Stephanie and I have been watching "Frozen", and as always, I'm looking for hidden meanings in the story. I love to look at movies and songs and apply them to my daily life. Our household is all-autistic. We all have diagnoses of Autism. I see Elsa's super power of ice as being similar to the Autistic super powers that we all possess. We don't have the power to freeze things, but our overzealous emotion can hurt those who we care about. Autism is defi ned by the Oxford Dictionary as " a developmental disorder of variable severity that is characterised by difficulty in social interaction and communication and by restricted or repetitive patterns of thought and behaviour." What this means for us, in my family, is that we experience external stimuli as blasts of information. When we are out in public, the smells, the sights, the sounds and the people can all merge together and become completely overwhelming. In order to regulate, we can focus on
On this date, twelve years ago, I was in the psychiatric ward of North Park Private Hospital. I'd had my first child, and although I'd wanted to be a mother for as long as I could remember (even though I found babies kind of annoying and squishy, but I was sure that would change when I had one of my own). It didn't. Motherhood is the place where you need to know who you are and what kind of mother you want to be. You need to back yourself and your decisions. You need to scream for an epidural if you want one. You need to tell the brestapo to fuck off if you want to use bottles because you can't stand the feeling of breastfeeding and it's making you insane. You need to look in the mirror and be able to tell yourself that this is hard and messy but you can do this because you are strong and that YOU ARE THERE FOR YOU. It doesn't matter what happens, you back yourself and you know you can do this. I had none of that. I had a chameleonic sense of self that cha