cousin Ralph did not get nasty with me in the way that uncle Sylvia had. However, the same mind-boggling question-the-abuse/acknowledge-the-abuse contradiction was there, expressed in emails containing such statements as “I have no basis on which to believe you” and “I had no idea you came from such a dysfunctional family.”

Excuse me for a moment while my head stops spinning.

There was also quite a bit of, shall we say, lying regarding the family photos. In one of her first emails, cousin Ralph had said that she had “many more” photos to send after the initial batch. In one of her last emails, however, she said that she’d just “scoured” the family albums and, well, gosh darn it, she just couldn’t find any more photos. Sorry! So sorry!

I hate it when people lie. I’d rather they just said, “Get the fuck out of my face.” That I could understand. Lying perplexes me. My Aspie brain just can’t quite believe that it’s happening. Why lie when you can just come out and say something? (That was a rhetorical question.)

Anyway, at some point in the interaction with cousin Ralph, I finally realized that I had to give up on having an extended family. I mean, I really, really had to give it up. And so, my friends, I must inform you that, during the past week, I made the difficult decision to remove from life support my brain-dead hope of ever having an extended family of people who share my DNA. (Services were private; in lieu of flowers, please make a donation to the charity of your choice.) After the cremation and scattering of the ashes, I was feeling very sad, so Bob wrote me the following beautiful email while he was in New York:

Hi love — Thinking more about Ralph’s e-mail, it seems to me that your decision to move on with your life as if there is no family is the right one. No matter what Ralph may or may not be willing to do in terms of a potential relationship with you, her email is simply another “missed opportunity” for people in your family to reach out to you in a loving, compassionate, understanding way. Whatever her reasons were for responding in the limited way that she did are her reasons, and have little if nothing to do with you. And hasn’t this been the problem all along? That no one has considered how you must feel about any and all of this?

And to me, that’s the real tragedy, and the source of the sadness I’ve been feeling lately about the absence of real family in your life. It underscores what you’ve been saying for all these years — that you’re a good person, that you’ve done nothing wrong, and that you deserve better from your family.

Sad to say, those are all good reasons to say goodbye to them. To close the door and move on down the road. The line from a Mary Black song goes something like, “We’ll never see what lies ahead if we’re always looking back.”

As I re-read these words last night, it came to me: I must end the interaction with Ralph with dignity. I cannot end it feeling powerless and screwed over. If I do, I’m just a victim again, just as I was in my interaction with uncle Sylvia, and just as I was in childhood. I must stay out of the victim place.

Sometimes, that’s hard for Aspies, because the world can feel like such a hurtful and incomprehensible place. But I can’t be a victim in this world. My innocence, my trustworthiness, and my truth-telling are some of my best qualities, and just because people occasionally take advantage of them doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with me. So, with all these thoughts in mind, I gathered myself together and wrote the following email:

Before I launch into this post, I want to make it clear that my cousin Ralph knew me as a child and made the initial contact with me a few weeks back. I had written to a different cousin, one who had never met me and had not spent any time with my parents. He felt safe. Unfortunately, he had no genealogical information, so he passed on my email address to Ralph—without my permission. God forbid anyone in this family should have boundaries. Anyway, once she had my email address, she offered to send pictures, and her brother offered to send genealogical information. As you know, the process stopped cold a week or so ago.

A couple of days ago, I wrote a letter to cousin Ralph about the abuse I had experienced as a child. I agonized over writing the letter, and I did it for one reason and for one reason only: to speak my truth in the face of the lies that have circulated throughout the family for nearly 20 years. In various emails, cousin Ralph had hinted at wanting more information, so there was a context for proceeding.

Here is the letter I sent her:

Dear Ralph,

In several of the emails you sent, you seemed to want to know why I had become estranged from my parents. The story circulating around the family is untrue, so I will tell you what happened:

1. My father physically abused me from the time I was 4 years old until I was 19. The abuse stopped when I left for the west coast in 1978.

2. My father sexually abused me from the time I was 11 until I was 17. The abuse stopped only when I began sleeping at my best friend’s house during my senior year of high school, 1975-1976.

3. My mother was aware of all of the abuse and never stopped it.

4. As an adult, when I tried to talk with my parents about what had happened, my mother told me that the physical abuse was all my fault, and that the sexual abuse had never occurred. My father acknowledged that he had been wrong to beat me when I was four years old, but that he had done no wrong otherwise.

5. Because of my parents’ denial of what had happened, I felt very unsafe around them and became physically ill whenever I had contact with them.

In 1991, when I was 33, I wrote my parents a letter. I told them not to contact me, that I needed time away from them in order to heal, and that I would let them know when I was ready for further contact. In response to my letter, my parents told my brother, my aunts, and my uncles that I had threatened to call the police and accuse them of abuse if they ever tried to contact me.

I never made such a threat. Ever.

Everyone believed my parents. I lost my entire family. My brother, my aunts, and my uncles all knew me to be a good, caring, and honest person and yet, they never contacted me again. Why they believed the story my parents told, without ever asking me what had happened, is beyond my ability to comprehend.

If my Aunt Fred had been alive, she would have called me to find out what was going on. She was a loving person, no matter what the situation. But she had been gone for almost two years.

I have done the hard work of healing my life. I have a wonderful husband and a beautiful daughter. I have forgiven my parents, and I bear no fault for what they did to me. If you believe me and want to have a mutually respectful relationship, feel free to email me. If you don’t believe me, you need do nothing but continue your silence.

Rachel

And Ralph’s response? Let me summarize what was in it:

a) lots of words about how hard this was for her
b) lots of words about how she’ll never know whether my “allegations” are true or not

And now, let me summarize what was not in the email:

a) any belief in the truth of what I had written
b) any loving or comforting words

So here’s what I wrote to Ralph in my response:

Dear Ralph,

Your message makes me very sad. When my parents told a story defaming me, everyone in the family who heard it believed it unconditionally. They believed my parents without ever talking to me, and they shunned me. My uncle Sylvia (my mother’s brother) told me all about it when I contacted him a few years ago. He said that he didn’t want anything to do with me, even after I told him about the abuse. He said he couldn’t imagine my father abusing me–as though abusers look or sound different from the general run of humanity.

Everyone believed my parents when they lied, but when I speak the truth, no one in the family believes me or has any comforting words to say. You say you have no way of knowing whether what I am saying is true. Why would I say such painful things if they weren’t true? What possible motive could I have?

If you can’t believe what I’m telling you, then we have no basis on which to continue a correspondence. I was looking for photos and genealogical information as a way of feeling that I had something remotely akin to a family. I was excited about all the photographs you were going to send me, and I don’t understand why you stopped.

But I was really fooling myself. I don’t have a family. That is my parents’ legacy to me.

Rachel

I’m done with the family business, and I’ve left on my own terms.

I have never felt so alone. I have never felt so sad. And I have never felt such immense relief.

© 2010 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg

After reading the kind and strengthening responses to my last post, and discussing the matter thoroughly with my very wonderful husband, I made the wise decision to get off the family airplane. Although I detest heights, I summoned up the courage to pry open the emergency exit, jump into the air, pull the ripcord on my multicolored parachute, and drift slowly back to Earth.

I also sent the following email to my cousin Ralph, just to let her know that I had landed safely:

Hi Ralph,

I see that the family lie has reached your door. Mazel tov. Enjoy.

Rachel

The view from the plane was spectacular, but I am very glad to have my feet back on solid ground.

© 2009 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg

My fellow autistic wonder-folk, I wish to share with you the history of the family business–my family’s business. It’s a multi-generational, multi-regional business and yet, it’s also a well-kept, closely guarded secret of a business. I can’t begin to speculate on how it became such a wildly successful enterprise, given that most of you have never heard of it, but believe me, it’s been thriving for a long, long time. 

Legend has it that the company began in a shtetl somewhere in Poland, a shtetl where it was very cold, and the people kept warm by coming up with business plans and feeding the cookstoves with them. One of my illustrious ancestors, however, seems to have carved out a business plan in secret—a visionary plan—which he passed onto his firstborn son, who passed it onto his firstborn son, who passed it onto his firstborn son, and so on, and so on, ad nauseum, until this very old and very visionary business plan ended up in the duffle bag of a great-great-ancestor, who carried it with him in steerage when he set out for America.

To make a long story short, I grew up in the very heart of the family business. Although its true name was rarely spoken, I distinctly remember my mother making a joking reference to Take-A-Chance Airlines. Had the rest of the family not loudly shushed her at that moment, I would have forgotten the incident altogether, but shush her they did, and the secret was out: my parents owned a majority share in Take-A-Chance Airlines. Can you imagine the nausea excitement I felt? 

When I was small, of course, the company was barely out of start-up mode. It was limited to a few offices in a motel, a small apartment, and other decidedly unglamorous places. But as I grew, the company grew with me. By the time I was 11 years old, we had quite a fleet. I mean, the planes! Oh my God, you should have seen them! They were so shiny and so new, inside and out. There were purple plush carpets, purple upholstered chairs, valuable antiques, brand-new lava lamps, and a TV set for every passenger. It was unbelievable!

And you’ll never guess the best part. No. You won’t. I’m telling you. Are you ready?

They paid you to fly on the airplanes! Yes! They really did!  Sometimes, they paid you in cash that came in birthday cards; sometimes, they took you shopping for school clothes; and twice a year, they took you on an all-expenses-paid vacation to places like Florida, Bermuda, Nova Scotia, and Quebec. I don’t know how they managed to remain profitable by paying folks to fly with them, but the money kept coming in like nobody’s business. Of course, the CEO would complain at the dinner table that he was worried about finances, but from what I could see, everyone on those airplanes had all the comforts of home.

Well, most of them did. But not all. Oh, no. Not all. There were two small children, and they were not so very comfortable at all. They had beautiful seats on one of the biggest airplanes, but every now and then, someone would come over to the girl when she was sleepy and touch her in ways she didn’t like. And then sometimes, someone would come over to the boy or the girl and begin beating one of them for no apparent reason. And yet, miraculously, whenever a stranger came onto the airliner, the little girl would play the piano beautifully (yes, there was even a piano on the plane!) and the little boy would do his very best not to bring a hose through the window and flood the passenger area again.

Those were the days! Of course, there was a catch. It wasn’t called Take-A-Chance Airlines for nothing. While the fare was unbeatable, the planes seemed to tumble out of the sky on a regular basis. Sometimes, in the heady days of my youth, I would rush the cockpit, push all the buttons at once, lean into whatever would move, and get that baby back up into the air. But sometimes, I just didn’t know how to do it, and the plane would crash. I have the scars to to prove it. They’re not pretty, so I’m not including photographs. They’re mostly where you can’t see them anyway.

By the time I was in high school, I had started to wise up. I began carrying a parachute, a bedroll, a good pair of walking shoes, several days’ worth of water, and a map every time I got on a plane. I hid everything in my backpack, of course. I had to. You see, it was a well-known fact that on Take-A-Chance Airlines, the planes never crashed or even came close to crashing, which confused my little Aspie mind no end. However, I was smart enough to understand that if I carried a parachute in plane plain view, it might appear that the plane might crash, and then the whole family business would be ruined, all because of me. So I learned to mind my Ps and Qs, let me tell you.

By some miracle, I survived into adulthood. And then, one day, after one touch and one crash too many, I resigned my seat on the board of directors and left my interest in the business to my younger brother. From what I understand, he took over the business after our parents died, and he got their entire inheritance in the bargain.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. As I grew further and further away from the family business, I began to think more clearly about it. After paying people to listen to me rant and rave on a weekly basis for several years, I began to realize that the planes really had been crashing all those years, and that I wasn’t confused or crazy at all.

I want to say that the story ends there, and that I lived happily ever after, but I have two terrible weaknesses: 1) I am a very visual Aspie, and 2) I believe that somehow, somewhere, in one of the company’s regional offices, in a galaxy far, far away, there is a plane that will not crash. And so, after a long time away from the business, I began emailing distant family members on my mother’s side and asking them for old family photographs. Sometimes, I would get wonderful photographs, which I would gaze upon for hours on end. The words that came with the photographs were friendly enough, but I didn’t forge any new or close family relationships with their senders, so I began asking for photographs closer to home. With some desperation, I went to one of my uncles—just one of the innumerable family members who had never called to ask why I’d up and left the family business in the first place. I knew that contacting him was a foolish thing to do (kind of), but I really, really wanted those photographs.

And family. I wanted family. And a plane that wouldn’t crash. And I thought I’d found it when I first emailed my uncle. But I was wrong. As we emailed back and forth, the plane pitched and rolled worse than ever before. And while it was pitching and rolling, I found out that my parents had convened a family conclave in New Jersey, in which it was agreed that if one of their offspring, whose name begins with an “R,” were to contact any other family member for any reason, they were to put her on a plane that would begin its plunge the minute she began to relax and get comfortable.

And that’s exactly what happened.

As you can well imagine, the next several months of my life consisted of paying more nice people to listen to a spirited recitation of all the email exchanges that had taken place as the latest plane was diving into the ground. After awhile, I began to get hoarse, so I stopped talking and began to feel better. And when I began to feel better, I swore off doing stupid things like calling Take-A-Chance Airlines and using my real name to ask for a seat on a plane that wouldn’t crash.

For a while.

However, recently (I know, I know, you don’t all have to groan at once, do you?), I decided to toddle over to my father’s side of the business and see whether there might just be someone who had a little genealogical information and a whole bunch of a few really cool old family photographs of some kind or another. So I looked up people with my father’s surname on Facebook. You know, Facebook. Where you find your friends? And do social networking? What could possibly go wrong? I mean, there’s no sign that says, “Abandon hope, all ye Aspies who enter looking for unknown family members.” If there were a sign like that, I wouldn’t go near the place.

Anyway, as usual, my contact with my new family member started off nicely. I got settled into my chair. The handsome steward asked me whether I needed an additional Ativan to take the edge off my anxiety. I thanked him and said I’d take two. He gave me a glass of crystal clear spring water to wash them down. Everyone was cordial. I was cordial. I was. I was so fucking cordial,  I swear to God, every one of you would have mistaken me for an NT. Really. You want proof? Okay. Here’s proof:

My cousin Ralph (not her real name) sent me a packet of photos that arrived last Tuesday, December 22. Here is the email I wrote in response:

Hi Ralph,

I received the photos today. Thank you so much for sending them! I have been sitting in front of our woodstove, gazing at them. I especially love the ones with **personal family information excised for brevity…**

Again, thank you for sending the pictures. I’m really quite crazy about family photos of any kind, and have a whole wall of photos from my mother’s side of the family, going from my grandparents’ generation and back into the late 19th century.  I’m so glad to begin collecting photos from my father’s side as well.

All the best,
Cousin Rachel

Here is what Ralph wrote back by email the same day:

 Hi Rachel,

I am pleased that you are enjoying the pictures I sent.  I have many more and am experimenting with our new computer.  I think we have figured it out and am attaching some additional pics.  Please let me know if you get them and I will send others.

* Information about attached photos deleted for brevity *

When I hear from you, I will forward some more.  Hope you enjoy them.

Have a good evening.
Cousin Ralph

Here is what I wrote back by email the same day:

Ralph, these are gorgeous! I love them. THANK YOU!

Cousin Rachel

Did you notice the part where Ralph says she will forward more pictures when she hears from me? Five days later, I had not received a single picture. So, I remained my cordial, restrained, friendly self and wrote her the following email:

Hi Ralph,

I don’t know whether you got my previous message. I just want to make sure you know that the photos came through just fine, and that I really appreciate them.

All the best,
Rachel

Here is the response I received an hour later:

Enjoy

That’s it. One word. No salutation. No proper names. No punctuation. Nothing.  So, I figured I’d take one more careful crack at it (I know, I know, it’s getting pathetic already):

Thanks! I am.

The last time you wrote, you mentioned that you’d send more pictures once you learned that I’d received the ones you sent. Just checking in to make sure that all is well.

All the best,
Rachel

Now, I will freely admit that I am working with a couple of subtexts here. When I ask whether all is well, what I really mean is the following:

I hope no one has fallen gravely ill. I really do. However, in my heart of hearts, I know it’s more likely that you’ve been talking to my brother, or to my uncle (who just happens to live in the same town that you do), and that one of them has told you, in no uncertain terms, that I’m the most vile creature ever to walk the earth. And why do they say this? Because I got sick of being hurt by the two (count them, two) people in the family who were responsible for the unwanted touching and undeserved beatings of my childhood, and so I left them behind, and I saved my own life. And I’m sure that whoever you’re talking to has repeated the lie that those two people told everyone. What lie? That I’d written them a letter and told them that if they ever contacted me again, I’d call the police and accuse them of abuse—something that I never, ever threatened to do.

Why does no one believe me?

Oh, yeah, that’s right. The family business is called Take-A-Chance Airlines, my name starts with an “R,” and I always get the plane that crashes—except that the propaganda advertising for the business claims that none of your planes has ever crashed. So you’d better ignore me, because you might just have to acknowledge what really happened, and that would be outside your comfort zone.

Of course, I’m not going to elucidate the subtext to Ralph. At least, not right away.

Somehow, I don’t think I’m the one with the problem here. Except, of course, that I keep hoping to find someone who can stand outside the family business for more than a day or two. Someone simple, who uses words that mean something, and follows through on them. Someone like me.

My mistake.

© 2009 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg

After reading and digesting everyone’s thoughtful comments on my last post, I came upon a very simple solution to reclaiming the color purple: I can just forgive my mother.

Now, I say that this solution is simple, but that’s only because I’ve been struggling with it for most (all?) of my life. The process has mostly entailed chipping away at all the things that forgiveness does not mean to me:

1. Forgiving my mother does not mean that I believe that my mother did the best she could. I have no idea whether she did the best she could. Maybe, she did. If so, her best was pretty poor, and that thought just generates more anger in me. And maybe, she didn’t do the best she could, and that thought keeps me on the wheel of wondering why not. So I’ve learned to dispense with the question altogether.

2. Forgiving my mother does not mean that I excuse the things she did. I don’t. She did some awful things, they were wrong, and nothing will ever make them right.

3. Forgiving my mother does not mean that I was partly to blame for what happened. I wasn’t. I was a kid.

4. Forgiving my mother does not mean that if she were still alive, I’d want to have any contact with her, let “bygones be bygones,” and dive back into the dysfunctional family cesspool. No way, no how, not in this life or in any other.

So, what does forgiveness mean to me? To explain it, I have to begin from a Jewish perspective. In Judaism, forgiveness is not simply an individual matter of giving up anger or resentment, although doing so is part of the process. It’s not about individual feelings so much as acting to repair the breaks in our relationships. In Jewish tradition, if someone asks my forgiveness, it works a lot like a 12-step program. The person needs to admit what he or she did, acknowledge that it was wrong and caused harm, promise never to repeat the behavior, offer to make amends for the damage done, and then change and act in a different way. In this paradigm, forgiveness is an action word. One obtains forgiveness by making amends and changing one’s ways; one grants forgiveness by discerning that the person is no longer a danger and then inviting the person back into one’s circle with open arms.

Of course, there are some situations that make this paradigm very difficult to put into action. For example, what if the offending party doesn’t think that he or she has done anything wrong? What if the person who has wronged you actually blames you, and expects you to fix everything? What happens when the person dies and there is work left undone?

I have struggled with all of these problems, and so I’ve had to search for a different way to forgive. A few years ago, I had a therapist who said that I’d pretty much figured out that forgiveness is a two-way street, and that it necessitates everyone involved being able to communicate. When that isn’t possible, she said, one has to jump to an entirely differently level and cultivate compassionate understanding.

I loved those words. They felt completely right. Since then, I’ve been defining forgiveness as the process of arriving at compassionate understanding. With my father, I’ve found the road much easier than with my mother. Somehow, I’ve just accepted who he was. I can see that he had no meanness in him, and that he was pretty much lost when it came to appropriate behavior. Perhaps it’s been easier because he was an Aspie, and I could always relate to him better than I could to my mother. Or maybe it’s because he was the one who played baseball with me and who seemed to enjoy having kids. Or perhaps it’s because when he wasn’t around my mother, I never felt that my father was a danger to me. I’m not sure, but I don’t feel that my life is saturated with my father’s bad energy anymore. It’s been a long time since that was true.

But compassionate understanding for my mother? I’ve always said that it would have to wait for a different lifetime, that it was just too difficult. But I don’t feel that way anymore. My feelings about my mother are sapping my enjoyment of life, and given the brevity of human existence on this planet, I can’t be wasting any more time letting that happen. When I wrote in my last post that my mother was cruel, and that it wasn’t her fault, because she was just wired wrong, that was a beginning. I didn’t know that I was going to write those words, and I didn’t realize that I’d been feeling the truth they describe. But I feel it very powerfully now. Something was amiss with my mother, just as something was amiss with my father. I can’t quite define it, but it’s always been there, and I’ve always seen it. The trouble was that my mother was so loud and so dramatic about always being right that I couldn’t hear myself think straight. It’s taken a lot of years to tune out the noise and just recognize who she was.

I’ve spent a lot of time fearing my parents, both when they were alive and after they had passed. I’ve carried the fear that when I die, my parents will be the ones to meet me at the gates of the afterlife, where they’ll obliterate me for the unforgivable sin of breaking contact with them. Recently, I’ve realized that I’ve been walking around feeling guilty for years over the break. This week, I finally understood that I don’t need to ask anyone for forgiveness over what I had to do to protect my life. Quite the contrary: I need to forgive my parents. For everything. Right now. It’s completely up to me. If we should meet at the gates of the afterlife, and they start telling me how horrible, how evil, how worthless I am, all I have to do is to say, “I forgive you.” And then, I’m free. No one can touch me.

But I don’t need to wait until I die. I can forgive them now. I can just say, “It happened. It was terrible. And it’s over. I don’t want to suffer, and I don’t want you to suffer. I forgive you.”

Does it matter to them? Who knows. It matters to me. It matters that I choose life and blessing right here, right now. It’s not just about clearing out the clutter from my soul. It’s about being able to reclaim my enjoyment of simple things: the color purple, classical music, my memories of childhood, and this moment, which is infinitely precious and infinitely fragile.

© 2009 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg

When I posted a picture of my first quilted piece, a couple of you mentioned how much purple I’d used. Unbeknownst to y’all, I have a teensy-weensy issue with purple. Up to now, I’d imagined that I had this itty-bitty problem quite under control, but after reading the comments about my art, it’s clear that I don’t. Much as I try to avoid the color, it pops up of its own accord.

Okay, so what’s the problem? Two words: my mother. The woman loved purple. She was nuts about it. From the time I was seven years old, our house had plush wall-to-wall purple carpeting on both floors, and going up the stairs, too. The only rooms without purple carpeting were the bedrooms. Everywhere else, it was purple, purple, and then more purple. From 1965 on, long before other people were adorning their middle-class suburban domiciles with purple, my mother blazed her own trail and went for it.

What’s worse, in 1972, my mother got me a purple blouse that was the most uncomfortable piece of clothing ever known to humankind. It was made of that puckered material—maybe some of you are old enough to remember it?—and it was tight. It was worse than spandex. I don’t know how I kept from screaming and ripping it to shreds. I even have a class picture in which I’m wearing it. (I don’t look happy.)

So, here’s the deal: In the house in which I was raised, if something belonged to my mother, it belonged to no one else. Sharing was not her strong suit. If she were grieving the loss of a loved one, all the grief had to be hers. No one else could cry. No one else could express any emotion. No one else could talk about it. If anyone tried, my mother pulled rank and talked about how it was all about her grief. I didn’t grieve my maternal grandparents, who were as kind to me as my mother was cruel, for 30 years. I just wasn’t allowed to.

And yes, my mother was cruel. It wasn’t her fault. Something inside her was wired wrong, and even if she’d been willing to change, it might not have been possible. As it was, she was most decidedly not willing to change. In fact, as far as she was concerned, everyone else was always wrong, and she was always right.

Enter this sensitive, visually inclined Aspie. I’ve heard it said that not only do autistic people feel things acutely, but we also remember events and their associated feelings quite intensely, and for a very long time. I am no exception. For me, the visual world is saturated with emotion. I can’t help it. It’s just the way I am. So, the color purple is saturated with my memories of my mother. And some of those memories center on the idea that purple belongs to her, and not to me. I can’t have it, even though I love it.

It makes me want to cry with frustration. I feel like I’m in a vise and can’t get myself free of it.

Do any of you have experience with a similar issue? Have any of you managed to wring out the associations and replace them with your own? I’m quite interested in how other people handle situations like this one.

© 2009 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg

Don’t worry: I’m not obsessing about death.

In fact, I’m planning on living on planet Earth for another fifty years. I figure I’ll need at least that long to understand my life and write about it. It’s a good plan, don’t you think? While I don’t discount the indisputable wisdom of the Yiddish saying, “If you want to give God a laugh, tell him your plans,” I know that God will make an exception for me. How do I know this? It’s simple: I’ve communicated my needs clearly, I’ve come up with a sound plan, and God knows, I need predictability.

So, while my tenure here on earth is assured, I often wonder what will happen after my soul departs my (101-year-old) Aspie body. In fact, over the course of my lifetime, I’ve had a number of theories on the subject, all of which I will now impart to you.

1. Ages 4 to 9: Don’t ask because you can’t know.

This theory came courtesy of my mother after I asked her about God. I’d heard this “God” word from someone, and I’d wondered what it meant. Here’s how the conversation went:

Me: “Mommy, who’s God?”
My mother: “God created everything.”
Me: “Okay. So where’s God?”
My mother: “God is in everything. God is in you, in me, in the air we breathe, and even in the kitchen table.”

[At this point, I have my first mystical experience. I can feel God in every molecule of the air, very close to me, but not crowding me. Then, I look at the kitchen table, and it's radiant with light.]

Me: “Who created God? And who created the God that created God. And who created the God who created the God who created God?”
My mother: “Don’t go there. You’ll drive yourself crazy.”

For nearly every other moment of my childhood, my mother was an ardent atheist without a spiritual bone in her body, so I’ve always considered this conversation to be the product of some sort of Divine intervention. In addition, despite the fact that my mother had not been taught anything about Judaism, she somehow communicated one of its core tenets to me: the absolutely unknowable mystery that is God. At that moment, I grasped that not only was God a mystery, but that everything concerning God was a mystery, including the question of what happens before birth and after death.

2. Ages 10 to 12: We’re born, we suffer, we die, and that’s all there is.

This theory also came courtesy of my mother. It’s the core tenet of that good old-time religion called “Jewish atheism.” Yes, trust me, Jewish atheism is a religion. Sometimes, it’s called “secular humanism,” and sometimes it’s called “democratic socialism,” and sometimes, it’s just called “Get your Bible out of my face and allow me to make the world a better place than I found it.” In my parents’ case, it was called “We’re just a bunch of molecules bouncing around the universe with no purpose whatsoever.”

3. Age 13: I am definitely going to hell, and it will be very, very painful.

This particular stage in my thinking came from a televangelist whose name I can’t remember. Why was a nice Jewish girl like me watching a televangelist, you ask? Well, my parents always watched the Billy Graham Crusade on TV. They didn’t watch it for the spiritual content. They watched it rather like anthropologists who have no respect for their research subjects. I can remember my father, in particular, being appalled by the spectacle of fear being used to elicit faith. My parents detested religion, and to them, the Billy Graham Crusade was a prime example as to why.

But somehow, all the fear-mongering got to me. One night, while I was lying in bed, I turned on the little TV I’d gotten for my birthday and found a station on which a televangelist was preaching. He said that whether your sins are big or small, it’s all the same to God. If you don’t accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, you will burn in the everlasting fires of hell. However, if you do accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, every single sin will be wiped away for all eternity, and you’ll never have to worry again.

Oh my. I did not want to burn in hell. Definitely not. And it all seemed so easy: I could become a Christian, and all my worries would be over. I was a very worried little Aspie, so the deal sounded good. There was one catch, however: I was Jewish, and I was pretty certain my parents would throw me out of the house immediately if I became a Christian. 

So, for next three weeks, I spent most of my time obsessing over every small thing I had ever done wrong in my life. (I hadn’t lived very long yet, so my recall was quite good.) When I was finished with the backlog, I obsessed over all the little things I was doing wrong in the present, many of which I probably wasn’t even aware of yet. And then, of course, there were all those things I might do in the future. It was overwhelming. The more I thought about the inevitability of screwing up, the further I descended into a state of abject misery.

One Saturday morning, at Hebrew school, I told my friend Caryn what was going on with me, and she miraculously lifted the burden from my shoulders. Here’s the conversation:

Me: “The televangelist says I’m going to hell if I don’t become a Christian.”
Caryn: “You’re not going to hell.”
Me: “How do you know?”
Caryn: “You’re Jewish. We don’t believe in hell.”
Me: “You sure?”
Caryn: “Yup.”
Me: “Okay. I feel better now.”

4. Ages 14 to 22: “It’s not worth thinking about. After all, I’m immortal.”

5. Ages 23 to 33: “I want a husband, kids, and a career. I simply don’t have the time to spend worrying about what happens after I die. I’m too worried about what’s going to happen while I’m still alive.”

6. Ages 34 to 40: “If I’m a good person, I will have everlasting life (whatever that is). If I’m a bad person, I will simply cease to exist altogether. That wouldn’t be good.”

7. Ages 41 to the present: “I will be reincarnated many times, in many places, depending on what I learn in each lifetime.”

There is a Jewish belief in reincarnation called “gilgul,” which basically posits that we return to this earth many times in order to make things right from a past life or to help others along their life paths. This particular philosophy appeals to me tremendously, because it explains so much:

a) Why some people do so much evil and others do so much good. What can explain the fact that Adolf Hitler and Mother Teresa once inhabited the earth at the same time? Are some souls simply born evil and others simply born good? No, that can’t be. If we’re hardwired to be good or evil, then there can be no free will and no morality. So, perhaps, Mother Teresa had been reborn thousands of times and had learned profound wisdom along the way, while Adolf Hitler hadn’t been around much and was therefore operating under a series of extremely dangerous delusions.

b) Why I got born into my abusive family. It took me a long time to work this one out, but I’ve come to feel that I actually chose my parents. That does not mean it was okay that they were abusive, or that I asked for it. It simply means that my soul might have seen the potential lessons to be learned through them (without knowing the details), and that I decided that I might as well give them a try. I’m also thinking that if I were as impatient in the spirit world as I am in this world, I may have been getting restless with the whole “being between bodies” thing and acted rashly.

c) Why I’m autistic. Maybe in a past life, I was a smug neuro-typical person who thought I had all the answers. You can’t learn anything that way. So, I came back as a periodically smug autistic person who more than occasionally thinks she has all the answers.

Hey, I’m doing my best.

Of course, I don’t really know what will happen. I guess I’ll find out in the afterlife. Or not. Who knows?

© 2009 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg

According to my mother, I didn’t speak a single word until I was 2 1/2 years old. Then, when I started speaking, I spoke in full and complete sentences.

Because I was a first child, I might very well have saved up my words until I could put a sentence together and converse properly with the adults. It’s also possible that I took to print more naturally than to speech, and so simply didn’t bother to speak for a while. I’ve always intuitively understood the purpose of the written word, and I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know how to read.

Ironically, when I entered the first grade, I was completely confused by the Dick and Jane books. We worked on them every day, and the teacher spent each session explaining, in excruciating detail, how to sound out every word. I couldn’t imagine why she had to explain anything so simple in such a tedious way. I secretly thought to myself how lucky I was to know how to read, because if I had to learn it in school, I’d be lost.

One day, the teacher asked me to read aloud a page of the book. In the picture above the text, the father was juggling. So, although I could see quite clearly that the words said “See Father play,” I read the text aloud as “See Father juggle.” The teacher told me to sound out the words and to stop guessing, but I wasn’t guessing. “Juggle” was the word I saw spelled out in my head, and it was the right word for the picture. The word in my mind was more real to me than the word on the page.

I have since discovered that whenever I think, speak, or listen to another person talk, I see word pictures. That is, I see every word spelled out across my mental screen. Needless to say, I have never had a problem with spelling. Once I see a word, I can remember it quite easily. What’s more, when taking college exams, I could leaf through my notes in my mind until I found the page with the correct answer.

The written word has always been my natural medium.

© 2009 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg

Dreams

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

                –Langston Hughes

Thank you to everyone for your love and support after my last post. Every word means so much to me.

Not surprisingly, I’ve just come out of another bout of grief and tears this morning, feeling the impact of so many dreams that have died. Certainly, some of my dreams have come true, and my grief in no way diminishes my gratitude. But right now, the grief is hitting me like a tsunami. Every day is a constant process of letting go of dreams that have propelled me all my life. I thought I’d let go of all the big ones, but I’m still hanging on, and I have to stop. Hanging on just brings me heartache.

I’m going to write about the dreams I’ve come up against today. Writing helps me feel like I have some control over what’s going on, but please don’t take this piece as any kind of indication that everything in my mind feels orderly and precise. At the moment, I’m feeling about as burned out and confused as I’ve ever felt in my life.

Where Did the Past Go?
This morning, I was sitting in the kitchen window, looking out at the orange lilies in the next-door neighbor’s yard. The light was dappled by the chestnut tree, and the shaded yard nearly had a feeling of autumn about it. But it’s not autumn, and what I was seeing was a memory from when I was a child. The only flowers we had were the same type of orange lilies; they grew by the side of our house. I had a very strong sense memory of being a little kid, living in that house, running around with my brother, feeling like everything was okay. Of course, most of the time, I didn’t feel like it was okay. Most of the time, I was anxious and fearful. But on a Saturday morning in summer, when all we had to do was go down to the drugstore, buy baseball cards and candy, and spend the rest of the day playing baseball, or wandering in the woods, or pretending to be Batman and Robin, life felt like it ought to feel—happy, hopeful, innocent.

My dream was that it would stay that way, and that my brother and I would always be close, but of course, that didn’t happen. My parents are gone, and my brother is lost to me. For the sake of his privacy, I won’t go into details, but suffice it to say that he is not someone I want to know anymore (and he appears to feel the same way about me). How we started out being innocent and happy, and ended up where we are now, is hard to explain. I could tell you everything that happened, but it would never be the whole story, because the whole story is not a collection of events, but the complex working out of pain, fear, love, anger, and confusion. It feels like my original family got put into a centrifuge, and each of us got spun out in different directions, never to return. It’s overwhelming for me, and unbearably sad. I want those days back. I want that dream back. I want to make it all work out just fine. But it’s all over. I can’t change any of it.

I’m Not Who I Was Supposed to Be
I was reading an article today on the Internet, and I noticed that the author was the daughter of my childhood piano teacher. Her name stood out to me because of a particularly sweet childhood memory. One day, while I was at my piano lesson, playing a piece that I was going to perform in Boston, the author and her sister, ages 2 and 4, were standing on either side of the piano bench, jumping up and down, screaming their heads off. When I was done with the piece, my piano teacher said, “If you can play a sonata through THAT, you can play it anywhere!”

So, today, I did a little bit of searching about what this woman has been doing with her life, and it turned out that before writing a well-reviewed book, she had been a producer for Dateline NBC. That’s when another level of grief hit. You see, I was a really smart kid. I mean, really smart. I taught myself to read. I got all As in school. I nearly aced every SAT and college board I took. I was gifted in music. I won a statewide piano contest. I got into an Ivy League university. I was supposed to be successful. I was supposed to be a producer, a director, a musician, a lawyer, a doctor or Anything Other Than What I Am. That was the dream, and it guided my entire childhood and adolescence. Now, I look at people who couldn’t do what I did when I was just a kid, and I see that there is no way I could ever do what they’ve done as adults.

Every now and then, I torture myself by going online and searching for the names of people from high school, just to see what they’re doing. It’s unbelievable what people are doing. They’re out in the world being important and successful. I keep asking the question: How can people have surpassed me like this? I never expected to be famous, but I once was full of promise. Could I have ever worked at the jobs they have? No way. I know it. And yet, I can’t quite grasp why not. I know that raw intelligence isn’t everything. I know that I don’t understand (or respect) social politics. I know that I get overloaded in groups of more than two people (and sometimes even that’s a stretch). I know all these things, but I still can’t quite accept what’s happened. The gulf between who I was supposed to be and who I am is so deep and so wide that my mind can’t take it in and make any sense of it.

It’s like looking at someone who has died. How can the person be alive one moment and gone the next? The mind can’t go there. You want to say to the person, “Just wake up.” You want to see where the person has gone off to. But you can’t. And that’s what’s happening to me. I still see myself as that person with the dream of doing Whatever She Wants, but I’m not that person. That person is gone. Where did she go, and when? At this point, I’m so sensitive to everything, I can barely go outside my door. 

What Could Be More Important than the Approval of Others?
When I was in high school, I was determined to be one of the cool kids. Of course, I failed miserably, but what did that matter? There were other kids I could have hung out with—the ones everyone made fun of because they were shy and awkward and carried slide rules and pocket protectors. I liked them just fine, but I saw what they had to put up with. I saw the cruel things that people wrote in their yearbooks. I saw how people laughed at them every day. I saw that they were perpetual outsiders, and I fled from them because I wanted to be an insider.

So, as I got older, I straightened my hair, lost weight, wore conventional clothes, and tried to become acceptable. I’ve never stopped. I’ve been trying and trying and trying to be one of the cool people. I have a million faces, and I have a million clever things to say, all in the service of not wanting to be laughed at and rejected.

I cannot be weird. I cannot be an outsider. I cannot be looked upon as an oddity or a freak. I must be like everyone else. Those were my prime directives in life, and I once dreamt that I could fulfill them.

Guess what? Game over. Bye bye to that dream. See ya. Nice knowin’ ya. And no, you can’t ever come back.

You Mean You Don’t Want My Energy for Free?
When my daughter first started school, she was in the eighth grade, and I offered to volunteer at her school as a tutor. It’s a small school, and all the teachers wear many hats, but they didn’t want or need my help. Of course, they didn’t say it outright. They said, “That’s a sweet offer” and then proceeded to ignore me. Who knows why? Am I too smart? Too direct? Too weird? I don’t know. Once the homeschooling was done, I was hoping to use my skills as a teacher, and I was offering them for free. But no one ever took me up on it.

At this point, I wouldn’t be able to help out at the school because of my sensory issues, but it still hurts that I never got the chance.

Seeking My Fellow Aspies and Auties
Okay, now that you’ve come this far, let me get to the latest and greatest dream-that-must-die. Remember the school for autistic young people, where the person was so excited to get my offer of serving as a volunteer? Where she said that they were completely open to my needs around sensory issues? Remember that? Sounded good, didn’t it?

The last email I sent them was on June 24, suggesting that we get together on June 30. That was over two weeks ago, and I haven’t heard a word—not even to say, “I’m sorry, June 30th won’t work, but how about some time in July?”

Now, I tried really, really, REALLY hard to not get my hopes up about this school, because things just generally have a pattern of not working out in rather mysterious and inexplicable ways. But, the truth is, I had my hopes up, big time. It wasn’t just about having something to do. It was about being around autistic people. Since then, I have found another Aspie in town, and we are emailing, but other than that, I have no local contact with anyone autistic. There are groups in Northampton and Amherst and Keene and Springfield, but I don’t live in any of those places, and I can’t possibly drive there and expect to have any energy left when I actually arrive.

So yeah, okay, I had my heart set on being at the school. I could walk there and be among some autistic people. Oh well.

I keep wondering what I’ve done wrong, and why people don’t want my energy when I’m willing to give it for free. Am I too direct? I’ve only spent 25 years and a gazillion dollars in therapy being told to be who I am and to ask for what I need. So I do, as clearly and as authentically as possible, and voila! I still get left by the side of the road. I’m a perpetual outcast. It’s really unbelievable. It would be okay if I loathed people and wanted nothing to do with them, but I love people and I want to help them. I just keep hitting the big brick wall that everyone else seems to see but me.

I just don’t understand. I try to be NT: no dice. I try to be myself: no dice. I try to be direct: no dice. I try to be gently patient and encouraging: no dice. I try to be super-competent: no dice. I try to acknowledge my challenges: no dice.

I would really like to get together with my new Aspie friend in town, but to tell you the truth, I’m scared. It seems like everything I touch in the outside world magically screws up. I keep thinking that there would be no social pressure with another Aspie. I keep thinking about how relieved I would feel to actually meet her in person. But I’d probably just cry for much of our first meeting, and whoops! another person gone.

So it’s hard to dream about anything that concerns other people. And I don’t want to be alone. So my life feels pretty awful right now.

Bob keeps saying that I just have to keep letting go of the dreams that don’t work so that other dreams can take their place. But I’m not sure I can bear any other dreams. They break my heart. If I could understand why things don’t work out, maybe I could change what I’m doing, but I don’t understand it at all.

© 2009 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg