Being Aspie

The first time I was taken to a psychiatrist, I think that I was about 5. My mom just couldn’t figure out why I wouldn’t sleep, why I had no interest in playmates, why I wouldn’t look at anybody, and why, in general, I was such an odd kid. My mom used to tell me that she would call the doctor late at night or early morning and tell him; “If he won’t sleep, you don’t sleep!” My mom was at first given paregoric (tincture of opium) to give me, which isn’t easy to give a kid, as it tastes something like battery acid mixed with cod liver extract. Eventually, if I put up too much of a fight with the paregoric, mom took to mixing Librium, Valium, or Phenobarbital into chocolate milk or juice in order to get me to sleep. It wasn’t a big jump, since she was already using barbiturates and tranquilizers herself, so while my father and siblings slept normally, mom and son were drugged. This became a relatively common situation throughout my childhood and on into my teens. When I was 8 years old, I was rushed to the emergency room and then on to Intensive Care where I was hospitalized in a coma for barbiturate overdose. Mom said that I took them, but that’s not usually how it worked. Usually she mixed whatever she gave me in a liquid. Either way, I have no recollection beyond what I was told. I survived, but apparently it was close. You would have thought that this would have made a difference, but my mother’s method of chemical parenting remained unchanged.