“But our society is so hell-bent on expansion, power, and efficiency at all costs that the folks like Tish -like me- are inconvenient. We slow the world down. We’re on the bow of the Titanic, pointing, crying out, “Iceberg! Iceberg!” while every one else is below deck, yelling back, “We just want to keep dancing!” It is easier to call us broken and dismiss us than to consider that we are responding appropriately to a broken world.
My little girl is not broken. She is a prophet. I want to be wise enough to stop with her, ask her what she feels, and listen to what she knows.”
Glennon Doyle, “Untamed” (Mar. 10, 2020). Random House Publishing Group.
To me, this feels like the perfect description of autistic parents parenting autistic children.
(inspired by the style of Glennon Doyle , here are my thoughts on autistic parenting)
I connect so differently with my son. We are a little zombie wolf pack, forever wrestling and gnawing at each other.
We love brains the best, obv.
He’s so rebellious and it warms my heart.
He can stimdump to me about Roblox for hours because I love it and yes it’s dysregulating, but also holy moly his analysis of variables + stats is freaking amazing. so I will zone in on something shiny to distract me for a few more minutes before my auditory processing centers dysregulate in puffs of steam.
I would listen forever but my sensory systems are annoyingly mortal.
Thankfully, we speak sensory and are gracious with each other’s low thresholds and best intero-tentions.
Sometimes, I am terrified I am getting it wrong and not doing it right, but gosh,
he’s so autistic. and authentic. He smiles and gets things wrong and is never scared that I am going to reject him. Because I won’t. He’s perfect.
Every decision he makes is the right one, even the wrong ones that feel like right ones. No knowledge is lost, I tell my kids.
It’s not that I lie to my kid. I just don’t attach a shame to getting it wrong because his brain is literally SUPPOSED to get it wrong in a place that will support his success.
Sometimes I do things I regret. My kids boundary me and it’s so CLASTIC to immediately respect their boundary.
Like, it breaks every neuron in my brain all at once.
It’s so hard.
But I like breaking paradigms and he’s worth the risk.
Autistic parenting is healing intergenerational trauma while authentically parenting your own children.
This often happens while parents are learning to accept their own neurodivergent identity. They are reconciling painful misperceptions of the past while building an identity-empowered context to thrive for themselves and their littles.
That’s a lot a lot a lot of identity work. And who has the time?
Spoiler alert: your body will eventually force you to create the time one way or another.
So many of you are autistics parenting autistics and I SEE YOU. 
We’re doing it.