fun stuff about asperger's

Some fun stuff about my kid with Asperger's:

• He doesn't have any pretense. I asked him last night if he was sleeping with his golf shoes purposefully, and he said, "Yes. I really like them." OK, then.

• He doesn't lie, ever.

ª I may not be able to trust him to cross the street safely, but I can give him my credit card and know he not only can make a purchase on his DS but that he can be implicitly trusted with it to not purchase one other thing.

• He's a rule follower in the extreme as long as the rules make sense to him. Whereas if I just happened to maybe, say, drop a curse word in front of my 11 year old girl, she might possibly try it out at another date, I know that Truman would never ever ever ever in one billion years do it because the rules say not to do that. In fact, he might spend part of the day reminding me and admonishing me for the slip up. Not that I know this firsthand.

• He has a very rigid structural idea about how life should work, which also means that his expectations are very high about others' behaviors.

•  He can't read the mounting emotional queues that say, "hey, you are doing something that's really pissing me off and I'm about to blow my top." It keeps you on your toes. Temper loss will crush him because he can't see it coming. You learn to take a deep breath before you talk to him when you are just about to lose it because the resulting emotionally blindsided Truman is about the saddest thing in the whole world.

• The above also means that when he's focused on something he may push past you or run into you and not say "excuse me" or even look at you. Small, social niceties and nuanced interactions don't mean much to him. But if you are very upset about something it will get to him. He doesn't recognize small emotional upsets, but large ones trigger his empathy like nobody's business.

• He is very literal and doesn't get or tell jokes very well and doesn't understand or use sarcasm. But when he is funny purposefully, it's usually either extremely, eye-rollingly stupid or very sophisticated.

• If he's not interested in something, there is nothing in the whole world you can do to motivate him about it. He won't even pretend to be able to get through it. (Unfortunately, much of school falls into this category.) But if it's something he's interested in (e.g. golf) you can expect that he will research it, talk about it until your ears bleed from boredom, read instructions manuals about it for fun, practice it, dream about it and master it.

• He does weird stuff that I love like put a a spatula to sleep in a doll bed; hang his shoe color inserts on the wall categorized by left and right; make a very serious note to himself not to mess his room up in the first place so he doesn't have to complete "clean room" on his chore chart; collect every single (and I mean every single) free newspaper, from Out and About to real estate listings, whenever we see them; read Rube Goldberg art books but see them as serious machines and not funny or ironic; write things in semaphore; decide to call himself only Dr. Graham; write his name backwards on all of his homework.

• He thinks having Asperger's is cool. (He would like to have a shirt made that says "autism golfer.") He thinks that it makes him interesting and smart.