WHY I SOMETIMES AVOID FAMILY GATHERINGS.

Not the weekend just gone but the weekend before that, my family held a gathering for my father’s birthday, which was last week. My brother, sister-in-law, niece, nephew and my brother’s mother-in-law and brother-in-law came over. My nephew got into a foul mood and my brother later said that he thought my nephew was overwhelmed by having so many people around. I stayed in my room and had a sleep and my brother said the next day that I was missed, something that my sister-in-law had said in that I didn’t really go to family gatherings.

I hate to break it to my sister-in-law, but I have long suspected that my nephew is autistic (he has a precocious vocabulary, and he likes being read to, he has his quirks and he’s quite smart), but my she won’t hear of it, as she’s a young mum (she’s eleven years younger than my brother).

The reason I avoid the gatherings has its origins in some things I have been trying to teach my nephew. For example, one day, he said to my niece, “No girls!” I said to him that I wanted them both to have the same chances and that a nicer way could be, “That’s Poppy’s and my special time,” if he feels my niece is third-wheeling. There’s nothing wrong with wanting special time with one person, but there is in sexism and cruelty.

I have always tended to get on better with women than men and I remember instances growing up where family gatherings have caused my dysphoria to go high. I remember one incident, nearly 40 years ago, where we went and stayed with my paternal grandparents (we should have stayed in a motel, to be honest). My maternal grandfather was in a hospital in a major city an hour away and he’d had his leg amputated and I arrived home from school and my usual afternoon regulation and vestibular activity was having a jump on the trampoline before doing my homework. This was a Friday afternoon and my mother told me, when I came home, that I couldn’t jump on the trampoline because we were going away for the weekend. I asked where we were going and she said, “Up to stay with Nana and Grandad.” Dad arrived home late and we had to go and see my maternal grandfather in hospital, and it emerged during the visit that the next morning, we would be going shopping to get some things my grandfather wanted and my mother would give him a haircut. So, we had breakfast with my paternal grandparents and then we had to go out and we didn’t arrive back at my paternal grandparents’ house until after lunch, and my grandfather was burning a tree stump. The next morning, my grandfather had given me the comics to read from the paper, and my brother wanted to go and see the tree stump. My father said that we’d go down later, but my grandfather decided that we’d go down then. I wanted to sit and read the comics, but my mother told me to put my shoes on, and go with them. I didn’t want to. My father hit me, but my grandmother gave me a packet of Smarties as she didn’t think it was fair. She sat in the kitchen with my grandmother.

Whenever we went to see my paternal grandparents, my brother wanted to play cricket in the summer or football in the winter and I was sent off with him even though I hated it! By my mother, I should add. I tended to prefer typically female things, but my mother didn’t think that was right. I do remember one day, my grandmother got out some toys, and I played with girls toys, but not in an imaginative way. My brother didn’t want a bar of it. My mother, for her part, didn’t know.

I saw my extended family for Christmas, and I mainly talked to my brother’s mother in law and my brother’s sister in law’s sister. My mother wasn’t able to say much and I kept a distance from her at the gathering.

I still remember when we went to a free entertainment thing put on by the local council in a park, and there was a display of gridiron. My mother sent me off with my father and my brother and I kept my focus on a tree in the distance and absorbed nothing of the gridiron display. My brother watches the Super Bowl, yet I would rather watch paint dry.

I do, however, remember a conversation, when I was 17, and my cousin had rung my grandmother for help with cooking and my aunty had said that boys shouldn’t be cooking. My grandfather told my aunty to leave my cousin alone.

I wish my grandfather had been in a position to do that for me with my mother, but, had I been able to confide that, my mother would have said that she was disgusted that I was telling my grandparents those things. Like if he’d have been able to say to my mother, “No, you leave Peter alone. If Peter wants to learn to cook, so what?”

My mother would often try to send me off to do things with other males, even though I didn’t want to. And she still doesn’t understand today, why I am not comfortable with males. I have, however, been able to make one link. Much of the sexual abuse I copped was from other boys who didn’t see me as a boy and used things to try their own form of ABA to make me more like them. I know the abuse was not my fault, but I have never truly felt comfortable being a male. I own my autism and wear it with pride. Now, I face the difficulty of how to be able to live as my more authentic self, without having my mother say, “Oh, you shouldn’t be doing that.”

Maybe I can get my sister-in-law to understand, but my mother is just like her father in that respect, in that my father or I could tell my grandfather something and he’d ignore it, but he’d come home from the bowls club and say, “Oh, Fred Murray said that this is what you should do.” And you’d have been telling him that all along. So, if I told my grandfather that I’m autistic, he’d ignore it, but if he went to the bowls club and someone told him that, he’d come home and say, “Oh, Thelma Murray said that Peter’s as classic a case of what used to be called Asperger’s Autism as you’ll meet.” It took my sister-in-law, who is a mental health nurse, to tell her that.

But unless I can get her to do the same thing about my gender issues, I think my participation in family gatherings will be selective and probably confined to my favourite aunty and cousin.