When I was 9 my younger brother was 3. Whilst I had lots of stored language I had just began to acquire functional communication. He had 6 words, none of which were understood outside of the house. We made a great pair, being surreal, kinesthetic, sensory and a pair of buzz junkies. Just as I had done with objects, my play with my younger brother involved spinning him and posting him upside down down the stairs, then posting myself. I’d fall into bushes (I liked bushes to catch me because I liked to fall through space) and jump on all the beds (often singing or reciting), and soon he was a recruit in the world of monkey see monkey do. We binged the biscuits together, were given the zinc, C and multivitamin-minerals together (he wasn’t growing and it was innovative in 1972 to try supplements on kids but it paid off). We’d pull the heads, torsos and legs off his cowboys and line them all up, color coded then assemble them to do this another ten times. We’d stack all his letter blocks and later categorise them all for shape. We’d play ‘attack attack boom’ which involved saying this over and over about 100 times in turn as we threw plastic soldiers into piles. He’d grab my special objects and run, throwing them into the swimming pool ad nauseum, amused to watch me chase and fetch objects like a dog. He turned around what had been a choice solitude and pursued me like a fan, teaching me to hide and in that, be aware of him. And finally as the violence of the house threatened him, I would find him and hide him in the wardrobe, keeping him safe as my safe object, and here I learned responsibility and compassion. By the time I was 11 and he was 5 this sibling relationship had helped me enormously.

But in my early years, sibling experience was very different. My older brother was 16 months my senior. He had been intrigued by a sister who appeared deaf and spent her time with textures and sounds. Until he was six, he valued me and saw me as a potential friend and a scapegoat for his own natural childhood antics. He’d take my limp wrists and flap them, then smack me in the face with them for a laugh, always amused at my incapacity to learn. He’d try and stir me into reactions.

But by the time he was five, my echolalia and echopraxia was doing his head in and he would scream ‘stop copying me’ and try and tune me out. I never bit him, punched him, plapped him or scratched him. That was all reserved for myself, usually weekly, sometimes daily, until around age 11 when it finally became directed at others.
By the time I was 5 and my older brother’s first friend had asked ‘what’s wrong with your sister, is she one of them spastics’, our siblingship was on a rocky decline into mutual alienation, disatisfaction and disintegration. I became something potentially contagious, something to make distance from. I understand its hard to play badminton with someone who has the shuttle in their mouth and is bouncing a racket on their head as they walk circles around a swimming pool. It’s hard to play monopoly with someone who grabs the cards and wants to keep all the colors together whilst they fill their mouth with houses and hotels and only copy your move but can’t understand their own. When I was 9-11 years old ‘go play with your sister didn’t work for him’ in spite of my mother’s best efforts to break his social isolation and encourage him to have social experiences with me. It just wasn’t gonna happen even if they lined the living room wall floor to ceiling with mirror tiles to get me in there and eat dinner with myself. By age 13 he and I were at outright war and a makeshift foster family took over my socialising. By age 15 and a frozen chicken thrown at his head with him retaliating with folding my head into the ironing board stand, I was on my way out that door permanently.

I have no regrets. No glorification of the 5-15 years I was endured by my brothers, for good or bad, but I’ve no doubts that non-autistic children walk some very difficult lines in loving and relating to an autistic sibling. Some kids with autism are so persistently violent and solitary that no amount of understanding can bridge that, but shame and hatred from either side of the divide help nobodies development.

This video honors the importance of good sibling relationships from both sides of the autistic divide.

… Donna Williams

autistic author, artist

http://www.donnawilliams.net