Aspie Girls

When I was a child (around the age of 5 or 6), I used to get worked upover the "little things". I can recall driving out through rural Indiana with my mother en route to visit my aunt. Having grown up primarily in the city; these narrow two lane highways seemed a bit foreboding to me. I used to struggle to keep count of the lines in the center of the road and was perplexed as to their meaning. Why a double yellow line? Why a dashed yellow line? Why only dashed on one side or the other? It was all very intriguing and I really dug in to study the possibilities. However, one bit of rural signage in particular just drove me to distraction! It was the "no passing zone" signs that appear along the side of these rural highway systems. I knew that road signs were there to advise travelers of the rules of the road, but being small and not understanding the true meaning of such signage, I was left to ponder how these "no passing" signs could ever be obeyed.  In my minds eye I was imagining the world in all of its roundness spinning someplace out in space. Protruding out from the side of our planet was a huge yellow sign dawning the words "no passing". "How does this signwork?", I would puzzle. It seemed to be an obstacle to our travels to visit my aunt and it really bothered me a great deal that my mother would just casually pass the thing without even the slightest mentionof the obvious "rule breaking" she was engaged in. If one were to drivet o the left or right of the sign they would be passing it. If they were to fly over the sign they would be passing it. In fact, one could drive the entire circumference of the planet and still have to pass the sign to arrive at their final destination. It made me uneasy to think that such signs dotted the landscape with a relatively high frequency. What a hindrance to travel!! How was anyone expected to travel about with all of these signs that could not be passed? Being like so many Aspie children, I never bothered to ask my mother about the obvious problems arising from these signs. It was so obvious that the rule was to not pass them; I didn't have to ask for clarification. Instead, I just sat and puzzled over them until some time around the age of about 14 or 15. At this time, I began to study traffic rules in preparation for mydriver's education course at school. It was then that I first realized the true meaning of the elusive "no passing zone" signs. How stupid I felt when I realized that it wasn't the sign, but the other vehicles on the road that were not to be passed!!

Tony Attwood has noted that while boys with Asperger's Syndrome often have special interests such as train schedules or deep fat frier's, girls seem to have interests that are presumed to be more stereotypically "female". As a result of this, the special interests of girls may be overlooked or considered to be typical girls play. My own childhood play, however,  was probably anything but "typical". I didn't have much in the way of a special interest when I was very small. What I did have was a bad habit of becoming hyper focused on an activity to the point that I had no idea what was going on around me. I was interested in "setting up" ratherthan "playing" and I was never big on making my Barbie dolls talk to each other or pretending to have a tea party. I was much more interested in setting up the perfect house "scene" for Barbie and planning the menu for the tea party. One might say that one of my "special interests" was "planning for play". I always had a hard time getting other kids to play with me and this inability to play in a reciprocal fashion didn't make it any easier. Part of my problem was probably due to a poor understanding of social relationships, but certainly some of it was likely a pure result of my "eccentricities". One instance in particular comes to mind?

I was playing with a girl who lived up the street from me and I was probably in about the 1st or 2nd grade at the time. This girl and I decided that it might be fun to pretend that we lived in a "play town". Being that one of my favorite activities was drawing up maps and floorplans for houses, I thought this was a great idea. I immediately set out to design the city. The location for this city was going to be my own backyard, so who better to be the site designer - right? After a few different sketches, I finally settled on a design that included sites such as "water works", "post office", "school" and "grocerystore". Everything that a proper little town would need had been included. By this time my friend had decided to go home. I recall her saying that she would be back later when I was finished. Next, I collected up as many straight sticks as I could find and began jamming them into the ground in strategic locations throughout the backyard. I gathered up some yarn from my mothers latest afghan and began to linkt he sticks together forming a series of streets and building "footprints". I had also created signage for each street and location within my little city. By this time it was starting to get a little dark and I was made to halt construction until the following day. Bright and early that next morning (I was always awake by dawn) I was back at it adding all of the final touches like food in the grocery store and books in the school house. At this point, my friend from up the street had completely lost all interest in playing "town" with me and I can recall being clueless as to why. Today, I realize that the poor girl had probably been put off by not being allowed to participate in building the city with me. It could have also been the way I focused in on my infrastructure design and tuned out everything else that was going on around me - including her. Either way, the girl didn't seem very interested in playing with me much after that.

I have read other similar accounts of Aspie girls playing in this fashion. Liana Holliday Wiley wrote in her book Pretending to be Normal about the desire to set up toys rather than play any sort of meaningful games with them. She goes further to describe her frustration with other children who did not share the same pleasure in setting up elaborate scenes. I imagine that this need to organize and arrange things is common among Aspie girls. Perhaps it is an exageration of an already femanine tendancy? Regardless, this same trait that caused me so much greif as a child has subsequently become one of my greatest adult strenghts. It's a pitty my childhood friends couldn't relate......

I always knew that something about me was a little bit "odd". It probably began when I was a very small child and I attended kindergarten. These very early experiences were difficult for me because I was, like many other children with Asperger's, rigid and inflexible. I was set in my ways and being thrown into a structured environment that was not of my own design was confusing and frightening. I suppose I had always been different, but it wasn't until this time in my life that I really began to sense it. That first day ofschool still stands out in my mind as it was marked by a great deal of anxiety and confusion. I can recall being very concerned that I would miss the bus and did not trust that my mother knew the location of the bus stop. I also recall being very concerned about what would happen once I arrived at school. How would I know the location of my classroom since I had never been inside of the building? Would they know who I was and why I was there? How would I get home again? I imagine that these things were heavy on the minds of most children, but for me there was always the additional problem of being "in a world of my own".There were so many unknowns and it was a serious diversion from my usual routine of breakfast followed by some light coloring. The other children in my class were a terrific sight, too - as I recall. I distinctly remember looking about at my classmates in horror. One girl was crying and another kid had his index finger and middle finger firmly lodged inside of his nose just digging away! What was wrong withthese people? No one was interested in talking about how to build a city or the best way to hold a pair of chopsticks, so I decided to justwalk up and tell the teacher all about it. The teacher didn't really seem very interested either and I can recall being sent right back to my seat and told that I was not to get up again until everyone was called to a "station". I was assigned to the "block station" first and was shocked to find that no one was interested in building things my way. No one in this new environment was very cooperative and no one seemed very friendly. I did not like this new activity called "school" and I spent the next 13 years trying to figure out how to get myself sent home sick!