I was diagnosed as psychotic at the age of 2 in 1965 when autism was known as Childhood Psychosis. I grew up in the 60s and 70s. We had KFC and my father had no shame of taking me in there to get our dinner for the night. But the franchises really hadn’t taken off until the mid-late 70s in Australia. By then I was in late childhood. I swung between being manic, feral and echolalic, and being solitary, highly self protective and silent. At home I threw myself back in the arm chair for hours on end, traced and retraced the wallpaper patterns with my hands with OCD driving me to make the ‘perfect repetition intervals’ or ‘die’, I tapped all the corners, catapulted objects down the stairs to watch 3D come to live in my 2D visual world. I jumped on all the beds singing to myself, spun everything and myself, climbed doors and stood on the tables, walked along the top of the sofa, swung in the chairs, chanted, sang, recited, or hid whilst spying on people as a people watcher. So, as such, I never got taken to a restaurant until I was 13.

It wasn’t my family who then took me. It was a ‘foster mother’. I had learned to stab meat with a fork and raise the entire thing to my mouth but I ate all vegetables with my fingers and scooped mash up with my hand. At school we didn’t have a cafeteria like in the UK. It was all lunches from home (and with an alcoholic mother that wasn’t going to happen), lunch orders that arrived in bags if you had the ability or parent to write on the bag for you so the shopkeeper could fill the order (didn’t have that either), or, as in my case, having the script of ‘five o’ chips, five o’ cakes’ I could get 10 cents worth of chips and potato cakes. That was my school lunch for 7 years and it never came with cutlery or a place at any dinner table.

When I was 2-4 my grandparents (who lived in our shed) would hand feed me with raisins, biscuits and tea to encourage me to interact, trust and snuggle up (and it worked :-). Down the road at Mrs C’s until age 3-4, I was hand fed with squid and other Italian cooking. In our house, from 3-7, I’d lived on fruit from the fruit trees, drinking tubs of honey and from opened tins of sweetened condensed milk plus celery sticks and lettuce leaves given to the rabbit, biscuits given to the dog, and the seed in the aviary. At my father’s car yard I was given pies, sausage rolls, pasties, cakes and icecream or he’s take me to KFC where we bought the night’s dinner (yay Dad, although I’m gluten and casein intolerant 😉 My mother tried to teach me cutlery when I was 3 and, in my memory, ended up jabbing me in frustration with the fork when I couldn’t learn (yes, she had as many or more challenges than me).

At 8-10 at our next house, I ate from the pantry, mostly biscuits, popcorn, dried break, dry crackers, then the fridge for ice cream and from fruit trees down the lane ways. I found I could shop-eat at the supermarket and would go there to have icing raids before they chased me out. I was introduced back to whole meals on a plate at a table when I was 9-11 years old. So freaked out by the exposure of sitting with and before others, so freaked out by complying with putting THEIR food into MY body, I spent age 9-11 vomiting it back up in the bathroom to get it out of myself and undo this feeling of ‘rape’ (that’s Exposure Anxiety for you). Then my family mirrored the entire living room wall and I’d take my plate and go eat with my reflection, watching TV in the mirror as I ate with my hands, but at least we’d graduated, I was eating from a plate. I did learn to stab meat and raise the whole thing to my mouth, but scooping with a fork was not working and picking up each vegetable to stick it onto the fork to then bring it to my mouth seemed so tedious and futile that it distracted from enjoying the food at all. So I continued to eat my vegetables with my fingers and scoop mash into my mouth with my hand. My family didn’t mind. I was eating.

When I was around 8-12, my parents were friends with people who wanted to ‘go out for a meal’. My older brother could go. He wasn’t feral. But what to do with Moi? They would go out but leave me home… at first with a babysitter, but later just on my own in the house. I was not considered able/acceptable to be included as they were.

When strangers in cafes and restaurants freak out, they trap kids like I was at home, losing skills we might otherwise have been challenged to learn. Sure, they’ve gone out for a peaceful, lovely time. So if an autie gives you a free show, enjoy the diversity. People pay good money for that level of entertainment. OK, so its your world too. Yeah, but you’ve probably spent your whole life enjoying that privilege. Just maybe, you can afford a little generosity now and then in our crowded, conformist, judgmental, hierarchical world.

Donna Williams, BA Hons, Dip Ed.
Author, artist, singer-songwriter, screenwriter.
Autism consultant and public speaker.
http://www.donnawilliams.net

I acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the Traditional Owners of this country throughout Australia, and their connection to land and community.