Double the Autism

Empathy is Possible

I’m no better for it, but I am here. What a week, man. The dips and valleys in recent days are not just mine and Finn’s. 

Observe: A coworker. She is stressing and struggling with a teenage daughter and a passive husband. She is also working on a credential and trying to finish early. She hasn’t come out as in recovery to me but she uses all the language. She left the office to “go out to my car and make a phone call” on Monday after repeated frustrations. Many of us know the subtext to that action. I’m gentle with her because she is new to the work, but because she sits closest to my desk (they put a new person next to me, bold move, admins!), she receives all my best jokes and hot takes. I’m starting to accept her effusive compliments as sincere instead of schmoozy. She says things like “OMIGOD you’re so cute” when I snark or quip. I don’t tell her my secrets, as a rule I keep them professionally. We might have been girlfriends in kindergarten. I listen, or try to anyway. My bucket’s been empty for others.

Observe: My (trans)daughter, Beatrix, was sexually harassed at work. Many of the fears I had when she came out have come to pass. I understand gender dysphoria, I understand the liberation of being who you know you are with no restraint– but damn, why anyone would choose to be a woman in this social climate baffles all that is precariously sane in me. The situation was resolved and the offending employee discharged, but if, and, but– this is a progressive town, anywhere else she might have been hurt and who knows if the offender is going to retaliate. These are her problems. I watch from the sidelines, like the miserable season I watched her soccer team, when she was a boy of five. 

Observe: Finn. My love, my muse, my best friend. Yesterday I woke up to him turning in bed, moaning. “Is he going to stop? Is this some gag? Why, though?” I lay quiet, pretending to sleep. If it was a joke I was going to foil him, and if it was real, it was over-the-top drama because I, too, didn’t feel like getting out of bed and was barely awake. Finally I put my hand on his chest. “My head hurts,” he whimpered. “I’m sorry!” Oh, baby, don’t be sorry you got a migraine. I jumped into action by promptly falling back asleep. While I slept, he later said he got up and vomited, then curled up on the bathmat with his head on the cold tile floor. He came back to bed an hour later with a cold washcloth on his bald head, still apologizing, now sobbing and crying from the pain. Now I was awake and able to act. Medication and water. Dogs out and fed. Coffee made and served. He asked me to spoon him for a moment. I did. I told him it wasn’t his fault and I wasn’t upset with him for being out of commission, and that I was worried, and sorry he was in such horrible pain, and I could get him whatever medication he thought might help. “Time, sleep,” he whispered. I left him still crying, astonished by the magnitude of the pain and how it took him out so completely, no amount of testosterone and masculine strength of any defense, and the power of trauma reducing him to a scared little boy who doesn’t want to upset his dad because he can’t perform.

Observe: Me. I accidentally took an extra dose of my own medication on Tuesday. I was so distracted. I was quite pissed off with myself for a moment. I wasn’t going to die, but I was not going to admit myself to be monitored, either. I had to be careful not to drive and I had to put life on the backburner for 24 hours. Wednesday morning Finn said something banal about when I am old, I will tell people he had been an ass all his life, and this sent me into an uncharacteristic emotional reaction, gut-crying and boo-hooing, thinking of having to speak of him in the past tense while being a helpless old lady, like I’ve seen other women do so many times in my career. Once I recovered, he expressed some satisfaction with my depth of feeling. “You get a boner when I cry. You like it,” I said. No, he said, he just likes knowing what he can’t read on my face.

Such is a moment between two autistics who can’t read a fucking room.

So much to do today, later this afternoon we’re headed for the seaside. I can’t wait for the drive, the time to do nothing but sit and chew gum, and I have yet to make my list of things to do before I move from this spot to start doing them, and I hope I have the spaciousness for inspiration while we’re there. For every layer we peel back as a couple, we love and attach all the more fiercely. The responsibility is immense. Somehow I got lucky that the wheel of fortune turned to my favor. I am equipped to handle this. 

I can’t wait to put my hands and feet in the icy waves at the edge of the world, to see the sky and sere beachscape, the sound of the sea drowning the chatter, and cleansing my being of the static of this world.