Celebrating Autistic Parents

Mountain Man: Thinking About My Dad

Some of my earliest language-based memories of my father, back when I could record the words but not understand them, include the words mountain man hovering in the air around him in several voices. And that he was, the man who went off alone into the mountains whenever he got the chance. Sometimes he took his family with him, and often he went alone. He needed the space, the time to himself, and the time away from the city. Many of my other early memories are of playing with his beard. I didn't know (at first) that it was his beard, or attached to him, but I liked it.

My dad's lifelong hobby, made into a career, is electronics. He's been tinkering with radios since he was a kid, and he always had a lot of space and time devoted to his electronics equipment. He and my mother sometimes taught local children how to build crystal radios. I never really got into electronics, but I liked sorting resistors for him, which gave me something fun to do and him an easy way to get his equipment sorted. I also liked hanging out at his work when I could, which was a place where a lot of exciting physics discoveries had been made. He once showed me a room full of electronics and told me he'd designed and built the whole thing.

He did have an anger problem at one point. But he learned to control his temper, and to change himself. He did not become less autistic; he just became less volatile. He showed me the value of honestly and forthrightly admitting your mistakes and dealing with the consequences. And he has been giving me private lessons in the right ways to deal with strong emotions like anger.

There were also all the things one reads about when it comes to autistic parents — not always doing the "right" social things in public, not talking a lot, chain-reaction overload, strange-seeming rules (the most memorable to me being the time he put signs up around the house telling us not to go to the bathroom after ten at night), the fact that he could tell if you'd moved a pencil an inch in his workshop, and so forth. But in the scheme of things, these are on the order of things that can cause conflict between kids and their parents, any kids and any parents. They haven't scarred me for life, and many of them I didn't even notice until they were pointed out to me, let alone have a problem with. I'm mentioning them only so people won't think they weren't there; I don't want to blow them out of proportion.

Something he taught me a lot about was justice and fairness. He doesn't recognize social hierarchies and views people as fundamentally equal. At one point, in addressing safety standards and inequalities in a workplace, he encountered a lot of persecution from the management. He taught me about speaking up when things were wrong, even when it puts you in danger.

He is a very honest and straightforward person. When he says something, wrong or right, you know he means it. This has been very important to me in a world where most people don't say what they mean and you never know where you stand with them. I also like his appreciation for silence. When we spend time together, we often just sit. We don't expect interaction every second, and silence is so comfortable and natural that I don't always recognize it is happening. I like the ability to be around someone without words or direct interaction.

It surprises me when people appear to expect me to view these various traits in my father as negative. It never would have occurred to me to view his need for time alone as abandonment, his dislike for noisy and crowded places as neglect, his interest in electronics as boring, his honesty as rudeness, or his need to disappear into the wilderness periodically as pathological in some way. Or even any of these things as strange. He's always been that way to me, and frankly I have a lot in common with those things. It is hard to express how little I have ever minded the fact that he is autistic, either before or after knowing about autism.

I am reminded of a poem by Dan Wilkins, a physically disabled father, which reads in part:

How could I tell him.
How will I ever tell him
That to some in the world
I am not worthy.
That to some in this world
I'm quite expendable.
That there are those in this world
Who do not know me
(Not like he does)
That there are those in this world
Who do not see me
(Not like he does)
That there are those in this world
Who would rather have me dead
Than Dad.¹

Like Dan Wilkins's son, I would not ever have imagined, growing up, that there were people who would see my father as unusual (and there were apparently plenty), let alone constitutionally unfit for parenthood (or any of the worse things people might see him as). My father is a gentle, loving, and compassionate person. Much of the way this is expressed is through the way he is built, which in this day and age is referred to as autistic. When I was growing up, it was "just how Ron is," and I never viewed it as being overly strange, embarrassing, or damaging. Now I can appreciate that he's in a technical sense somewhat strange (as in unusual), but I don't know what's wrong with that. He is a different kind of father, which I am grateful for.

I have not always or at all times been close to my father, but now he and I talk a fair bit. We have a lot in common. He does not have the expectations of me that most non-autistic parents have of their autistic children, or for that matter their non-autistic children. And neither of us expects the other to be something they're not. He affectionately refers to me as his little hermit, or a chip off the old blockhead. Call it autism or anything else; this is just who we are and I like it. Of all the members of my family, he is the one who seems to most intuitively understand where I'm coming from. This wouldn't be there if he were someone else. So I'd like to thank him for being who he is — mountain man, autistic, and all.

[Author's note: I still feel a bit strange about having written this. It seems strange to have to show that my father is both autistic and a good father, and I really didn't want to turn him into a specimen in order to write this. It seems to me it should be evident that this is possible. I hope I've been able to show a bit of the person he is, which includes being an autistic person among other things.]

¹ Dan Wilkins, from Four Sight, Diverse City Press