Aspie Girls

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......