parent's perspective please?

sarahstilettos · Phoenix Joined: Sep 08, 2007 Age: 23 Posts: 852

I'm not a parent of an autistic child, I'm a 21 year old female who was recently diagnosed with it myself, but I am posting here because I would like a parents perspective.

My father left our family home when I was 15. Since then all the places he has lived have been at least a four hour drive from where I live - he has a fondness for desolate places. To be brutally honest, this did not impact much upon our relationship. My father is not the sort of person you can talk to about your problems. Our phone conversations now are incredibly strained and awkward - he tells me about the cheap things he's brought from the supermarket, although the price of their pies has gone up, (and he will tell me by exactly how many pence) or just general tedious stuff about the cost of his car and the electrical appliances in his flat breaking.

I feel guilty because I know how sad it makes him that he never finds out about any trauma in my life until way, way after the fact. He says he could have helped. I have no doubt that if the issue were practical he would have, but it rarely is, and I learnt pretty early on that however much he feels he needs to know, telling him about any emotional problem actually scares him.

Whatever people on this forum may say about not needing to tell other people you have aspergers, instinct tells me I owe it to him to let him know. If I kept it from him for a long time and he found out, I know he would be devastated.

I would guess that my father's knowledge of autism is relatively poor. I have no way of knowing if he even knows what aspergers syndrome is. I have no doubt that he will be totally, totally thrown by the idea that his daughter is mildly autistic, and if I'm honest... I don't think he'll believe it.

I am not a qualified psychiatrist and have no wish to make an amateur diagnosis of my father, but from what you've read so far, you can see that he has a few traits. He also has a lot more which I have not mentioned. What is important is that, what with him having so many of the traits himself, he probably views them as fairly normal, and will not understand the need to medicalise them in me - he would have no need for it himself, so why do I? (Simply, because he is odd, but I have been disturbed. He, so far as I know, has never ended a night by crouching in a shop doorway for two hours, self harming. He has never had an anxiety attack trying to get on a bus).

I also remember him completely ostracising a lifelong friend when he found out the friend was gay. He's only homophobic in the sense that he's scared of what he doesn't understand. I fear him having the same reaction to me, although I know he would at least stay in contact with his daughter.

Parents, if this was you, how would you want your adult daughter to tell you about this? What would make you understand better?

I am going to tell him, I'm just considering how.