divergify

Pride, politics, and disability in ABQ today.

Photos 1-4: I take Ava to Pride every year for two main reasons. It's important for her to see a diversity of families and to learn her role in supporting marginalized communities. She was torn between wanting to march with candidates like (who has been helping our friends in Afghanistan) and just enjoying the parade. Her solution? March in elections years; watch on odd years. She couldn't bear the thought of anti-LGBTQ+ rights candidates being elected (a strong sense of social justice is a common autistic/gifted trait). I don't know how she knew when mid-terms are. Maybe when your mom is a policy wonk, you just absorb this info by osmosis 🤓 After years of attending protests, she knew to request poster board to make her own signs 😂

Photo 5-6: Prepping for a march as a disabled mom with a disabled kid can be a lot. Here's a photo of our setup (taken by the Amazon float crew). We bring a wagon that serves as a space for Ava to feel safe and calm when the world becomes overwhelming and a seat for when my joints hurt or my blood pressure drops. Ava's bag includes a book to make wait times bearable (current read: Small Town Pride from our local indie bookstore ), quiet headphones for noise reduction, snacks, and fidgets. My bag includes a ridiculous amount of water, liquid IV, braces, portable fans, and other first aid items for pain and potential injuries. However, the goal is to prevent rather than respond to incidents - talked to Ava last night about what to expect, wore comfortable shoes and clothes, stayed hydrated, took inflammation reducer ahead of time, stuck to safe foods. No service dog because of the intense heat today (maybe not the safest decision!)

Photo 7: Pride on historic Route 66

Photo 8: Bathroom mirror selfie of an outfit I bought from Target specifically for Pride because I'm a basic straight white woman *Ally(TM)*

Ava made a video explaining to the IEP team why she should skip 2nd grade, and they agreed to accelerate her to third. Welcome to the class of 2032!

Summertime means feeling good because I can soak my joints in the hot tub and do low-impact cardio and core-strenthening exercises in the pool. Hot disabled girl summer has officially begun.

My favorite part of Ava's abstract for her science fair

Tuesday 8:00 pm - Ava goes to bed devastated because she realizes she has chosen an overambitious project and procrastinated too much to finish in time for the science fair

Tuesday 9:00 pm - I catch her out of bed resuming her project experiment. She begs me to let her stay up and she promises she'll work hard to finish in time. As a fellow ADHDer, I can't help but relate so I relent.

Tuesday 11:00 pm - Ava goes back to bed after working on her project for 2 additional hours.

Wednesday 5:30 pm - 10:30 pm - Ava continues to hyperfocus on her project, including writing a 5-page paper

Thursday 6:00 am - 7:00 am - Ava frantically puts finishing touches on her project.

Thursday 7:15 am - Ava is the first to submit her project to the science fair in the whole school.

Thursday 7:00 pm - Ava wins first place.

And that's a case study in twice exceptionalism.

"There's a rabbit in the river!" 🐇🌊 What do you do as an Autistic or parent of an Autistic when you've prepped for an activity ✔️ in order to limit surprises and things don't go as planned? 🚫 This was the Santa Fe River beside our riverside trail 🏜😂 Luckily, Ava was mostly looking forward to going on a walk with Mochi 🐈 and Hildie 🐕‍🦺 while I was the one more disappointed with our waterfront.

Meet Mochi - Ava's prescribed emotional support animal for autism. Mochi has helped Ava learn incredible coping skills, to pay attention to body language, to know that she is worthy of love and affection.

As a bonus, its been cool to see Ava take on consistent responsibilities to care for Mochi.

What are your questions about emotional support animals?

If you have an ESA, what do you wish others knew?

When you're an Autistic single mom of an Autistic daughter👩‍👧, you gotta get creative 🦸‍♀️ Silicon Valley Comic Con would have been expensive 💸 and a very overwhelming sensory experience for 3-year-old Ava (and mom), but she has a super hero special interest 🤓 Instead of getting event tickets, I researched online and found the times and locations of photo-op meet ups taking place just outside the venue 📸 Ava got to play with her favorite heroes outdoors, even showing off her abs to the Amazons to prove she's one of them 💪 😂🥰 Who says Autistics lack imagination? 🙄 and when she inevitably did get overwhelmed, it was totally safe to lie down on the spot or run a short distance away 🏃‍♀️

Is your local police department or another public agency using the puzzle piece in an campaign this April? Feel free to borrow from what I just wrote to one near my hometown (I also tagged city leadership in that post):

As an Autistic mother of an autistic child, I'm pained to see [City] Police Department promoting the puzzle piece to "support autism awareness."

Many autistics find this symbol to be personally hurtful and harmful to our community. Research from the National Institutes of Health substantiates our concern - most people (including neurotypicals) "explicitly associated puzzle pieces, even generic puzzle pieces, with incompleteness, imperfection, and oddity."

I'm sure this was not your intention, and perhaps you coordinated with an organization claiming expertise on this matter (but maybe lacking actual autistic leadership). However, information about how the autistic community feels about the puzzle piece is easily found with an internet search. In the future, please center the perspectives of actually disabled individuals when engaging in disability awareness rather than the voices of abled people who are disability-adjacent.

So you know for next April's campaign, we generally prefer:
- gold, red, or rainbow infinity symbols to represent autism over the puzzle piece
- the term "acceptance" over "awareness"
- meaningful systems change to improve our health and safety over awareness patch fundraisers. I'd be happy to talk to your department about what that might look like.

NIH research source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6085079/ #!po=0.806452

Getting the support that neurodivergents deserve and are legally entitled to is HARD. Systemic ableism is real, and we'll never stop fighting. But today, we celebrate 🎉

Nothing about us without us.

What kind of challenges have you faced in getting health care or accommodations?

Stereotypes about autism prevented me from getting the diagnosis and support I needed as a child and young adult. Most autism research is based on how it presents in young, white boys, but autism is a spectrum of diversity. This is one of the many reasons why "Lighting It Up Blue" for is so harmful and offensive - blue was chosen to represent autism as a boy's disorder because more autistic boys are privileged with a diagnosis.