Some Asperger's Books Are Just Idiotic

Cool rain. Wet pavement smell wafting on the ocean breeze.

Marching band booming. Drumbeats. Christmas carols beaming through the air. Steady rain coming down.

The annual Holiday Parade in our small town on Florida's Atlantic coast was rainy. But blessedly cool, and appropriately holiday-feeling.

NJ marched in the parade with his Scout pack. Not only that, he was one of the volunteers who didn't ride on the float - he wanted to walk alongside it and hand out Christmas flyers to the spectators along the route.

Kid loves to play to the crowd. It's kind of counterintuitive. He really enjoys selling and talking with total strangers and making his "spiel."

And he's damn good at it. Like, seriously.

When he sold popcorn for the Cub Scouts at the mall, a woman came up to me after falling victim (er, I mean, being swayed) by his persistent sales pitch. She said: "Is this your kid?" I was like, oh hell, here we go. She says: "He is the best salesman I have ever met, period. And I am being totally serious." She was about 70 years old and fully under his spell.

Now.

If I had read certain books about Aspergian kids, and believed that every word applied to NJ, it's possible we never would have joined the Cub Scouts in the first place.

I remember reading one particularly crappy book that literally said: Asperger's kids don't form friendships. They can't manage the subtle non-verbal communication, blah blah blah.

It didn't say that they had difficulty. It said, they didn't form friendships. Period.

If that's true, then why would we even bother with Cub Scouts? Why even go through the trouble of enrolling him in social group therapy? For that matter, why not just shut him up in his room and let him pursue his bizarre "special interest" whatever that might be (I hear it's supposed to be train schedules, but so far, no luck...)?

Because apparently he has one special interest and he doesn't care about people or anything outside of that.

I still am not sure what his one special interest is. Swimming? Spongebob?

Computer games?

Volunteering to help homeless families with his mom?

Playing "cowboys" on the bed?

Reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid books.

Playing with Legos.

Playing tag with his best friend Darren.

Going fishing.

Walking along the lakeshore behind his mother's house, collecting shells, sticks, rocks and waterlogged coconuts.

One of these, I'm sure, is his "special interest." I am just trying to get him to narrow it down. I wish he would hurry up and start excluding everything else so I could make more sense of him, and really start to pin him down.

You get my point.

He's certainly very focused in on his passions, when he's pursuing them. That's especially true of video games.

But he doesn't have one or even two areas that he pursues at the exclusion of all others.

And he DOES get non-verbal communication. He gets irony. He gets sarcasm. He gets and tells very good jokes. And yes, many of them are made up, and very off the wall... and very funny.

And yet... and yet. I am not in denial. He's an Aspergian.

Despite the huge growth strides he's been making, he still prefers to do his own thing. He still monologues (I think that's his main Aspie trait, actually, which he shares with his grandfather, big time).

And we still love him to pieces because of it, not in spite of it.

This past weekend, as I watched him handing out flyers to strangers along the two-mile parade route, charming them as he went, I didn't see AS. I wasn't thinking about symptoms, or fixes, or diagnoses. I wasn't worried about whether he was following the behavior patters outlined in the books at Barnes & Noble.

I was just drinking in the picture: a strong, outgoing, involved and beautiful seven-year-old Cub Scout doing his daddy very, very proud.

And to think: according to some of the "literature" out there, none of this could have happened.

Yet it did. And I thank God for it.