Lydie the Cliff Bird
Yesterday my six year-old daughter Lydia was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome–apparently a milder, gentler autism. The doctor told my wife that it’s a “social learning disability,” which, in my mind, describes every one of us in junior high. The news was not tragic, at least not compared to all the horrors of the world, but it told us something about the struggles our daughter will face trying to interact with everyone.
According to Wikipedia, the fount of all awkward knowledge, “physical clumsiness and atypical use of language are frequently reported.” She’s the worst dancer you’ve ever seen–spastic, jubilantly flailing in a beat known to no human. It melts me thinking about how she dances. I love how she dances.
“Childhood desire for companionship can become numbed through a history of failed social encounters.”
“Depression is often the result of chronic frustration from repeated failure to engage others socially.”
“Abnormalities include . . . use of metaphor meaningful only to the speaker . . . tangential and circumstantial speech. Speech may convey a sense of incoherence; the conversational style often includes monologues about topics that bore the listener, fails [sic] to provide contexts for comments, or fails to suppress internal thoughts.”
Their community website is called “Wrong Planet.”
This blog is about my daughter and her diagnosable eccentricities. Star Land is a place she invented to help her drift off to sleep, a place like Heaven but with more polar bears. Our goal as her parents is to help her learn how to make this planet the right one, the best one for her to live on.
