Brain

During pregnancy, the brain of the expecting person shrinks about 5%, and this loss of volume remains for the first couple of years after birth. It´s not meaningless, though. The pregnancy hormones rewire the brain and cause neurological pruning to make it more attuned to a baby´s needs, and learning processes regarding baby-related objects and concepts are enhanced. I wonder how autistic brains undergo these changes. After all, an autistic brain retains a good chunk of it´s pre-pruning connections (the initial neurological pruning in children, which integrates the function systems of the brain and streamlines the thinking and learning processes, happens in neurotypical children between the ages 2-10) and remains more connected throughout life. This was what I was thinking about when I walked to the grocery store carrying a bag of trash I had forgotten to toss in the bins. I´m so preoccupied with dreaming about parenthood and being horrified I´ll be denied from that chance that I took a trash bag for a scenic walk. Can you imagine? Baby brain before even being pregnant!

If I were to become a single parent, I would spend the next several years in a brain fog, but it would be worth it. I wouldn´t be alone: I have the support of autism assistance services to keep an eye on my well-being and mental resources for being a good parent; I have a good psychotherapist; and there are support systems for single parents so I could keep up with my gym and pool habits and have someone look after my chickadee when I´m working out. I would get to watch my child grow. I would get to teach it the names of colors and rocks and plants and animals and what is and isn´t safe to do. I would teach it to swim, in the kiddie pool at first, and slowly in the deep pool and finally in natural waters, teaching it how to deal with sudden cramps, how to enter and exit a murky body of water safely, how to stay alive and afloat in all conditions. We could finger-paint with beet roots and blueberries at first, and gradually move on to color pencils and aquarels, acrylics and oils and graphite and coal. I would spend sleepless nights when it would be sick. My anxiety would manifest in relation to the child´s well-being, waxing and waning, now circling around the king or queen of my existence as it used to circle around the wormhole of my life-long losses. I´m not expecting parenthood to be a miracle fix for my life – I expect it to be parenthood. I would be the same person as I was before, and yet, somewhat altered, somewhat transformed by the life that was formed inside my body, the blood we shared, the dreams we dreamt together when I had two hearts inside me instead of one.

Many things are necessary for a child to grow up with a healthy brain. This can´t always be guaranteed, and what constitutes as a healthy brain is defined by society that says that mine, for example, is not. My brain is so unhealthy and filthy by society´s standards that I can´t donate gametes, and my capacity and right to become a parent is being doubted and scrutinized. This society considers my parents to be exemplary citizens with healthy brains, because they never sought out therapy, they never sought out help, they took all their past pain out on their own children, and I have been paying my whole life for that. The world is sure funny. But I know better and I know to be better. I haven´t forgotten how awful it felt to be treated unjustly by my parents. I´d never do the same to my child, and that is one thing the child will need to grow up with a healthy brain. I also eat fatty fish twice a week, and eat cold-pressed seed oils and nuts daily to ensure I have the right types of fatty acids in my system to maintain my cardiovascular health as well as the healthy brain development of my future dream baby. I supplement with vitamins and creatine. But at the end of the day, it will be up to chance whether my child is born autistic like me, or neurotypical. I´d love it either way. Society would love it more if it were neurotypical. But an autistic brain is a healthy brain. It´s just different.

My anxiety was sky-high earlier today. As rain was whipping the windows, I was tormented by all things that could go wrong, past regrets about trusting the wrong people, the wrong doctors, choosing to tend to my ex-partner instead of tending to a child; these hurtful thoughts were circling me like the indignant desert birds in Yeats´ ”The Second Coming”, and I realized that I was way too overwhelmed to think clearly, so I took a little nap instead. When I woke up, the golden evening sun had filled the room and I was filled with a deep, lovely peace. It felt as if someone had been here and left a pleasant scent in the air; every object in the apartment seemed to be in its right place and waiting calmly and happily to be able to serve a new little lord or lady crawling and teething and tasting and using them to support their effort to stand up on their two feet. What has been ailing me ever since I was a teenager hasn´t been depression; it´s been loss and grief over the life I had inside me and lost. But I can have another life inside me, one that won´t end before birth, one I can nurture and protect into adulthood and beyond. The medical system hasn´t listened to me. It hasn´t helped me. And I am done with it. I don´t need it for anything else than my continued access to psychotherapy and support systems, and if the employability clinic doctors´ first instinct is to threaten me with the loss of these, it truly is a sign of her own dysfunction, not mine. And considering the shape of trans healthcare in this country, it is much wiser for me to leave that project be up until I have had the baby and completed my PhD. It will be very hard for them to deny me a diagnosis after I have become an expert on their own field, albeit from an auxiliary scientific background.

But: my entry into a PhD programme is not guaranteed and not solely dependent on my own efforts. I need something else to show I am worth parenthood. I take a step outside the frustration of having to prove myself when cis-het people get pregnant and have babies in the most upsetting and disgusting situations all the time, but it is what it is. Bower birds build elaborate nests to attract partners. Blackbirds sing and flash their bright orange eyelids and legs contrasted with the depths of the psychedelic patterns in their UV-reactive feathers that us humans can only perceive as a glossy jet black. What do I do to attract the medical system´s attention? There´s this blog, sure; it does take a lot of brainpower to be able to publish in a foreign language with a consistent schedule; but the fertility doctors want a cushy story, they want me to be someone who has been put through pain but who has persevered, which is true, but they don´t want me to be a survivor of my own parents, they want me to have forgiven them and to be close with them because unfortunately, victims of familial abuse are not given the same rights to a good life as the rest of the people are. The silence with which my family has protected itself will spell my sterility if the discussion ever goes towards that direction. So this blog is not what they need to see about me, even though I won´t go through any effort to conceal the truth. People don´t want to see it or hear it anyway. I´ve told so many people, and all of them have seemed to just… Forget. Such is the power of taboo.

In order to increase my chances of being seen as someone worthy of parenthood, I knew I would have to keep my mind open and see what kinds of seeds would be planted while I slept. Earlier today I grabbed my color pens and my aquarels, both of horridly bad quality, and painted a quick little scene of a procession crossing the desert in a sand storm. There are three figures in the troupe, their details and faces concealed by the flying sand. There´s a man on horseback, dressed in reds, the horse as red as its tack is; a dog, its fur the color of sun, of citruses, of happy and bright things, with sharp needle-like teeth and two feathery wings on its back – not a beautiful and noble type of dog, but one of those mutts who seem mis-matched and odd, cute and hideous at the same time; and finally, a figure in the shape of a woman sitting on the hump of a dromedar, wearing comfortable pants and a ribbon that runs across the shoulder and around the waist, and to which a crown is attached. The crown is that of a dutchess, but the figure is not a woman at all: ”Dutchess” is his title, and he wears all the customary dinkadoinks that come with it, but the crown he wears around his waist instead of on his head as it gives him a ghastly headache otherwise. Wouldn´t they sound like a lovely group of companions to make their way across the pages of a children´s book? My vision of them is still blurry and concealed, just as the picture is, the air still full of grating particles of sand. But no storm lasts forever. Eventually it will settle and the air will become clear. Eventually I will see them and report of their goings-on and maybe, just maybe, I´ll be able to do it in a style that´s fit for a children´s book that may bring joy and entertainment to many, hopefully my child along them.

This is what I know of the characters. They belong to a group that is displaced and not well-liked by many. They are underdogs of the world they live in, and many would not even consider lending them a helping hand, but not everyone in their world thinks the same. They have friends, and an everlasting hope that one day they may be seen as everyone else. They are seeking for a home to settle and make a peaceful living in. On their journeys, they offer help to others and get helped in exchange. Some people they deal with are not very nice, but some are. I do not think that children´s literature, especially that aimed to slightly older children, has to present the world as a place free of conflict and bad things. If I become a parent, there´s a chance that my child will be bullied for having a single trans parent. But the question is – how to live a life of dignity and happiness in a world that to a great degree doesn´t agree with you even when it´s not openly hostile, which it also can be? How can you keep your spirits up and find meaning in a world that vilifies and belittles you? How can you stop crying and moping when the world really sucks and get up and go for a walk in the neighborhood and smell the scent of apples ripening in the apple trees? That is what it means to be human: to hold onto your humanity even if the rest of the world denies that you have it.

The desert is crossed one step at a time, and I need the dignity and patience of a dromedar. Perhaps, perhaps as soon as this fall, my humpy-bump may start to grow; if all goes well; if all goes very very well.