I was seriously surprised to win the Anne Brown Essay Prize this year and to see an extract from my winning essay published in the Scottish Herald a couple of Sundays ago. It was a strange and double-edged feeling, after sharing my work with just a few like minds here on Substack, to be suddenly outing myself as autistic in a national newspaper. It also made me question anew what portion of the story I share with my son is mine to tell. I might write about my unexpected ambivalence here in future when I have more time.
But for now, I thought I’d share the winning essay. The first half is below. The second half will be coming in a couple of weeks. If you don’t want to miss it, you could consider subscribing.
I’m at the kitchen counter again. Distant traffic passes. My son is at the table, eyes on a screen. A too-familiar soundtrack fills the room. It sometimes feels like this will never end. Him there, me here, the same tinny music on a loop.
He calls me over to show me what he’s built. It’s a fortress, designed to keep the zombies out. I stand beside him, my hand on the back of his chair. The screen is a blur of colour and light. I blink. It’s about the 700th one he’s made. My attention slides off towards the window where the world waits in its blaze, trees melting into sky.
Reaching up, he takes me by the chin and turns my head back to the screen. But I can’t see what he sees.
1980. It’s playgrounds that scare me most. The wide-cold open space and figuring out how to cross it. Bells ring. Patterned concrete passes under running feet, lines blurring. I watch the other girls. I learn to look like them. Survival depends on staying in the middle, staying invisible. The best place to hide a pencil is in a pencil case.
1988. It’s double maths. I’m in the back row with the others, laughing when they laugh, swinging on two legs of a regulation plastic chair. Sweat pools at the backs of my knees and under my arms. The room is loud with heat, close with stifled talk. Itchy jumper. Itchy skirt. I live a life constricted by confusion and self-loathing. It’s impossible to hear the teacher over that.
There’s what they mean to teach. And then there’s what you learn: be careful not to say too little; be careful not to say too much; don’t give anything away.
I look out of the window, then at the clock. Twenty-seven minutes left. I’m waiting for the bell, even though it doesn’t mark the end, only a different room for more of the same. I’m counting the days and weeks, the years until it’s over: that’s the only sum I’m doing.
1997. I never speak in class. Silence marks me out. The other students share their thoughts with ease. The room swims with ideas, too fast to catch. It’s not as if I don’t have thoughts myself. I can almost taste them, in their music and their grit, but they won’t make it past my lips. If I try to talk, nonsense comes out. So I don’t.
2017. Three brain scientists from three different US universities – Noah Sasson, Ruth Grossman, Daniel Kennedy – publish a report laying out their work on the role of stigma in autistic experience. Up to this point much of the research in this area has, they say, focused on the communicative ability of autistic people themselves. Sasson et al point out that social interactions always involve more than one person. They turn their attention to nonautistic people. Asking participants to observe and rate ‘thin slices’ of videotaped interactions they aim to learn about all-important first impressions nonautistic people form about their autistic peers. Across all three studies they find that participants see autistic people in the videos as more awkward and less likeable. This is the case even though they aren’t told which ones are autistic.
In 2023, a smaller study led by Danny Dunn, a young autistic graduate student in Sasson’s department at the University of Texas, asks both autistic and nonautistic participants similarly to rate similar ‘thin slice’ interactions and finds that, while both groups see autistic people as more awkward and less socially skilled, only the nonautistic participants ‘report lower interest in socially interacting’ with the autistic ones. In other words, autistic people aren’t put off by awkwardness. Dunn calls his study ‘awkward but so what’.
Mothering means waiting. It means waiting with the other mothers—pencil in a pencil case. You wait outside gym halls and in playgrounds, by nurseries and schools. You wait on a litany of classes and clubs to be over. You wait, the lot of you, along the shoreline of your child’s experience, a ragged row of cross-armed Penelopes. It reminds me of that old Guinness ad, all moody black and white—grizzled surfer, surfboard, wave—with a voiceover saying: She waits. That’s what she does.
Things might, or might not, be going well in there. That story isn’t mine to tell. One thing is certain: whatever happens, I’m responsible. Responsible but powerless. I’m crossing not only arms but fingers and toes too. Crossing everything.
Sometimes he comes out screaming. Sometimes he throws a toy. Sometimes I get called aside and told a list of the latest misdemeanours. They never say it’s my fault. They never say it’s his. They never say that. They just keep smiling, smiling and talking. The other mums, probably glad it’s not them, pretend not to hear.
During the first few weeks of school, it doesn’t take long for things to fall apart. There are meetings with management. There are fidget toys and strategies, plans for part-time attendance. It’s clear nobody knows what to do.
One morning, a girl from my son’s class comes up to us in the playground. She invites him to her birthday party. Then she says: ‘Are you going to be bad again today?’
When there’s no official story, no label to describe you, you get the unofficial ones instead. You’re bad. Or odd. Nobody can quite put their finger on it but everyone agrees. They don’t say it’s my fault, but I’m the mother after all.
I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong.
We are in an NHS paediatric unit, a doctor observing. The child plays on the floor with a speech therapist. I sit behind them with his dad, the two of us on matching plastic chairs designed for children. The perspective is all wrong. We look like giants. Small cars drive on small roads. Two heads bent over the game.
The child has a plan. The therapist also has a plan. She’s testing to see how flexible he can be in response to her ideas. (Spoiler: not very.)
‘He got hurt,’ she says. ‘We need an ambulance.’
‘No we don’t,’ he says.
I look up. The doctor’s watching me across the room. I look down and away. On the phone, before the assessment, she asked if there were any autistic people in the immediate family.
‘If you’d asked me a year ago, I would have said no,’ I said, gripping the receiver. ‘But the more I read, the more I understand I’m probably autistic myself.’
It was the first time I’d said it to anyone other than my partner. The moment it was out, it sounded made up. I’m not sure if she believed me.
I barely believe it myself.
Doctor and speech therapist go to a different room to confer. My partner leans closer, lowering his voice.
‘That doctor’s autistic,’ he says.
The child picks up a plastic telephone. He presses the buttons. His dad joins him. We wait. We act like it’s a normal day. The doctor might come back any moment. She might say our son is autistic. She might say he isn’t. I’m 99.9% sure he is. But I still need them to tell me.
The child keeps coming over, bringing me things. The car. The telephone.
‘Look,’ he says.
But I can’t see what he sees.
The doctor comes back in. Words are coming out of her mouth, words that seem devoid of content. Then she says, ‘based on what we’ve seen today there’s enough evidence for a diagnosis.’
Child and father keep playing on the floor. I’m not sure that I heard her right. After that I can’t take much in, except the way she keeps using words like ‘we’ and ‘us’. The message slowly clarifies. Us autistic people. We are like this.
Autistic doctor.
Autistic mother.
Autistic child.
The doctor talks about her own son then. He’s autistic too. When he was the age their child is now, he used to like playing with cars.
‘He used to like things that were predictable,’ she says, shrugging. ‘Don’t we all.’
She hands over a leaflet. That’s the end of it. We step back out onto the same street.
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I get amazed at writing that is amazing.
That was amazing !!!
Beautiful writing, well deserved award