My Autistically Beauty Creations
I’ve spoken at length about how relaxed patterns make me feel.
I am sure that to varying degrees this holds true for many people, but we on the spectrum thrive more than others on patterned behavior, and for me it deeply informs my parenting and so many aspects of who I am, including my intellectual output.
I drive my spouse and three of my children a bit nuts with my commitment to starting dinner by 6, brushing teeth by 6:30, and in bed by 7:15 for two children. Since they don’t need routines to feel relaxed, and so they push back. My autistic child though loves the patterns more than me.
Routines are clearly my way of maintaining control over a small slice of the world, and you know what, that is fine. These routines keep my boys regulated, they know what to expect, and kids thrive on that.
Though I am bound by the clock, I am not a strict parent, and roll around with my boys all the time. I have rules, but only rules that are direct and explainable and make sense to the age and neuro-type of each child.
And to take down another pernicious prejudice against autistic people. I never miss an opportunity to tell my boys how much I love them.
My parenting is actually quite similar in how I come up with ideas.
I am on the systemetizer-savant band of the Autistic spectrum, and I find patterns everywhere, patterns where others don’t see them.
What it starts with, however, is a lot of hard work, akin to controlling the dinner and bedtime schedules as it were. I first gain control over a body of material, and once I have that control, I invariably find patterns. I learn the rules of the body of material I am studying, but they must be rules that are appropriate to that body of material and are straightforward.
Take for example the Hebrew Bible, which I’ve been studying since I’ve been a child. One simple rule that I discovered early on about ancient texts is that authors in the ancient world so rarely deleted things, instead they added. The reason for this is straightforward. Text was precious to ancient writers, especially texts about religious ideas and national myths. No editor of a seventh century BCE text would red pen a manuscript like we do today. Instead if a later writer wanted to shift the understanding of a particular story they would add and make it into a different story.
The biggest blessing of my intellectual life is that I’ve never suffered the tyranny of the blank page, since when I am thinking of the bodies of material that I love, I am in a zone called by thought researcher ‘the flow zone’, and the words fly out faster than I can type them. Writing becomes almost meditational for me, and there are times when I wish I could do it forever. But alas I can’t, it is 6 pm and I must prepare dinner for my kiddos…