Sharing Life Experiences With My 4-Year-Old Niece

By Savannah Logsdon-Breakstone, www.crackedmirrorinshalott.wordpress.com

Savannah Logsdon-Breakstone is an Autistic adult with multiple disabilities of varying sorts, from rural northwestern PA. She does disability justice advocacy and activism on both state and national levels. Savannah writes for a number of websites, and maintains her own advocacy blog at http://crackedmirrorinshalott.wordpress.com/. She can also be found on twitter as @nicocoer.

I’m an aunt to a 4-year-old girl who calls me “Aunt Nico,” after my online handle. I’m also an Autistic adult.

I watch my niece, A, on a regular basis. We do a lot of the same things that I remember the aunt who I was close to when I was a child—sharing music, video, and culture, as was appropriate to what I could handle at the time. I had a good relationship with my aunt, particularly as a teen. We were in some ways similar enough that when I was little, my biological father would accidentally call me by her name.

I suppose that the big difference is my passion for some of the things that I share with A. I can spend hours watching My Little Pony or Ruby Gloom with her, both of us singing along to the theme songs at the start of each half hour. I watch and rewatch episodes of shows I like, such as Doctor Who, to try to guess which episodes she’s ready for. (Her favorite Doctor Who episode, by the way, is Partners in Crime. She loves the “baby aliens.”)

For Passover this year, I made a bunch of window clings to visualize parts of the telling of the Exodus story. She liked it so much, I’m planning an entire Haggadah in window clings for next year.

Disability Culture & Acceptance

As I share different things with her, I also try to bring elements of disability culture and acceptance into the media that I share with her. As she gets older, I hope to continue to share those things, especially when in the near future she enters formal schooling and is exposed to less tolerant parts of our culture there. There’s a lot of shame around disability, including Autism, that permeates our culture, but I hope that someday that negativity will no longer be there. I hope that between the work autistics and others with disabilities are doing, and the influence that teaching acceptance has on the children in our lives, we will see that future.

There are also the things that are more difficult for me than might be for non-autistic aunts. For example, I sometimes find certain types of touch or noise very overstimulating. A has learned to step back and sit near me rather than practically on top of me at those times, and that that space doesn’t mean I love her any less. It’s just that my brain works differently so that it hurts sometimes when she’s too loud or too “touch-y.”

Social Interaction

In the past few months, A has started to develop skills in social interactions that I’m not great at to this day—and I’m 21 years older! I’ve adapted some coping skills for some of the areas that I struggle with, but there’s still something unfamiliar in watching her skills develop, in anticipating the day when her skills eventually surpass my own. I don’t expect that for years yet, but it is still an unsettling thing to watch her skills develop at a pace that seems fast to me.

That’s not to say that unsettling or unfamiliar is a bad thing, as uncomfortable as I find those feelings. As someone who is unsettled by unfamiliarity fairly easily, I spend a lot of days learning to live with those sorts of feelings. When it’s in the context of “Auntie-ness,” I talk to other aunts (and sometimes mothers!) both on and off the Autism spectrum. There’s a lot of good advice that can come from talking to or reading about the experiences of others in similar situations, as I imagine a lot of you know. I also go over developmental psychology with other friends, each of us noting where the children in our lives depart from our own developmental trajectories. It’s beautiful to me, how diverse we all are.

I think A is learning about that beauty, too. She doesn’t shame me for flapping or rocking, and has even explained that her Aunt Nico is happy or nervous to people who don’t understand. She’s also fairly accepting of differences in her friends—that they have different needs. It gives me hope, and each day I feel blessed to be an aunt—even when it’s a harder day.

Photo: Courtesy of Savannah Logsdon-Breakstone
Published: May 29, 2013