EASTER AND REFLECTION.
Easter is a time of year for me when I reflect. Not in a religious sense but in a personal sense. With my autistic brain, I reflect on the fact that Easter, 1988 and Easter, 1994 were over the same weekend, date wise, and Easter, 2020 is over the same weekend as Easter, 1998, and Easter, 1992 was on the same weekend as Easter, 1987.
Easter, 1988 is a time I remember as we had the week before Easter off for school holidays. (The Education Department wasn't always logical with this, as I remember in 1984, they gave us the week before Easter off, so we had Easter over April 20–23, we had to go back to school for one day, then we had April 25 off for Anzac Day. What they could, and should, have done was say, "Okay, schoolkids being schoolkids, yes, in Brisbane, they get Wednesday and Thursday off in the Exhibition week and go to school on the Friday and have the weekend off, but one in five days in which you have to go to school isn't as ridiculous as one in twelve.) It was on the Thursday before Easter, a cloudy day, that my brother sat on the lounge and the spring base broke, so we went shopping for a new lounge suite. I remember it being a depressing day as I thought, four more days of holidays (four had already passed too quickly) and I'd be back at school.
The change from primary school to high school is one that is frequently discussed, and for me, yes, it meant a change from being in the one classroom with the one teacher (okay, in some years, we changed for maths and English, according to level) but it also meant a new level of responsibility and it made me think that, okay, you're getting older, and if you want to be treated that way, you have to act like it. I remember the Deputy Principal saying, "We don't expect you to be like adults, but we don't want to treat you like children, we want you to be adolescences." The school's philosophy also was that there were no bells to signify when things started and finished, we were expected to know the time and be on time. Some kids in my class were terrible.
Okay, I know that adolescence is a time of changes to one's physical appearance, but is that really a time of a second childhood? I was someone who believed that adolescence was a time where adults would start looking at the adults of tomorrow.
One thing I remember about high school was a girl in my Year Eight class asked me whether I preferred Year Eight or Year Nine and I said Year Nine as we had more of the subjects we liked. She preferred Year Eight as we were all in the same class for everything. Year Nine, unfortunately, for me, was a time of being different classes, different idiots. There were kids who were possibly doing some subjects because their parents wanted them to, instead of because they wanted to, so they rebelled by misbehaving.
Adolescence is a time whereby people don't learn who is in their group and who isn't. What I think needs to be taught in childhood is, if you want to be part of a group, be part of that group, but if someone else is different, allow them to be different, if they're not hurting you. So, if you want to start smoking, don't try to push others to.
Being an autistic adolescent, I typically didn't run with the crowd. I didn't much care for the latest fashion. The clothes I had were the pair of shorts and the shirt my mother bought for me this Christmas or this birthday, or the pair of shorts and shirt that I received last birthday, or the pair of jeans my mother bought and the jumper she bought. Some of my school colleagues had to have the latest Nike shoes or the latest brand of this or that.
I also say that autistic kids and adolescent need more of an extended family effort to raise them than just a nuclear family. Remembering my own childhood, my typical weekends in 1988 consisted of: Saturday morning, brother's sports commitments, (I enjoyed watching Rage, and the Top 50 Countdown) Saturday afternoon, he'd want to do something and my mother would ask him if he wanted to hire the tennis courts the next morning. Sunday morning I'd have to get up at 6:30 to be there at 7am. Then, the rest of Sunday was spent having to entertain him.
My father was away a lot with work and he had long hours when at home, but what would have made my time easier would have been greater learning support for maths and my confidence would have improved, better class selection, and for my parents and paternal grandparents to be called into something to say, "Okay, your youngest son is very active. Your eldest is more bookish, but at this time, your eldest needs more support than he receives. What I would suggest is, to your father, for say, one weekend, every term at school, you take your eldest son away. You stay in a unit for one night and you spend time together. And for your paternal grandparents, you make a firm commitment, that say, one weekend, every six weeks, especially when his father is away, you let your grandson come and stay for a weekend. He can come out on Friday afternoon, after school, you collect him from the train station, he can stay Friday night, Saturday, Saturday night and Sunday and he goes home Sunday afternoon."