Last updated on November 26, 2023
Podcast 0013; Season 01, Episode 13; July 20, 2018
This episode of The Autistic Me Podcast reflects on our summer so far, which has featured a lot of travel and enrichment activities for our daughters. In the podcast, I also explore my own prejudices and how we must overcome those through experiences in various communities.
I will be posting during our trip to California and hope to record some podcast episodes on the road, too.
Transcript (lightly edited)
Hello and welcome to The Autistic Me Podcast. I am Christopher Scott Wyatt, speaking as The Autistic Me.
As I mentioned in previous episodes and on The Autistic Me blog, summer has been a difficult and busy time preventing me from realizing the goal of posting a new podcast each week. There will be a Season 2, which will be weekly, starting right after Labor Day. In the meantime, I will continue to post sporadically as time and travel permit.
I mentioned travel because our daughters and I are about to travel to California for ten days.
We have been traveling quite a bit this summer as I seek to give the girls as many experiences as possible between school years. This is a very difficult task for me as an [00:01:00] autistic individual with sensory issues and just as a parent in general. The travel requires a lot of driving and driving can be overwhelming — especially in cities such as Pittsburgh, which are difficult to navigate.
Cities such as Pittsburgh, here on the East Coast, evolved from walking trails and cattle trails so the streets aren’t straight. Just as challenging are the geographical situations of these cities. In Pittsburgh, we have the rivers… we have mountains… and we have a number of natural obstacles that result in puzzling intersections and traffic patterns, even on the interstates. It isn’t uncommon to have a left-hand merge and a right-hand entrance onto a freeway. These cause a great deal of stress because we see the accidents on a [00:02:00] daily basis. So having seen a number of accidents on the freeways in Pennsylvania and Ohio, I tend to be very cautious and nervous while driving.
But, I want the girls to experience as much as possible, so this requires driving on these very interesting interstates and the local roads. This summer we have gone to Washington, DC, Lake Erie twice, Waldameer Park (with its water park adjacent), and we recently went to Kennywood which is famous for being over a century old.
The drive to Kennywood requires getting off the interstate and driving through surface streets in a number of challenged communities. These economically struggling communities can be unnerving for someone [00:03:00] unused to the area. People come up to the car and you also see people banging on other cars and yelling and screaming. You have a number of burnt-out buildings. There are a lot of police in these regions, too. But, unfortunately, you have to navigate these areas to get to Kennywood Park, which is not near a major freeway and not actually located in the city of Pittsburgh, but in a nearby bedroom community.
These communities are taxing for me because you don’t want to discount what they have endured. At the same time, based on crime reports and the news, you want to be careful with yourself and your children driving through these areas. [00:04:00] I wish this weren’t the case and I wish that more of the experiences were easier to get to.
As we prepare to travel to California, the girls will experience airports and air travel. They will also experience the hustle and bustle of Orange County and Los Angeles County. We will be driving back to where my wife and I are from, where we will spend another week after four days at Disney. As they see these communities, they will see something very different than what we have in the Pittsburgh region.
In my opinion, California is more integrated, though there are serious problems [00:05:00] — socioeconomic divisions that persist — but the communities are closely integrated geographically. You move very quickly from an impoverished area to a wealthy area to a middle-class area and so on as you drive through California communities. I think it’s important for our daughters to develop tolerance and to understand that these areas that are impoverished and are isolated economically became that way through policies and ideas that restricted opportunities for individuals.
Our daughters came to us through the foster system and their birth parents [00:06:00] are from some of these regions in the Greater Pittsburgh area that are economically disadvantaged. I believe that that influences those parents and those individuals trying to survive in those situations. So, I understand that it is wrong of me to be uncomfortable in some of these areas and I want my daughters to be better people than I might be with my biases and fears. I did attend the University of Southern California, which is located in the Heart of Los Angeles and I did witness crimes committed: shootings, stabbings, and car thefts were something that you accepted as part of daily life.
You eventually develop patterns and [00:07:00] routines that are prejudicial based on experience and fear and I don’t want our daughters to have those same fears.
In addition to the travel that has taken us through different types of settings, these are also educational in the sense of traveling to museums and state parks for those experiences. Those are very rewarding [experiences] once we get to them and that’s part of what summer parenting is. We have enjoyed our time in Washington, DC, seeing the national monuments. We have enjoyed the state parks up at Lake Erie both in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Why Experiences Matter
I really want the girls to learn the cultural and linguistic norms of class markers, because I know those are important and I know that these experiences in museums [00:08:00] and at the national parks will give them a vocabulary and a knowledge that will help them succeed academically and socially.
We have also enrolled the girls in gymnastics class. We have enrolled the oldest in the Daisies, part of the Girl Scouts of America. And we do these things because we understand that as two parents who aren’t as social and who tend to be introverts that one of the things that success often hinges upon in our culture is the ability to discuss culture and to give off the markers of the middle class or the upper middle class, at least.
I know this isn’t a good thing. I’m certainly hoping that this changes over time and we all become better people. But as foster-to -adopt parents [00:09:00], I want to give the girls every advantage possible. When they look back on where they came from and the types of communities in which their parents lived, they can look back and hope to make a positive change — through access into the middle class and the upper middle class.
Summer parenting is ongoing school. It is a lot of stress as you try to give your child these nurturing and enriching experiences regardless of the stresses that those experiences might cause myself or, in limited cases, my wife. These are important experiences.
Someone might say, “What is the important value of something like Disneyland?” And yet we expect our children to know the famous fairy tales. Not only the [00:10:00] traditional version but generally the Disney versions in our culture. We say things like “That’s a Cinderella Story.” We talk about someone doing “A Mickey Mouse job.” We have these cultural icons that become part of the middle class and part of the upper class that a child needs to know if that child is going to have success socially and academically.
I find this very strange when reading standardized test. For example, one of the handouts from the Common Core Curriculum used at our child’s elementary school said something about. two children kayaking. If you’re from the urban core of Pittsburgh, I’m not sure that you have a fair shot to answer a question about kayaking. You might, [00:11:00] but we often have these cultural markers in our standardized tests and in our standardized curriculum.
Another one of the things that I have noticed is our students are expected to know the Fancy Nancy stories. These Fancy Nancy stories, which are popular with young girls in our elementary school, use French. There are French phrases scattered throughout the texts. Again, by exposing the girls to the French language in these books, we’re giving them an advantage.
It might not be fair, but it is something my wife and I consider essential to their success.
So as we’re doing these summer trips, we’re experiencing these new phrases. We are experiencing these new places, these bits of knowledge that become enculturated within a specific stratum [00:12:00] of class existence — at least in our United States…. And, actually, throughout the world, the experiences and the knowledge are simply class-stratified, whether we like it or not.
Summer parenting, for me, has meant doing all of these activities and engaging in these enrichment experiences with the girls because I know how important the experiences will be in the future. As they learn about Disney, as they learn about the princesses, as they learn about the national parks, as they learn about Yosemite, Sequoia, Big Sur, the differences between Texas and California… the girls are obtaining a language that will let them engage their peers at our middle-class and upper-middle-class elementary school and then junior high and high school [00:13:00].
Again, I know it isn’t fair and I know that we are providing experiences that other children might not have — especially children from similar backgrounds to those of our daughters.
I don’t feel good about that and I am sometimes conflicted by it. But I am going to do all I can to give them every possible advantage.
So while I’m gone for ten days to California, that’s ten days during which I can’t be working easily on the podcast or the blog. I will try, but these travel arrangements have always interfered with my plans. I had hoped this summer would be a little different by working ahead, but that proved very difficult.
You might wonder why I’m confessing to the conflicted emotions of doing these [00:14:00] enrichment experiences and where we must take the girls to arrive at certain places. I think it’s very important to say that has an autistic individual I struggle to drive. I struggle in environments like the theme parks. I even struggle at some of the national parks that are too crowded and too busy. I also have struggled to engage with the people around us.
It’s important, however, that I do my best so the girls have a good role model who is teaching them that these experiences are valuable.
I have taken our oldest to see The Nutcracker during the Christmas season, and I have taken her to see fine art at galleries, because even if it’s challenging for me to be in those situations, I know that those situations are culturally enriching and providing [00:15:00] knowledge to her.
It is very exhausting to always be on edge and traveling. I know that every parent experiences this, but it is more difficult for me. I do require more time to recover and sometimes I don’t do well in the settings and have to excuse myself to recover. Even when we are at a theme park, or a museum, or a national park, knowing that I need to recover is something I have to explain to the girls and provide to them as a life skill. I tell them, “When you are feeling exhausted and you need some quiet space, it helps to know where that quiet space might be.”
I am hoping that at the end of this summer and at the end of [00:16:00] every summer in the future, the girls have learned more about other people, other cultures, other places. I am hoping that they appreciate that we need to help other individuals who aren’t as fortunate as us. And I hope they become intensely aware of any biases that they carry with them.
It is important to me that the girls come to value all people, even those people that might at first intimidate, or scare or, otherwise make them uncomfortable.
The truth is that as an autistic individual, I make other people uncomfortable because of my mannerisms and how I carry myself. I need to be extra sensitive to the fact that when people make me uncomfortable I am probably judging them unfairly. [00:17:00]
I am aware, however, that some places we must pass through are dangerous and I need to also explain to my daughters that there are places that, unfortunately, one has to navigate with caution. I am hoping that I teach them valuable skills and tolerance… and so much more.
Summer parenting has not been easy and it will not be easy, ever. It will not be easy to go to Girl Scout outings. It will not be easy to go to concerts. And it will not be easy to drive. It certainly won’t be easy to fly — not with two children — but I consider what we’re doing for our daughters to be the most important thing any parent can do.
We are providing them with knowledge about other people and cultures [00:18:00]. We are teaching them about history. We are teaching them about science. We are teaching them about the world in which they live.
We look at birds together. We look at leaves of plants together. And we try to identify the birds and the wildlife, even the insects. We try to learn as we are exploring.
We met some wonderful people from all sorts of backgrounds in Washington, DC, and that was very good for my daughter: to hear a mix of languages, and to see a mix of cultures, and to understand that people are different — but that doesn’t make them necessarily scary.
What makes myself afraid… what makes me afraid [00:19:00] is knowing that an area does have high crime rate. I do worry about places that have gun violence that we must pass through. And I want to change those areas for the better. I told my daughter’s that we’re not driving through a place with bad people. We are driving through a bad place where the people were mistreated and I hope they take that lesson to heart.
Summer parenting is an adventure and it is worth it.
I am sorry that it has interfered with blogging and creating podcast episodes. But by September, when we return for Season 2, the podcast will be weekly. I am looking forward to it. And even before then, I promise to have one or two more episodes posted of The Autistic Me Podcast.
I am Christopher Scott Wyatt. Thank you for listening. [00:20:00]
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