If you have patience, then you will also have love. Patience leads to love. – Amma

A few days ago, I once again came across a post depicting parents of autistic children as superheroes. The picture was the cockpit of a Concorde, with the comment that surely all "autism parents" would feel that way.

Of course, I couldn't keep my mouth shut and remarked that I found this impertinent and insulting to autistic people.

Which resulted in my comment was deleted.

Another example comes from a Facebook group with the pretty name "Autism Connects", in which a mother complains about her autistic child something like this: "Our autistic again. Spills the juice all over the laptop and then says, 'I didn't do it!' Of course not. Always happens all by itself."

And in this tone a bit more.

Do parents of children with, say, Down syndrome also talk about their children in such an annoyed way? Or parents of blind children? Or parents of children who have cancer, or say XP (xeroderma pigmentosum, also known as "moonshine disease" or "light shrinkage skin," a genetic defect that is the cause of a skin disease in which the child cannot go in the sun. The average life expectancy for these individuals is about 30 years) or perhaps hemophilia? I have not yet noticed parents of non-autistic children speaking of their children with such blatant annoyance. But maybe I'm just not paying attention.

Having a child or children, raising them, is always by far the most challenging and greatest and most difficult task of any species, but especially of the human species. Every child challenges the parents in its own unique way to get to know and understand it. To understand how it perceives the world. Mother Nature has developed a perfect trick here, with this tiny bundle coming into our hands and first it looks at us with its big eyes, then maybe it smiles, and most of us completely melt away and perceive it as just sweet and adorable…

But there is a complete personality within this little worm! A personality with its rough edges, a personality of which we will find some sides great and others maybe really shitty!

A person who needs our love and care, no matter what makes him or her tick.

Sometimes parent and child harmonize so well that it feels like a walk across the spring meadow, over the whole 18 years, and more.

Sometimes the personalities are so different that there is practically a constant clash.

And all this has nothing, but nothing at all to do with whether the child is autistic or not, and I find it not only unbearable, but, yes, impertinent and insulting to have this shoved in my face again and again like this.

There are parents who devote themselves to their children with love and devotion, and there are parents who don't really care very much about their children. There are parents who, despite all their love and devotion, are not the best parents! And I think that’s many, maybe even most parents!

And all parents, without exception, are just people with their own issues and fears and hopes, and if you haven’t had a child at home for at least two weeks during vacation and know not only what such a little human can eat, but what it means to live with him or her, then you have not even a rudimentary idea of what it means to have such a small person as your own child (whether biological or adopted) in your life.

Parents rack their brains over all these things, in one form or another. Parents who live in great poverty worry every day about how to even put food on the table for the children. And what if the child is sick? Parents who are materially better off worry about what kind of food they can... should... give their child.

In short, having a child is fundamentally always, ALWAYS a challenge and also a struggle, because very few parents live alone with their children in some wilderness without social inclusion.

As an autistic adult, seeing this self-celebration by modern parents of autistic children is a slap in the face, to say the least. First of all, many of us have experienced the exact opposite, i.e. parents who didn't care about *us* but about what people said; parents who didn't want to and couldn't understand that their child didn't want to be and didn't participate like all the other children, and looked for the child's fault - because society blamed them, i.e. exclusively the mothers. And today it's the other way around and parents, especially mothers, I'm sorry, make themselves out to be so great and special because they deal with an autistic child every day.

So that's how much of a burden we are, or were, to our poor parents.

That is the message of such statements.

An autistic child is a challenge. A struggle. A burden.

And, and, and.

And we autistics ourselves?

Of course, being autistic is sometimes a challenge or a handicap.

It is also sometimes a challenge to be a woman. To be ten or 20 or 50 years old. To have glasses. To be six feet tall, or even just five feet. To have sensitive skin. Maybe being black…

It's fundamentally challenging to be human sometimes.

Is my black best friend a challenge for me because of that? A burden even?

How could he be?

Is my 1.80 tall girlfriend a challenge for me?

Why would she be?

Is perhaps my 70-year-old grandpa or blind neighbor a challenge or even a burden to me?

Neither.

So why do we constantly talk about autism as if it is such an immense burden on everyone around them? As if an autistic child is the biggest challenge for parents and teachers and who else? Drugs, violence, unprotected sexual activity, cancer, that's a burden for parents and teachers! And when the mother is in a wheelchair and the 15 year old son hasn't seen his therapist in four weeks and is now having one meltdown after the other and getting aggressive, yes, that's a burden! THAT!! But such behavior is not limited to autistic children/adolescents!

An important person once said to me that she did not want to dwell on labels and diagnoses. She even considered this to be a hindrance. Rather, she wanted to see and perceive the human being as a whole.

That's how I also see it. To a certain extent, of course, it is important to recognize certain details, because they make the individual the personality that he or she is. But if we only think in terms of labels and diagnoses, then that is nothing more than pigeonholing, and pigeonholing does no one any good. We autistic people are constantly accused of thinking in terms of black and white, but that is exactly what society does to us, leaving little or no room for the gray… or better, the colorful.