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I am still unpacking some very weird shit that happened in my family of origin (highly educated, quite left politically, not the sort of people you’d outwardly guess). It’s clear in retrospect that they (particularly my mother) thought there was something very wrong with me, and back then (1980-ish) an #ActuallyAutistic diagnosis generally made things worse.
During a conflict that led to me being estranged from my family of origin, in 2010, my mother described how at first I was this perfect baby. Utterly perfect. (Weird words; by then I’d had one baby and step-parented, then adopted, a toddler, and they were and are both awesome people. But not “perfect”.) And then something *malevolent* attacked me, which, after a lot of time and work I eventually managed to “overcome” it (reality: a combination of masking and getting old enough to order my life in a useful way for my still very much #ActuallyAutistic self).
This struck me as very strange from the start, but I would later read about the “changeling” folklore that existed throughout much of Europe, and its likely connection to neurodivergent and especially autistic babies, and had honest-to-God chills for a bit. Feeling like I had somehow dodged a bullet.
I don’t know how common this sort of viewpoint was among parents who believed (possibly retrospectively, as a result of later childhood diagnosis) they’d had an autistic baby around that time, but that it happened *at all*, long after all that folklore passed into just plain lore, is extremely disturbing.
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