Note From An Aspie’s Mom
By Susan Thomas
Courtesy of Parenting Aspergers
I wanted to tell you about my son with Aspergers, Louis.
He is now about to turn 27 years old.
First, he has made it his quest in life to "find some cure" other than "pretending to be normal" and has made significant strides.
He meditates every day and has found it really helps regulate and control his emotions and his focus.
He also practices yoga which really helps with controlling his thoughts!
His diagnosis was late in life and so our early struggles were due to not understanding why he did what he did and reacted the way he did and of course, those meltdowns.
Like everybody!
Meltdowns were considered bad behavior and so I endlessly struggled to "correct" him and misread his intentions about 99% of the time!
He was always punished.
Shame on me.
But today, he has an honors degree in Philosophy and is the Operations Manager at a $1.7 million (about to be $2.7 million) start-up company that he has worked so hard to help build.
He maintains his own apartment in another city.
He works tirelessly (although he would beg to differ as he is exhausted a lot) and is seen by the CEO as a man who "ALWAYS" does what he says he will do and does it with a sincere earnest regard!
He will never lie, cheat or steal!
His boss told me that these qualities are extremely hard to find in an employee!
He recently did the presentation before the venture capitalist firm who is awarding them a million dollars to expand!
I would suspect that the firm's Managing Director was quite tickled with him!
Can you picture the details he must have submitted to justify funding!
So there it is!
We work ourselves to exhaustion trying to change our perfect and wonderful children to fit the mold when they are quite frankly better than we atypicals!
Anyway, I hope this is an encouragement to those parents who still have young ones with Aspergers and worry so much about what might happen to them in this big ugly world.
I know I worried myself to death about what might happen to him and I spent the bulk of his life rescuing him from the dragons!
Our perfect children have been delicately placed here to change our ugly world into something sincerely innocent with a beautifully child-like vision.
They do not understand deceit or malice and are quite baffled and terribly hurt by those who would be that way.
It's not in their DNA.