For those of you who read my Born in the Wrong Decade series that I posted last month, I have some more thoughts about an incident I wrote about in the first installment of the series.
If you recall, I talked about being very self-conscious about my focused interest in Back to the Future, which started when I was nine years old, and how my childhood efforts to hide it backfired spectacularly. I then related a story from when I was ten, in which Back to the Future Part III was released on video on the same weekend of the Bar Mitzvah of the son of a family friend. I wanted to leave the after-gathering at the boy's family's house so that I could go home and watch the movie, but I felt guilty for even thinking this way. Ultimately, a war broke out in my head between the Whims of My Mind and Doing What was Right, but this time the Whims won: I told my parents that I needed to do my Sunday School homework, which was a lie; I simply wanted to watch the movie. But then I was, once again, wracked with guilt. From the original post:
I've always hated lying, and I realized that I needed to confess my true motives. Following my mother upstairs... I told her the truth. She made a noise of disgust. Already ashamed of myself, I wasn't sure how to react, so I said, "You're angry?", but in a tone that made the question sound more like a statement. The next two seconds, where I looked aimlessly around the room, seemed much longer. Finally, she broke the awkward silence and said, "I'm disappointed. I can't believe you would give up someone's good time just for a movie." I was already self-conscious about my hyperfocus on Back to the Future, and hearing the disapproval from my own mother further cemented the idea in my head that it was wrong.
I then commented on how I think there might have been some unconscious bias on my mother's part, pointing out that it's not uncommon for little boys-- neurotypical little boys-- at gatherings that they find boring to say things like, "This sucks! I wanna go home and play video games!" Despite the fact that what I said to my mother was essentially a guilt-ridden confession of my "thoughtcrime" rather than an unconsidered demand, she still reprimanded me as if what I had said contained the subtext of the latter. And thanks to emerging efforts in the twenty-first century to encourage others to check their implicit attitudes, I am sure I am not the only one who would note the gender bias. Focused interests are more tolerated in boys, and there is also the expectation of girls to always consider others' wants and needs. An appropriate response from my mother at the house gathering would have been understanding, coupled with a reminder about how I needed to be patient and that a Bar Mitzvah is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, whereas you can watch a movie at any time.
However, I strongly suspect that had the circumstances been slightly different, my then-40-year-old, early-'90s-era mother would have been more understanding, once again, due to unconscious bias: there is one type of focused interest that is historically tolerated well in girls, and that is having a crush on a male celebrity. Mom now knows that I love the Back to the Future series because of the time travel element and, not insignificantly, that I find Doc Brown to be a strangely relatable character (as a kid I had no idea why, but as an adult it became clear when I eventually "headcanoned" him as autistic, but that's another quirky in-depth discussion for another day). I don't know if she knew about this back then, or even if she even questioned why I loved these movies so much, but I guarantee she wasn't laboring under the delusion that I had a crush on Michael J. Fox-- or any of the other actors for that matter.
But what if I had had a crush on Michael J. Fox, and Mom knew that I wanted to go home and watch Back to the Future Part III so that I could ogle over Fox dressed as a cowboy? Or what if, like a lot of the girls in my fourth-grade class, I was into the then-popular boy band, The New Kids on the Block? What if a new NKOTB album had been released that weekend and I wanted to go home and listen to it because I had a crush on one (or more) of the members and listening to them was like a siren song for my on-the-verge-of-adolescence girl brain? I hate to say it, but in both cases I think Mom would have been more understanding, and her response, sans the disgusted edge to her voice, would have been more along the lines of what it should have been: that I needed to be patient. Similarly, also when I was ten, I relentlessly begged for a remote-controlled hovercraft. Why? Because it reminded me of the flying DeLorean in Back to the Future Part II. One day, after what was likely dozens of requests and audible brainstorming about how I could find a way to get this expensive toy, Mom told me that my "obsession" with getting the hovercraft was "obscene." But again, what if the thing that I had wanted so badly was related to a teen idol that I had a crush on? What if I had had a crush on the New Kids on the Block and there was a $129 statue of one of the members that I wanted so badly?*
It is cliché for adolescent girls to have crushes on male celebrities, and back then plenty of girls were intensely infatuated with the members of The New Kids on the Block. One girl in my class-- I'll call her Karen-- swore the she was going to marry Joe McIntyre when she grew up. I suspect most parents wouldn't have been "concerned", let alone thought it was "obscene," which is strange because I would think a ten-year-old girl's repeated declarations that she would one day marry a male celebrity almost twice her age could be unnerving: what if she eventually developed a similarly-hyperfocused crush on a teacher or another adult male in her life, and it turned out one of those men was a pervert who would take advantage of her feelings and sexually abuse her? I don't think most parents of that era were cognizant of the disturbingly prevalent occurrence of adult male child groomers, but I suppose that's another illustration of how much more ignorant society was back then.
As I keep reiterating, I was born in the wrong decade. I was born into an era in which phenomena like unconscious bias weren't discussed like they are now, and in which priorities were skewed. It was an era in which atypical behaviors were, at best, seen as superficial actions and, at worst, the result of brattiness, bad parenting, lack of discipline, take your pick. What they weren't seen as were the manifestations of a brain that was wired differently and was doing its best to get through life. As a result, I took many severe blows, even from well-meaning people like my mother who honestly and sincerely thought they were helping me learn to "get along" in society, not aware of the emotional cost of these lessons. My therapist has told me that he's heard countless similar stories from autistic people who grew up in my generation and earlier.
If nothing else, I hope I have raised your consciousness here. Please go and think about it, especially if you are raising an autistic girl. You will save her a lot of emotional turmoil.
*This is roughly what the hovercraft cost-- in 1991. After adjusting for inflation, this translates to about $295 in 2023.
