Transplanting a Seattleite

R. and I went out to dinner at Less Than Greater Than and I had a couple drinks (Vieux Carre and a Lioness — both really yum) and then stopped at Medusa and came home. Delightful.

I slept for a while, but then woke up and was really feeling very hot (this happens sometimes when I have a couple drinks and a meal with a lot of protein— I get really, really thermogenic). Since I’d slept in pretty late and wasn’t really short on sleep overall, I figured I’d just read for a while, which was honestly extremely blissful. I did eventually get several more hours of sleep — yes, I’m sure that my circadian rhythm at this point is well and truly fucked — and woke up feeling pretty good. I got some breakfast, and fed A. some too, and then I decided to do a little poking around on the topic of 80s era bulletin boards. NO not Compuserve or Prodigy. The ones made of actual cork, that people cut out Farside from the newspaper and put up using push pins or tacks.

I’m interested in this, because I was trying to explain memeposting and/or shitposting and why people do it. Why was I trying to explain this? Because for the second time (at least) in my life, my sister had developed a parasocial relationship online with one of my friends and then gotten mad at the friend. The first time she did this, she called the school where my friend worked and reported my friend for what she had been posting on social media. My friend’s boss knew exactly what she was doing, and my friend was not breaking any rules (I became a temporary, mini-expert on FERPA at the time) so my friend was fine, but I was horrified. When I realized this was ramping up again with a different friend, I decided to try to first warn the friend (who has had randos online go weird at her before; this is not her first rodeo) and then try to understand what was going on with my sister. (The friend has adjusted her social media settings WRT my sister in a way that should reduce everyone’s risk of bad behavior, and has been extremely gracious about the whole thing.)

With my sister, the issue seems to have been a straightforward combination of the changing of the seasons and overwork, and is improving as she has taken a weekend to go have some IRL fun. But as I spoke to her before the weekend, I explained that what the friend was doing was memeposting / shitposting, and my sister’s response to engage with the reposted post-and-comments about C. S. Lewis and the Susan problem was socially extremely inappropriate, and the feelings that the Susan problem and Lewis remarks engendered in my sister for herself and about her children were based on bunch of important misunderstandings. I think my sister believed me about the important misunderstandings (we all know we are autistic, and subject to these types of errors) however I was unsuccessful in answering her question about why do people memepost / shitpost. I compared it to Back in the Day when people cut comics out of newspapers and posted them on corkboards, but she claimed never to have encountered that. That is obviously not possible, however, it is completely probable that she failed to notice the boards (very, very believable that she failed to notice or comprehensively forgot them).

Here is an entertaining little post about The Far Side and those cork boards in particular.

https://www.everything80spodcast.com/the-far-side/

Today, I found this explanation which I think captures at least some of why people memepost / shitpost.

https://racuned.substack.com/p/i-tried-shitposting-for-a-week-and

Basically, boredom leads to shitposting / memeposting, a dopamine hit from people engaging with the meme / shit post rewards having done that, and an awareness that this is a relatively easy way to grow an audience results in more directed effort to shit post / meme post “better”. It’s just like being the class clown.

But hilariously, at no point in this entire process did it occur to me to point out, uh, hey, you understand why the online forums were originally called “bbs” or “bulletin board system”, right? I mean, it’s just like those fucking cork boards.

Which she ignored.

Which she forgot.

Which she is participating in now, in kind of the same way that people back in the day would occasionally post on the cork board a detailed debunking of whatever urban legend someone had photocopied and tacked up.

Was Lewis queer? Oh, hell yeah. Did he have good / any / positive relationships with women? Evidence suggests otherwise. Is “attacking” Lewis for how he treated the Susan character in Narnia attacking queer people generally, or attacking “men” as a category? No. Is my friend posting memes and shit posts about toxic masculinity a generalized attack on “men” or “masculinity”? No.

My sister’s feelings that men are being attacked by my friend and that endangers someone in her family are super weird boundary problems that are unlikely to ever be resolved in any kind of direct fashion. But taking a weekend off to have IRL fun helps. If you have a loved one who occasionally completely loses the plot, encourage them to go have fun in a nearby state, AFK. It’ll be good for everyone, but especially them.

The loaf of bread from last week was kinda hard, so I made bread pudding with it. Yum.

I walked with M. at 2 pm.

I made another loaf of bread, and a roll.

R. and I had a steak for dinner. T. had a burger. We all had fries. I had coleslaw with the purple napa cabbage from Siena Farms. It was pretty, and also very tasty.

A. ate crackers and drank juice and missed her half day of school because I took her temperature after she came down for breakfast and was crying because she felt like crap and it was 100 degrees (ok, 99.9, but later in the day it was 100.4, so I’m just going to average here). She went back to bed and later she was well enough to read.

I did 2 one mile loops by myself and not on the phone. I wasn’t even listening to music.

T. went to Concord and took himself to Concord Teacakes for a treat and to Blue for a $200 pair of jeans. The jeans are very, very pretty. Super dark denim, very soft, from Japan. I commented that his grandfather really liked nice clothes, too, and that was fine, but then he started asking me about all other relatives and how they felt / thought about nice clothes and I more or less lost my shit and explained in some detail why those were unreasonable questions and that in general asking me detailed questions like that about my deep past and relatives resulted in me thinking really hard to try to figure out what I might or might know that would generate a good answer about things long ago from a very bad time in my life. Not good. Also, pointless. If he wants family stories, that’s a terrible way to go about it. I think we all learned a lot from this experience, and I thought about it a bunch while I was walking. I _do_ definitely want to convey to my children the lessons that _I_ learned the really hard way about how to interact with people and also, I really don’t want to be the hard way for my children. So. Tricky stuff.

I watched two episodes of The Equalizer, so I am now all caught up. I tried to program the tivos to record it going forward, but there are some huge gaps in the coming weeks and that show is in those gaps and that made it tricky.

I was looking for a book, ideally fiction, with a(n explicitly) neurodivergent character for my daughter to read for school reasons. She’s reading _Queens of Geek_, which I’m also pretty excited about (fiction, and involves characters attending a con, which is, in fiction, in my limited experience _always_ a fun setting). Along the way, I ran across this memoir written by a British journalist about her experience learning in her mid-40s that she has autism.

I initially thought (because apparently, I failed to do publication date math) that James was a few years younger than me, however, I was wrong; we appear to be literally a few months apart in age. Obviously, there are many, many, many differences between our lives, but there was a lot that I found extremely relatable about James. She was adopted and raised Jewish. The Jewish subculture created an alternative explanation for her oddness when young, just as my JW childhood and young adulthood created an alternative explanation for mine. However, the adoption meant that while there was significant mental health struggles in her small family (her adoptive mom was hospitalized for “nerves” repeatedly), she did not see herself in the people around her, in the way that I clearly could, and in the way that she could see herself in her children when she had them. That turns out to be pretty salient!

My response to sensory overstimulation is quite different from hers, and she also has an Ehlers-Danlos syndrome diagnosis. I’ve been running across a lot of later-in-life EDS dx lately (TikTok and elsewhere), which got me wondering about that again. I’ve never really thought that could be me, in the more severe forms, altho it absolutely could explain things about a first cousin who has since passed. It also might go a long ways to explaining my mother and one of my sisters and possibly some other people in my family who have perplexing chronic pain and are prone to dislocation. There’s a lot of hypermobility in my family on that side as well. It’s interesting to think about whether it would be worth getting assessed for that, and what that might involve; there are sites now on the web that advertise whole genome testing and will do an EDS screen for all known variants. Seems risk free, because I’m quite _good_ at avoiding getting sucked into unnecessary medical care. But I’m not sure.

Because of the extensive medical interaction of my mother and some other family members, I got interested in diagnostic categories a really long time ago, and because I’m a asshole, I got really interested in how diagnostic categories evolve over time. However, as much as I learned by doing this, I never got to have the experience of combining a life review post-major diagnosis while having phone conversations with the experts in the field. I cannot really articulate how _happy_ I felt _for James_, because she could actually _talk to Tony Attwood_ as she was making sense of what she was going through in life. I am _so grateful_ that she shared that in this book. I hope everyone reads it.

I got a little worried at the point in the book where the boys were finally at college and out of the house; she had poured so much of her emotional self into them, and there was so much hostility depicted with her husband (man, whenever people say they don’t argue, I brace myself for _unending_ hostility diffused throughout the lives of the non-arguers. There are exceptions to this rule, but they are not super common, and this couple isn’t one of them). However, she took those months post-life-review as an opportunity to really think about how she could start to feel better. Her therapist M clearly was an amazing catalyst for this work. It was a joy to read about her decluttering, figuring out that meal plans and shopping lists actually could be useful, and taking a weekend evening each week to plan out the work of the next way. I did not notice her explicitly relating that to her Jewish upbringing, but I can definitely see and feel that connection. Best of all, finding ways to rest and restore herself, and establish systems / environments of control that _support_ her was also supportive of her husband and their relationship. There’s no guarantee it will work that way. I’m so glad it did for her and for them.

I’m looking forward to discussing this in book group. As with all people with autism, each book about a person with autism is _a_ book about _a_ person with autism. I’m so glad that this one exists.

This is not about events in the news.

This is _also_ not about the events of Friday evening’s zoom cocktail hour, which is what I was poking around to try to understand where the psychological community was on managing social conflict of a friends-hanging-out variety.

This is about the sitter.

I have not had any control over the days the sitter worked, the hours the sitter worked, what happened during those hours, or when the kid(s) got home for … a really, really long time now. I’ve tried various things to try to reduce the number of days a week, the number of hours at a time, etc. Every effort lasts for less than a week. Not long ago, my daughter had a significant conflict with the sitter that resulted in unsafe yelling in the car while the sitter was driving. I listened to my daughter. I listened to the sitter. I agreed with the sitter that yelling in the car while someone is driving is unsafe. I stated it would never happen again. She wanted to get into it; I declined. The solution was permanent and very straightforward: daughter never goes with sitter again. There was an initial sadness because daughter likes hearing sitter’s stories about the past. I had a pattern of not really talking about my personal history, so I changed that pattern. Daughter is happy hearing about the past. Husband is hearing new stories about my past (that’s weird; we’ve been married since 2004 and knew each other for over a decade at that point.). That’s fine. (The conflict between daughter and sitter was regarding politics, and daughter feels bad about yelling. The yelling was part of a autism-related response to frustration that we are all aware of and which I share with her. She’s getting great help from the school system with this, and the sitter is well aware of this response to frustration and used to be a lot better at making sure that frustration did not build up.)

Because there is increasing conflict with finding time to take son driving, prepare for camp, etc., I have been working again to reduce the hours worked / days worked. Part of the daughter doesn’t go with sitter solution was, no sitter Wednesday, so that son could be around with daughter at home while we went out. (Sibling conflict is at this point in time minimal, and I have no current safety concerns with either of them, okay, fine, a little concerned about daughter’s emotional state when left home alone for more than about an hour, which is why son is there.) I also wanted to reduce total time with sitter on any one day to eight hours, which should NOT have been controversial, and yet it was apparent that this was going to be a heavy lift and was perceived by sitter as a hostile act. I did not discuss it directly with the sitter. I told son, you have to be home within 8 hours of leaving with her. If you don’t, next time it is 7. He managed once; second time, half hour late. Totally predictable, and I absolutely understand why it happened. Further discussion ensued. Since sitter wasn’t coming on a day when she normally might have, I tagged that the 7 hour, declared it a success and instituted an additional Be Home By rule. On school nights, Be Home By 8. Otherwise, by 9, except on Fridays, I wanted him home before Fancy Friday started.

Because there had been some pretty hostile texting in a group text he set up to tell the sitter about the 8 hour rule, I specifically told son not to tell the sitter these are the rules. I said, you are old enough, you can tell her when you need to be home by. If you have a plan that _requires_ being out past that time, you have to tell me that and we will figure it out. He didn’t have any such plans. However, son decided to directly text sitter without including me in the texting. I don’t know precisely what was said, because he deleted it. He had previously deleted texts between him and the sitter, but it had not been clear why. This time, I asked him if the sitter had told him to delete the texts. He said yes.

To recap: I am attempting to reduce total hours on one day with the sitter to 8 hours. I am attempting to get some structure in place in terms of Be Home By. Also, _son does not need a sitter_. As I have noted above, son is the sitter for daughter one night a week, and that is completely fine. Son is 16, has a learner’s permit, and has applied for a job. Sitter is not really a sitter; sitter is a driver and dinner companion. Sitter has texted with son, and then told son to delete the messages so that I won’t see them.

Sitter has been working for us (first through an agency, and then not) for over a decade; I felt safe in leaving my kids with her in part because she’d worked for a local school as a special ed aide (not for my children) and thus was background checked frequently. She retired a few years ago, and she took a break for obvious reasons in 2020. Obviously, a lot of things happen over the course of a decade, and it’s not like we thought that everything about this particular person was what one would be looking for in a long-term chosen friend for ourselves, much less our children, but we were relying pretty heavily on professionalism. Texting with a minor in your care and telling the minor to delete the texts so the parent can’t see them … isn’t even in the same universe with professional. It’s off in another universe called Hey Don’t Ignore This Red Flag Like You Did The Last Dozen Or So You Fucking Idiot. (I am calling myself a Fucking Idiot, because, I mean, duh. Obviously, I am. Look at the evidence right here in front of us.)

Now, it’s _texts_, and it’s not like I am new to this whole electronic communication thing. I figured I’d give this a little thought. I went off and did Family Zoom, and got a text from the sitter.

“Walkitout, as you are aware [son’s name] has communicated why you will not text me.
After all these years I must say that I am shocked that you would feel that you would expect conflict, and that I might say something that you would find outrageous.
This is bewildering to me and most unfortunate.”

FWIW, this is very on-brand for her, and I’m familiar with the concept of DARVO. Remember, I don’t know what my son texted her, because _he deleted the conversation_. _At her request._ Or, possibly, direction. Command. Whatever.

But remember: _it is texts_. So let’s go to the phone call and make sure that it really was her, and that her account wasn’t hacked. Yes, Dear Reader, I _gave her the opportunity to use the implausible denial_.

Hi Sitter. You sound upset. [bit of a call hiccup, make sure we can hear each other]. My son tells me that you have been texting and that you told him to delete the texts. Has your account been hacked? Did you do this?
Yes, I have not been hacked, [rising tone of voice] Walkitout, you just never want to hear anything that isn’t what you want it to be. [Walkitout interrupting.] You’re fired. Don’t contact son. Don’t contact us. You’re fired. You’re fired. [call ended by sitter, or possibly, act of merciful electronic chaos].

After a brief moment of relief, I then went to listen to son talk to me for a couple hours, relaying a lot of details he has collected over the years about the sitter’s extended family and the many, many, many conflicts that led to breaches of relationships over the years. I knew about a fair number of them (and an ungodly number of workplace conflicts, friendships that ended badly, etc.). I was surprised at how much detail son had retained, and his perspective on what he had been hearing. He also shared that he knew more about some of these things, but that he had been told not to share any of that with anyone else.

I am always troubled by situations where a secret is shared with someone and that person is instructed not to share it further. This relieves a psychological / psychic / spiritual burden that the teller of the secret was carrying alone, however, it does so by placing that burden on the hearer of the secret, who feels like they cannot relieve their burden by sharing it further. To do this to a minor who lacks experience and wisdom in terms of what kinds of secrets can be kept and which kinds of secrets _must be shared with appropriate authorities_ is _never_ a good idea, and in this particular situation, where she was trusted by parents to care for the minor, and where she knew that autism was part of the overall picture and that further handicapped any ability to know what kinds of confidences to keep and which to flag to other people, well, again in the universe of Don’t Ignore This Red Flag You Fucking Idiot.

I have no idea what happens next. Hopefully, absolutely nothing. My daughter wanted to know how to block the sitter on her phone; I was like, look, we’ll just delete the contact info on your phone, and then you ignore that number like every other call from someone who is not in your contact info. I don’t think any such contact will occur.

Son understands that if he feels like he is being abused or neglected by us — the one situation that might justify an adult telling a child to keep communications secret from a parent — he should tell someone at the school. I’ve also volunteered the option of us reaching out to the Department of Child and Family Services, and even to work to get him a guardian who is not a part of the family. Son is _very_ clear that the sitter gave no indication that any of this was motivated by a belief that we are abusive parents. I pointed out to son that as a teacher and special ed aide, she was trained in _how_ to report suspected child abuse, and so if she believes that is what is happening, the appropriate response would be to (if necessary, anonymously) contact DCFS, who would then open a file, send someone out to talk to all of us and create a plan to remediate any issues they discovered in the course of an investigation. I told son he absolutely is allowed to discuss any and all of this with the people at the school who run his Extended School Year program, which starts on Tuesday. I have emailed the teacher for ESY and the teacher for his regular year program a bare-bones (fired sitter because asked son to conceal text conversations with her from us) explanation of what happened so that if he talks about it, they will have some clue what happened and know they can ask us for more details if they want. I also asked them to work with him on inappropriate requests to keep secrets.

Whew.

That was a lot. Fortunately, my daughter has been a ton of help in figuring out how to revise this — and the email to the school — down to a somewhat coherent and manageable level.

I took a long morning nap.

I walked with M.

A. had a lot of homework — some from all four core classes, and it was a struggle to get her to focus on it, and she keeps forgetting (and so do we!) to use the accommodations / mitigating strategies completely. Like, we tell her to turn her screen brightness up so we can see it … but forget to remind her to get her migraine glasses out and put them on. She’s allowed to use a calculator … but doesn’t want to, and we forget that the alexa devices work great for this purpose. Etc.

On top of that, the student whose behavior caused us to pull A. out of district summer programs permanently is back in her life in PE class and literally hassling her from day 1 (today was day 2). The behavior _seemed_ innocuous while actually being really awful back then — saying her name repeatedly to get her attention; seems fine? Try at a volume that can be heard two rooms down with the doors closed, and where repeatedly is at short intervals for hours. I had independent confirmation from uninvolved special ed aides in the same building — this is not reported to me by A.

Anyway, that was then, this is now. Wednesday it was incessant apologies for singing Rhymeswithhername Hername Back in the Day, which was NOT what happened at all, but which if a kid were sensitive (fortunately, none of us are. LOL) would be upsetting to hear apologize for … dozens of times. At volume. She handled it _great_: I accept your apology. You can apologize to yourself. Focusing on the past only makes you less productive. Etc. Could not possibly do better myself. Today, there was that and an escalation. Pressure to agree that A. was his friend (never good!) followed up rapidly with:

Tell MaleNamedStudentADoesNotKnow that other, FemaleNamedStudentThatAAlsoDoesNotKnow is Not For Him.

Wut.

Fucking junior high school mafia drama.

We wrote it up and sent it in to A.’s special ed liaison, and I told her, and had her rehearse: if he approaches you (they have PE and PE preview together), go to your aide (if your aide is not available, his aide, if neither is available the teacher, if the teacher is not available, if no adult is in the room with you, _run_ _immediately_ out of the room and to the office) and say to the adult, “I don’t want to talk to so-and-so. Can you help me?” And then stand there with the adult. The kid has already lied to his aide about what he was talking about with A., so I’m reasonably certain that this will stymie him, however, I’m concerned he’s going to escalate to out-of-class encounters; hopefully, he’s supervised enough that that won’t happen. We pick her up and drop her off (walking), but I’ve been trying to move in a direction of more independence for her. I’m going to be very annoyed if I have to go back to meeting her at the exit door again.

If you are reading this and thinking of sending me a nastygram because you’ve identified your own child in this description, you might want to think several more times about that before proceeding. I haven’t even used an initial to identify the child in question. Also, lawyers.

This year, my daughter will be going to a different elementary school than the one she went to K-3 in. This is not because we moved. This was not a change we initiated. The change occurred because the school she _was_ in only provided the program she was in through 3rd grade. After that, the theory was she would go to the school that my son was in so unsuccessfully for kindergarten, and which we hadn’t exactly been hearing great things about from other people whose children have the same or related diagnoses as my two children.

I asked for a second choice. I toured both choices. I was like, this isn’t even a question. Of course we’ll pick the one my son didn’t go to. Also, why were we never offered this as an option earlier? No answer.

It’s in a really new school building — several decades newer than the two choices I had been provided. What’s up with that — not offering the special needs kids the squeaky clean new building. With the special needs program which will fit her needs.

I went to the orientation yesterday. At the orientation, someone asked a question I’d been wondering about. Where are the school supplies lists? Teachers at my daughter’s other school in district, and the school that my son went to in kindergarten both sent detailed lists of what the kid had to bring for themselves, and then a detailed list of even more things to bring in “for the classroom”. I thought this was squirrelly — we live in a town that is quite well-off, in a state that is quite well-off — but shrugged. I don’t argue with really large bureaucracies if the argument is avoidable. I have enough unavoidable arguments to satisfy my basic urge to defy authority.

No supply lists. The school provides everything. What to bring in the backpack? Lunch and snack. Really? Really. OK, if you want, you can bring in tissue, wipes, hand sanitizer — we run out of those.

*crickets*

My town has 5 elementary schools, 6, actually. And full school choice — every kid has the option to be bused to any school. There is a bit of a lottery for when a school has more applicants — kids who were there last year I think get first pick at a school, then their younger siblings, then kids who can walk. But I’ve been tolerating a severely abbreviated list of choices due to my daughter’s special needs, and I’m just now discovering that there were apparently choices in this district that would have fit her, and put her in the nice new building where you don’t have to scrounge up supplies.

WTF?

ETA: One of the major issues for my son in kindergarten involved bathroom access. Being in an older school meant being in a school with a shared bathroom down the hall even for kindergartners. The newer buildings all have bathrooms connected to the kindergarten classrooms. This would have drastically improved many, many things about my son’s school experience in kindergarten. He would still have needed a different school placement. Probably. Altho hard to know for sure, because the other issue with his placement involved a probably simultaneously phoning-it-in speech therapist who was also inexperienced, at least with providing speech therapy for kids on the spectrum. And this was the school with the spectrum program.

I know people still go out of their way to pick Conant’s autism program. I can’t figure out why.

Today, I took T. to an audiology appointment. His hearing is fine. We are still trying to figure out whether it makes sense to do the auditory processing test. When I get the report from the audiologist, I will consult with his speech/language therapist at the school and get an understanding from her whether she thinks there might be a useful recommendation that could come out of the more complex testing. If even a positive result produces no actionable advice, what's the point? (His current school placement does as much or more than most recommendations that might come out of the test: sound treatment, fewer people in the room, one on one instruction from an appropriate distance, etc.)

I had hoped to somehow wedge a phone call in with K., but it didn't happen. I also missed a call with A. earlier in the week. It's been one of those weeks. I think K. has a really bad cold. So does my walking partner M., which is (part of) why no walk today.

We stopped at Subway to get lunch on the way back to dropping T. off at school. I eventually called S. to describe the issues we have been having with one of the kids' therapists (<-- look, anonymization!) and what we have been doing and asked her for advice. She's going to do a little investigation. She confirmed that we will not have to deal with this therapist after this school year, which is in itself a pretty comprehensive solution.

After the call, I decided that 4 p.m. was not too early for a drink. Then A., R. and I all went to Julie's Place for dinner, and I had another drink. But I wasn't driving.

Recently, I watched my daughter’s friend tell my daughter that she absolutely could not answer a question I was asking her, because, “It’s a secret.” Neither child would tell me. I didn’t want to make a fuss so I let the playdate end after getting a category and no more out of them (“It’s a thing.”). The reason I’d walked in in the first place was because I’d heard my daughter nagging at her friend about, “When are you going to tell your parents?” I mean, I was going to stop my kid nagging about whatever it was — on some level, I didn’t really want to know. And I figured I could find out once the playdate was over.

Afterwards, I couldn’t get my daughter to tell me. I tried everything. There was a lot of crying. And I went from being a little worried about my daughter not telling me what it was that she was nagging at her friend to tell her parents about to being a LOT worried that anyone had this much power to stop my kid from telling me anything … anything at all. She’s 8. She has autism. This is terrifying.

I told the parents of the other child that my daughter was distressed about a secret and asked them to help out with the dilemma. They asked the other child about the secret. Apparently, the friend basically said, “There is no secret.” I was non-plussed. I had spent several minutes trying to drag it out of both of them, then even more time with my daughter. There was a secret all right. But I told my daughter, your friend says there is no secret, which means it isn’t a secret any more, which means you can tell me. Out it spilled, as stupidly trivial as anything could be. The friend wanted something. My daughter wanted her friend to tell her parents so they would buy it. The family finances are tight. And the friend said a lot of nasty things about her father’s unwillingness to spend money. That was it. The whole secret was basically a kid calling her dad names for not buying her toys. Boring as fuck. Also, the dad’s a good guy, doing everything he can for his family. Kind of mean to be calling him names.

I’m allergic to secrets. Part of why I am allergic to secrets is because I (and I wasn’t the only one) was sexually molested by a family member and obviously there were a lot of secrets involved. I got to wondering what the current consensus on kids and secrets is.

Here is the national Crime Prevention Council page on kids and secrets.

http://www.ncpc.org/topics/by-audience/parents/secrets

This one really stood out to me: “Make sure they know that no one has the right to ask them to keep a secret from their parents.”

Wanting to know the content of the secret doesn’t make me a bad mother.

The primary exception to the No Secrets rule is clear and common, and exactly the one I came up with when talking to my daughter after the dust settled.

“It's okay for children to keep surprise parties and presents secret because these secrets will make someone happy and won't be a secret forever.”

Surprises parties and presents okay, time limited secrets okay. Everything else, nope. I even went down a list of everyone that my daughter and I both know, and asked her in turn, if any of those people had ever asked her to keep a secret. Ever. Answer: none of them. We don’t do secrets — we don’t even do surprises. And if kids want candy or cookies, they get them. We don’t have limits that are broken and then the violation kept as a “secret” — I think that just causes all kinds of trouble.

Some websites have much more complicated explanations of secrets that are okay vs. ones that are not okay.

https://www.kidpower.org/library/article/safe-unsafe-secrets/

I can’t make head or tale of most of that. I have a bunch of policies about confidential information. If the story in question is entertaining, I’ll shave off all identifying information, change some details, and use it as cocktail party fodder. I’ve actually done this in front of the source of the story and had them think it was someone else — they came by and said, OMG, that’s so much like what happened to me! I can’t believe you know two people that happened to! And I’m like, weird, huh? Secret kept. Stories which are too boring to tell at a party are not hard to keep confidential — I barely remember them. A long time ago, I had friends who were really awful people, and so sometimes I’d find out that someone was sleeping with someone else who they were not supposed to be with. And yes, I am the person who will go tell the partner of the person who wasn’t supposed to be doing that. I eventually figured out not to hang out with people who did that kind of shit and thus had to keep that kind of secret.

There are some people who use secrets as a bridge to more complicated sets of rules that are pretty valuable:

http://denver.citymomsblog.com/parenting/why-we-dont-keep-secrets-in-our-house/

Years ago, a friend of mine was dating someone who used to be a friend of mine, but who I had gotten really suspicious of. She was being treated for depression. She was being pressured to do things she really didn’t want to do. I decided that enough was enough, and I contacted a bunch of people who had had some kind of relationship that went bad with the person she was dating. We staged a rolling intervention. Basically, I got everyone to tell her all their stories about What Went Wrong With Him. And that was the end of that. Relationship ended. Cats were rescued. New relationship started. Happily Ever After (look, life is complicated, and nothing is perfect, but they still seem quite happy in their now family of 4). And she will reliably rant about the dangers of a Culture of Silence since that event. More power to her.

She’s right. I’m not opposed to being tactful and diplomatic when we complain about other people doing annoying things. Tact and etiquette are great things. Keeping secrets, however, is NOT a great thing. Just fucking gossip publicly. It’s so much less scary.

Another library selection. I was looking for a book about narcissism, because a friend of mine has had problems with narcissists, then there is the obvious election thing. The book I found in the library was unsatisfying, so I thought I would pick up a book about personality disorders in general, since I have not too long ago had a strong interest in better understanding Borderline Personality Disorder and found learning more about it to be really rewarding in terms of better understanding, better ideas for how to be around people with this particular issue without making things worse (and possibly helping to support them emotionally), and in general feel more compassion.

During the lead up to the DSM V, there was talk that perhaps personality disorders would be reworked entirely, to be one true personality disorder list of criteria, and then a more detailed coding/listing of how it manifests. Dobbert's book was written before that debate occurred. In the event, the new approach is listed as an alternative. I was hoping that reading Dobbert might give me a sense of what is shared across personality disorders. Instead I wound up coming to a very different set of ideas.

I really liked this book, and I think it is generally very useful. The author is not mean spirited, nor does he engage in obvious name calling (you might go, well, duh, but you might read some books about personality disorder to get a sense of how rampant that is before you conclude that this bar is too low). He intends his book for a general audience; he himself comes from a forensic/criminal justice background, which shows up a lot in his discussion of antisocial personality disorder, and his inclination to think that conduct disorder should be rolled in to the personality disorders (I don't disagree with him). I particularly liked the section on Histrionic Personality Disorder, because I had no idea what that was (I'd heard of it, but didn't have any sense of it); once I read through it and told a friend, she immediately said, I know someone like that!

And that's perhaps the best thing about this. It is like a bird spotting guide or a nature book that you can take on a hike, only it is for people who make us all scratch our head and go, what the heck is that all about anyway? We can't figure out where the win is, they cause all kinds of problems in groups, are difficult to work around and sometime force us to quit participating in organizations or change jobs just to get away from them. Well, if you've ever wondered what was going on, maybe you'll find the same sort of value in this book that I did.

The set of ideas I came to after reading this was as follows. I knew that some of the schizo* personality disorders were confusing and difficult to tell apart (I don't have that problem any more!), and I had reason to believe (mostly because of reading people's posts on Wrong Planet) that they were either "cousins" of autism spectrum, or autism spectrum in its higher functioning forms compounded with other problems. Here's my first cut at that:

schizoid personality disorder = mainstreamed, HFA person with depression, who has not yet/ever found people of like minds. I think if you treated the depression, and then helped them Find Their People, they would wind up just looking like other autism spectrum people. Pretty varied, still gonna need a lot of alone time, and still reduced affect, but not NO affect. Might also have an asexual component; wouldn't know for sure until the depression was addressed and Their People were found

schizotypal personality disorder = HFA person, possibly from a spectrum family, weird ideas. Might think they are psychic. Might have a lot of odd ideas about UFOs, occult, etc. The spectrum component means they don't have any perspective taking ability so they don't realize that they shouldn't talk about this stuff around mundanes. Work on the perspective taking issues, walk them back from any paranoia they have developed, get them into a social skills program. Once they "get" that they need to be a little selective, and if you can help them find some flavor of Their People which isn't too terrifying, further descent into paranoia and delusions will probably halt/reverse.

obsessive compulsive personality disorder. Best BEST thing about this book: I can now actually keep track of the difference between OCD and OCPD. Never thought that would happen! I have some issues with his description of OCPD, in that his scenario has someone who weight cycles, which just makes very little sense to me. My sense is that OCPD tends to be more associated with anorexia type eating disorders than bulimic type eating disorders. But who knows. People are exploring the possibility that OCPD has autism spectrum components, but there is a tremendous amount of resistance, because if it turns out that is true, then a lot of the received wisdom in eating disorders, hoarding, etc. is going to turn out to have been entirely wrong headed. Also, it may turn out to be the case that there is a fraction of OCPD which is autism or autism like, but another chunk which has a very different etiology.

Don't blame Dobbert for any of that rambling mess! He's a very reasonable person and I am engaging in early stage, uninformed speculation. But his book is concise, clear, well cited and easy to read. It'll help you understand confusing people, I can almost guarantee it. At the end, he has a neat appendix of various psychologists/psychoanalysts/etc. contribution to the ideas in the book; it was there that I learned about (possibly again) Karen Horney, who I am going to try to read some of because I think a lot of her ideas about how people deal with (or don't) fears and anxieties might be quite fruitful to contemplate.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4006222/

I really think that a lot of our approach to identifying people who need support would work better if we focused on smaller-than-diagnostic modules (such as social interaction problems), rather than characteristic clusters (like ADHD or ODD or ASD or whatever). This particular analysis seems to share that way of thinking about kids who need support.

I've been really wondering a lot about the overlap between ASD and ODD for years now, especially as we have tried to have playdates with kids with the same diagnosis as my kids, but a very different range of symptoms. I had convos back when A. was doing EI with therapists who said that some parents diagnosis shop, which I just wasn't sure whether I really believed that was a full explanation or not (really, are all these high energy, high conflict kids with ASD diagnoses actually ODD instead? Because they sure set off my ASD-dar for the rest of the package: social interaction issues, sensory problems, narrow areas of deep interest, etc.). I try not to blame parents (because I don't want to be blamed, either!), and I sure recognize that when a parent has needs that aren't met, that is going to limit how much the parent can then do for their child. Part of why we work with a play therapist is because I recognize my limitations at helping kids solve relationship problems in a play context without either creating high structure or making the situation worse in some other way (neither of which gets at the thing I want my kids to be better at than I am, which is being able to relate well to other people and share goals and cooperate and All That Good, Prosocial Stuff).

I'm starting to think that maybe ODD actually starts out as what I think of as Grumpy Old Man Syndrome. You say, hey, let's do X. GOM says, NO! If you wait a few minutes, GOM will say, hey, I have an idea. Let's do X! Annoying as fuck, but manageable, if you can avoid engaging with the initial no. If you make the mistake of trying to convince GOM to do X, GOM will escalate and entrench, until GOM is saying that X will kill the kiddies, give us all cancer and directly start Armageddon within his limited remaining lifetime. Also, cost too much money. A parent that doesn't have GOM, and who figures out early on to wait, and maybe do some environmental nudging towards X, and doesn't require the GOM to admit it was actually the parent's idea, etc. etc. etc. can take a kid with GOM and produce an adult who may be a little annoying at times (especially when tired or surprised out of their routine), but is basically functional. A parent who has severe GOM themselves may wind up making an adult with severe GOM, aka, ODD. Assuming they don't just kill each other when the kid hits puberty.

We tend to think, oh, let's fix the kids and then it'll be good in the next generation. And I'm like, yeah, that's probably never going to be good enough for things like really entrenched, multi-generational GOM. You are going to have to mitigate with the 'rents, if those kids are gonna have any chance at all.