Even now, barely a month after my brother died, my mother still regularly links me to autism-related pseudo science websites which essentially paint autistic kids as a curse that needs to be "cured" (much like the Autism Speaks people). She still believes all of that nonsense. She thinks that if he hadn't been autistic then he wouldn't have died somehow. (???) That it was a terrible and tragic curse, essentially. She infantilized him in ways. Of course she never mistreated him, but she has always bought into all those harmful notions and nonsensical theories which suggest that ~EMF fields and gluten and whatever "worsen autism" or even cause it. For 26 years she has refused to listen to reason. (Of course, she's grieving, and I can't pretend to understand what a loss of a child feels like-- as opposed to the loss of a sibling--so it's difficult to necessarily hold any of this against her at this very moment, but I am so tired. This attitude toward autism is so, so common and absolutely none of them listen ever. It breaks my heart.)
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