AUTISTIC KIDS FUCK UP YOUR DREAMS

Autistic kids fuck up your dreams. Having an autistic kid will crush your dreams. There, I mean, I said it. I think a lot of us are thinking it, but we never dare say it out loud because we're not supposed to, are we? We're supposed to talk about the other things, aren't we? Like the unconditional love, you know, the good stuff, the acceptance and how your kid has taught you about patience, compassion, and what really matters in life. And I'm not being facetious. All of that can be true, and it is true. But there's another truth that I think which doesn't get spoken about enough. Sometimes being a parent of an autistic child, and in my case with PDA, it does crush your dreams. And it's, you know, when you say this sort of stuff, it doesn't mean you don't love your child. And it's not because you wish there was someone else, I don't, but because somewhere along the line or the way, part of your own life seem to disappear, socially, professionally, whatever have you. And the things that you wanted to do, the places that you wanted to go, the ambitions that you had, and even the simple freedom to wake up and decide what to do with your day, it changes. And for a long time, I struggled with that. And I would find myself feeling frustrated when, you know, plans changed because of Ruby's behaviour, when I couldn't get something done because of her behaviour. And when another day passed and the things I wanted to achieve, they just didn't get done. And it dawned on me that a lot of my frustrations wasn't actually about Ruby's pathological demand avoidance, her autism, it was about me. And that's because the life that I imagined for myself before I had my daughter was the expectations that I had. I was holding on to those expectations, right, like any human being. And there was this constant internal battle that about or about the the man that I was supposed to be versus the man that I've become. And without realising it, my, you know, I was measuring my life against a version of it that no longer existed. And that can be a painful realisation, because my daughter is not sitting around thinking about, you know, my ambitions or my plans or my unfinished work. She's not trying to crush my dreams. She's just trying to simply get on in a world that feels overwhelming to her. And, you know, there I was, or here I am, sometimes feeling overwhelmed because her needs were getting in the way of mine. That's the truth of it. Two completely different or two people struggling for control, should we say, but completely different reasons. And that's the strangest thing. I began to realise that that there's a struggle and something shifted. And I stopped seeing every interruption and every inconvenience as something being taken away from me and I started to question things in a different way and I wondered, why was I so attached to having a life that look like X? Like who decides what success means in achieving all those things? Who decided that a life spent slowing down and being present and helping another human being felt somehow like a lesser life? Who said that? I'm not going to pretend though, like I become some Zen, Buddhist, enlightened father who never gets frustrated. Fuck no. I still got ambitions. There's loads of things I wanna achieve. I'm not exactly an old man yet. But the headline is I'm starting to understand something. Maybe, maybe the thing that needed to change wasn't my daughter. It was my relationship with the life that I thought I was owed. And there's something weirdly freeing about that. So did autism crush my dreams? Did it crush your dreams? Or was it a case that I was forced to question which dreams are at? What are they what are actually worth holding on to?