The print was supposed to be white. It came out purple.
He had sent a design to the 3D printer earlier, and I noticed that it was in the wrong colour. I stopped the print and reminded him to change the colour. He said he would do it right away. I went off to help his brother brush his teeth, and when I returned to check on the print, it was restarted and it was printing purple.
In the few minutes I had been gone, he had looked at the print in the wrong colour, forgotten that he was meant to change the colour, and sent the same thing to print again.
I asked him, defeatedly, what had happened. He looked up from the screen, where another design was already half-rendered in the Tinkercad workspace. He looked puzzled, and told me he didn’t know.
I knew before he answered.
His attention had moved on. He hadn’t truly heard me. My voice went into his ears and out, and his brain did not process it.
It is not, in any case, only about the print. The print is one of many small things that fail if I am not the one tracking them. Those small things have accumulated. In different spaces. On different afternoons.
I plan his day, I write the lists of what he needs to remember, I cross things off when they are done and add things back when they have been forgotten. When I lapse, he lapses, immediately and entirely, as if my attention were the structural support that held the day upright.
Day in, day out, me as his second brain.
The clinical name for this is hypervigilance, and I know the term from training I no longer practise, and I know it from inside my body now in a way no textbook taught me. The manuals describe it as a maladaptive nervous system pattern, a body braced for threat where there is no threat. The autonomic system is burning fuel on something that should not require fuel. In our apartment, it is the only way the homework gets finished.
There are days I wish he would just grow up. I wish he would grow out of this. I wish the work of being his external brain would taper off, the way it does, I am told, for other children at his age.
Then I remember what I have learnt and unlearnt and learnt again, which is that kids do well when they can. He is not refusing to do it; he does not yet have the skills. The work of growing his skills is the work that I have committed to.
Being his second brain is taxing on my own brain, and the brain that is doing this work is itself autistic. It was something I did not yet know in the years when this began, and I was burning out from the immense mental load of managing everyone and everything on top of it.
He is loud. He is in three rooms at once. He calls for me from one of them while screeching from another, and he needs answers and snacks and attention and witnesses. I cannot finish a sentence in my own head. I cannot finish a thought. The conditions I need to think, plan, regulate, hold are the conditions he prevents from existing in the room by virtue of being himself in it.
I need quiet. I need solitude. I need to go inside my own head, slowly, with all the doors closed behind me.
Everything he is not.
I used to be soft-spoken. I used to be mild-tempered. I was collected and intentional.
What happened to me?
I do not answer the question, because the answer keeps changing. Some days the answer is that he happened. Some days the answer is that motherhood happened. Some days the answer is that living a whole life inside a nervous system that nobody, including me, knew was autistic, happened.
The question stays. The answer shifts.
Before I had a name for what I am, I had a different name. The name was failing.
Every day I asked myself variations of the same questions. Was I being firm enough? Was I being soft enough? Was I being too soft? Was I being too firm? Was the firmness teaching him cruelty? Was the softness teaching him that nothing held? Was I loving him correctly? Was I loving him wrong?
I was worried that I was not good enough.
Year after year of those questions, and underneath them the feeling that the variable in his struggle was me. Perhaps the way I parented him was the cause. I wished that I could find the right combination of tone and book and technique to undo what my mothering had done.
Then, my diagnosis arrived.
The diagnosis answered one of the questions. It said the variable was not what I had thought it was. It was not my parenting.
He inherited this neurotype from me. He is struggling because of me, not because of how I parented him, but because of what I gave him even before I parented him at all.
The diagnosis did not lift the guilt that perhaps my inadequate parenting caused him his struggles. The guilt changed its shape. I gave him the neurotype that caused all of this.
He is working on a math paper. He sings and screeches and yelps. One moment he is on the chair, another he is on the floor, and on the monkey bar the next.
It is taking him longer than it should. He is bright at math, the kind of bright that reads algebra textbooks for fun. The paper in front of him, in any honest assessment of his ability, is something he should be able to finish in twenty minutes. He has been at it for over an hour. I am sitting nearby, not pressing, not pacing, letting him work through it because I learnt through experience that interference makes it worse.
When he is done, I take the paper from him to check. The calculation has one careless mistake. He has not written the statement. He has not added the dollar sign. Every single time we do math, we go through the same thing. The same forgotten statement. The same forgotten unit. The same thing that has been told and told and told to him, and the telling has not, evidently, taken.
The diagnostic question is already running in my head, the way it has run for years now, in different rooms, over different homework. Is it that he does not care what I think? Is it the lack of skill because of his neurodivergence? The clinician in me is doing the assessment even now, even mid-eruption, even as the eruption is gathering itself into the room.
He spent such a long time on this paper. Surely, this cannot be his actual standard? I know it is not, because I have seen his potential. In school, in exams, he scores full marks. At home, the standard is sub-par, and the asymmetry has been there for years.
It is too loud. It is too chaotic. It is getting too much.
I am holding it. I am holding it. I am holding it.
And then a missing dollar sign tips me, and I explode.
I startle myself at how loud I sound. The voice in the room is not the voice I think of as mine. It is not soft, and it is not mild, and it is not the voice of the woman I had thought I was. It is loud and sharp and frightening, and it is coming out of my mouth.
That is not me, the thought arrives, even as I am being it. I am not like this.
He flinches. He looks up. His eyes go wide and then they fill and then he is wailing. He did not see it coming.
There it is. My own autistic meltdown. He bears the brunt of it.
I know what I am watching, because I have watched it in him for years before I recognised it in myself. The holding. The holding. The capacity that was holding and is no longer holding. The trigger that is not the cause. The eruption has nothing to do with the missing dollar sign. It has everything to do with the years of holding that came before the missing dollar sign, and the years of holding that will come after.
I am the adult. I should know better. I should do better.
I keep cycling. The imploding, the exploding, and the wilting. The diagnostic narrating, and the conscience demanding. The child wailing and the mother who knows what she is and cannot stop being it.
The guilt that follows is double. There is the guilt for exploding, and underneath that guilt, there is the deeper guilt. The guilt for being the one who gave him the nervous system that triggers the eruption that is mine to own.
I gave him this. That is the weight I cannot put down, no matter how many times the cognitive part of me has tried to put it down for me. I gave him the neurotype that is making his life this specific kind of hard.
Cognitively I know this is not the helpful way of thinking. I know neurodiversity is not a failure passed down between bodies. I know the genetic story is more complicated than any straight line from a mother to her son. I know the way the literature would frame this and the way an honest clinician would push back on the framing if I told her I was holding it.
But it is true.
Because of that, I must step up. I must not falter. I must not fail him. He must not walk my path.
The path I do not want him to walk is not the path of being neurodivergent. That is something we cannot change. He is neurodivergent. I am neurodivergent. There is no version of him that is not him, and there is no version of him I would trade for a version of him without his neurotype.
The path I do not want him to walk is the other one. The path of not knowing. The decade of suspecting his own mind was the variable. The years of carrying the unknown weight before there was language for it.
He must not walk that path. He has a name for what he is.
He is asleep now. The flat is quiet. This quiet has arrived too late, like medicine for a fever that has already passed.
The silence I needed all day arrives only now. The day in which I needed it is already over.
The question that comes with the silence is one I do not dare say out loud.
Will he blame me one day for the neurotype I gave him? For the eruptions? For the years of being mothered by someone whose nervous system was running the same program as his and could not regulate either of them through the worst of it?
For all his brilliance, his daily struggles are so real.
I do not have an answer. Cognitively, I know it is not a fair question. Emotionally, I keep asking it. Some days gently. Some days harshly. Most days the question just sits in my chest where it has lived for years.
A weight I have learnt to carry.
If you have stood in your own home wondering what was wrong with the way you were doing this, Meltdowns vs Tantrums is the post that named for me what I had been watching for years.
And if you have only just begun to wonder whether the way you have moved through the world might have a name, Why I Called It Grow with Their Flow is where I keep returning to.
I write when the writing is honest. If you’d like the posts in your inbox, you can subscribe below.
Grow with Their Flow 
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