My daughter looks like everyone else, a beautiful smile, electric eyes, cute button nose, and she has ten perfect fingers and toes, but she isn’t like anyone else.

For a long time, her father and I held hushed worried conversations long into the night as we asked each other why she didn’t talk in public or was having  severe meltdowns over music in the car? I googled why she had to have her special spot at the dining table, why only her father could tie her shoe laces, why she wouldn’t eat anything that had color and why she would only wear the same T-shirt over and over again?

She looked exactly like every other little girl but she was different and we didn’t know why. As we tried to find answers, she struggled with being different.

I was the Mom who held her close when she cried about being the only one out of the whole class not being invited to a class party. When she did eventually get invited to one or two, I was the last of the Moms who stayed at these parties because she could not talk in public.  I had to be the Mom who opened our home to every girl in her class so that she will not feel left out because no one ever invited her back to theirs.

I pushed hard to look for an answer, thinking that finally understanding why she was different would help her in understanding herself. Her different was called “autism” and I was relieved. I finally had an answer. The strategies the psychologist, the speech therapist and teacher assistants implemented were aimed at her trying to be like everyone else but she struggled to fit in.
There is nothing more painful than watching your child, now navigating her teenage years, trying to be like everyone else. While other kids worry about dress choices or food choices, she struggles with understanding sub texts, non-verbal body language cues and social conventions. Nobody makes any allowances for her because she looks exactly like everybody else.

Then one afternoon, she came home and buried her face crying in my arms. Kids being kids, were cruelly labeling anyone who said or done anything silly as “autistic”.

“They all laughed,” she bawled, “And what if  …. What if they knew I am…”

I immediately hugged her tight because she had finally realized the significance of her diagnosis three years earlier and  was worried about coming out to her friends.

“Yes, baby girl, you have autism,” my heart yearned to whisper into hers, “But that does not mean you are any less a person, a gorgeous one at that.”

People can’t see past the label, I want to tell her. They can’t see the real person underneath it. They can’t see the wonderful sweet girl who loves Pokemons and plays basketball like a demon but who cannot place an order at MacDonalds or have a conversation with the check out cashier. They just see a girl they will never invite to a birthday party, or to a play over or sit by for lunch.

And today she realized the awful truth of being different, and of what would happen if she came out as different in High School.

As I heard her soft cries and the sounds of her heart breaking, she needed an answer but what can a mom say to her teenage daughter about something she had never had to experience? There was nothing in the parenting guidebooks on how to help your child come out as being different.

Then I see the poster of Troye Sivan, her most favorite YouTube Star, stuck on her wall. I remembered an earlier discussion we had about the allure of this young teeny bopper who had come out as gay to his fans. In his coming out video, he said that when he was born, he knew that there was always something was a little bit different about him and then he realized he was gay. He was afraid that being gay would change how people would feel towards him. He even asked his father if he still loved him when he told him that he was gay. When he decided to do this coming out video for his fans, he was terrified that some people would have a problem with him coming out as gay.   

She was puzzled as to why he would worry about coming out as gay to his fans because it didn’t change who he was to her. He was still Troye and she liked him for him.

I realized then that the answer she needed had been on her wall all along.

“Life isn’t about finding yourself, it’s about creating yourself.” I read Troye’s quote out to her.

Like Troye, she was coming out, but as autistic. She was worrying about what her friends and family would think of her if she told them that she is different.

I then realized that that was also the answer I had been searching for all these years. I had been so wrong all along. She shouldn’t be trying to be like everyone else. She should just be herself. Why should people with autism have to fit in with everyone else? It’s time the world accepted them for who they are, as they are.

“Why worry about other people, baby girl?” I said to her, “You should never be defined by a label. You create your own label. Stop worrying about trying to fit in with the rest of the world. You just be yourself, just be different, like Troye with an ‘e’ and you.”

She looked up and a smile peeked through.

I know she gets it. That young teeny bopper from Perth was living proof that you could come out as different and still be yourself and be so goddamn good at it as well.

As I hugged her tight, my heart whispered to hers fiercely, “And you know what, my darling girl, the rest of the world can go fuck themselves if they don’t like your coming out. You are and will always be the most fucking awesome human being to me. And that should be the ONLY message of your coming out.”

 

 

About the author: Michelle Tan is the absurdist comic writer and certified life nonsense expert behind The Secret Diary of Agent Spitback, a fictionalized blog about a newbie mummy’s nonsense in trying to survive the world’s most dangerous place in the world — the school playground. Some call her genius, some call her dribble and some, like her three children, just call her “Mommy.” Her nonsense has also been published on ScaryMommy, Babble, HuffingtonPost and Mamapedia. Catch more of her shenanigans on Facebook and Twitter. She is determined to be the World’s First Nonsense Blogger in Nothing Important.

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