Autism Vox

Demeter and the Autism Mother

by Kristina Chew, PhD on May 23rd, 2007

Sunday was graduation at the college where I teach and with grades turned in, I’ve been trying to catch up with various unfinished things—-one being the questions that Mom-NOS sent me over a month ago as part of the Interview Meme. I responded to one question, “where would you choose to live,” here. Another has been on my mind for some time:

You use a lot of mythology as metaphor in your writing. Which figure from mythology could we use to gain greater insight into who you are?

There is Demeter, goddess of agriculture, whose maiden daughter Persephone is abducted while dancing in a meadow by Hades, and taken down into the Underworld. Demeter—you can read an ancient account in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter—distraught, mourns and all the crops and plants die. She finally learns where her daughter is and goes down to Hades to bring her back, only to discover that, because Persephone has eaten a few seeds of a pomegranate, her daughter can only return to the land of the living with her mother for half the year, and must reside in the Underworld the other half of the year.

Even just a few months ago I thought this myth captured what it feels like to be the mother of an autistic child.—thought that Demeter could be seen as a sort of archetypal autism mother. What are we but mothers searching, seeking, for our children, who—lacking speech, or again and again caught up in terrible behavior squall tantrums—seem as if “lost” to us? When our kids are struggling does it not feel as if we are living in some blighted land where no green thing grows, and no bird sings?

I have shyed away some from this comparison. I do not see myself as a mother on a mission to find a “lost” child—as if my autistic child were a sort of changeling, and autism as something I have to pull my child out of. Charlie has autism, and with that diagnosis comes (in him) a particular neurological make-up (some features of which I see myself reflected in), and this can lead to Charlie having unexpected reactions to sounds or sights or other sensory data. Because Charlie’s language is limited in quantity and because his way of using words does not automatically and obviously communicate his meaning (Charlie says “Mommy stairs” and that can mean I am to go up stairs, or downstairs, or just get out of the room)—–because of all of these, it is particularly difficult to get out his meaning to me, with the result that he sometimes (particularly in the past) used to use every part of his body to say how he felt. At such moments, a parent can feel they have indeed “lost” their child and just to bring her or him back to a general state of calmness seems all that is wanted. At such moments, Demeter grieving, Demeter searching for Persephone everywhere, Demeter keeping the faith was how I felt.

This is less and less so now; now, no matter what the season—spring and summer when Persephone is with her mother on earth, or autumn and winter when she is in the Underworld and the Queen of Hades—-no matter Charlie’s mood or feeling, I feel very much in step with Charlie. I understand that you cannot have spring and summer without the freeze of winter, without the fall, “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” I see the need for the seasons in Charlie, for spring-bright smiles, the blasts of winder storm unhappiness, and all kinds of days inbetween.

So Demeter is no longer the mythological figure I would explain myself by.

There is Antigone who stands up to King Creon and stands by her burial of her brother in Sophocles’ play. There is Penelope, who waits at home in Ithaca for ten years while her husband Odysseus is fighting the Trojan War in Homer’s Iliad, and ten more years as he journeys home in the Odyssey. There is Orpheus………… there is Thetis, the nymph who is Achilles’ mother…..

More about Thetis tomorrow.

And I think I am going to have to take Charlie to this exhibit, Gods, Myths and Mortals: Discover Ancient Greece at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan.

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POSTED IN: Classics, Literature, Myth, Parenting, Poetry