Mary was a beautiful baby, sweet and affectionate, but by the time she’s three she’s turned difficult and strange, with fey moods and a stubborn mouth that screams and bites but never says mama. But her mother’s well-used to hard work with little thanks, and when the village gossips wag their tongues she just shrugs, and pulls her difficult child away from their precious, perfect blossoms, before the bites draw blood. Mary’s mother doesn’t drown her in a bucket of saltwater, and she doesn’t take up the silver knife the wife of the village priest leaves out for her one Sunday brunch.
She gives her daughter yarn, instead, and instead of a rowan stake through her inhuman heart she gives her a child’s first loom, oak and ash. She lets her vicious, uncooperative fairy daughter entertain herself with games of her own devising, in as much peace and comfort as either of them can manage.
Mary grows up strangely, as a strange child would, learning everything in all the wrong order, and biting a great deal more than she should. But she also learns to weave, and takes to it with a grand passion. Soon enough she knows more than her mother–which isn’t all that much–and is striking out into unknown territory, turning out odd new knots and weaves, patterns as complex as spiderwebs and spellrings.
“Aren’t you clever,” her mother says, of her work, and leaves her to her wool and flax and whatnot. Mary’s not biting anymore, and she smiles more than she frowns, and that’s about as much, her mother figures, as anyone should hope for from their child.
Mary still cries sometimes, when the other girls reject her for her strange graces, her odd slow way of talking, her restless reaching fluttering hands that have learned to spin but never to settle. The other girls call her freak, witchblood, hobgoblin.
“I don’t remember girls being quite so stupid when I was that age,” her mother says, brushing Mary’s hair smooth and steady like they’ve both learned to enjoy, smooth as a skein of silk. “Time was, you knew not to insult anyone you might need to flatter later. ‘Specially when you don’t know if they’re going to grow wings or horns or whatnot. Serve ‘em all right if you ever figure out curses.”
“I want to go back,” Mary says. “I want to go home, to where I came from, where there’s people like me. If I’m a fairy’s child I should be in fairyland, and no one would call me a freak.”
“Aye, well, I’d miss you though,” her mother says. “And I expect there’s stupid folk everywhere, even in fairyland. Cruel folk, too. You just have to make the best of things where you are, being my child instead.”
Mary learns to read well enough, in between the weaving, especially when her mother tracks down the traveling booktraders and comes home with slim, precious manuals on dyes and stains and mordants, on pigments and patterns, diagrams too arcane for her own eyes but which make her daughter’s eyes shine.
“We need an herb garden,” her daughter says, hands busy, flipping from page to page, pulling on her hair, twisting in her skirt, itching for a project. “Yarrow, and madder, and woad and weld…”
“Well, start digging,” her mother says. “Won’t do you a harm to get out of the house now’n then.”
Mary doesn’t like dirt but she’s learned determination well enough from her mother. She digs and digs, and plants what she’s given, and the first year doesn’t turn out so well but the second’s better, and by the third a cauldron’s always simmering something over the fire, and Mary’s taking in orders from girls five years older or more, turning out vivid bolts and spools and skeins of red and gold and blue, restless fingers dancing like they’ve summoned down the rainbow. Her mother figures she probably has.
“Just as well you never got the hang of curses,” she says, admiring her bright new skirts. “I like this sort of trick a lot better.”
Mary smiles, rocking back and forth on her heels, fingers already fluttering to find the next project.
She finally grows up tall and fair, if a bit stooped and squinty, and time and age seem to calm her unhappy mouth about as well as it does for human children. Word gets around she never lies or breaks a bargain, and if the first seems odd for a fairy’s child then the second one seems fit enough. The undyed stacks of taken orders grow taller, the dyed lots of filled orders grow brighter, the loom in the corner for Mary’s own creations grows stranger and more complex. Mary’s hands callus just like her mother’s, become as strong and tough and smooth as the oak and ash of her needles and frames, though they never fall still.
“Do you ever wonder what your real daughter would be like?” the priest’s wife asks, once.
Mary’s mother snorts. “She wouldn’t be worth a damn at weaving,” she says. “Lord knows I never was. No, I’ll keep what I’ve been given and thank the givers kindly. It was a fair enough trade for me. Good day, ma’am.”
Mary brings her mother sweet chamomile tea, that night, and a warm shawl in all the colors of a garden, and a hairbrush. In the morning, the priest’s son comes round, with payment for his mother’s pretty new dress and a shy smile just for Mary. He thinks her hair is nice, and her hands are even nicer, vibrant in their strength and skill and endless motion.
Blogger Bunmi Laditan sent her 10-year-old’s school a clear message.
“Hello Maya’s teachers,
Maya will be drastically reducing the amount of homework she does this year. She’s been very stressed and is starting to have physical symptoms such as chest pain and waking up at 4 a.m. worrying about her school workload.
She’s not behind academically and very much enjoys school. We consulted with a tutor and a therapist suggested we lighten her workload. Doing 2-3 hours of homework after getting home at 4:30 is leaving little time for her to just be a child and enjoy family time and we’d like to avoid her sinking into a depression over this.”
A++++ parenting 💜
I’ve talked with a whole cadre of child therapists and psychiatrists about this very issue. There islittleconclusive evidence that homework significantly improves elementary school children’s grades, understanding of subjects, or facility with various operations, processes, etc. However, plenty of evidence suggests that ever-increasing amounts of homework for young children lead to stress, anxiety, emotional fatigue, resistance toward academics in general, lack of leisure time to build social/interpersonal skills, and poorer family relations. (My kids were doing about 3 hours a week IN KINDERGARTEN, at age 5 – so that’s ½ hour every night, after a 6.5 hour school day, or else saving it up for long slogs over the weekend, even more disruptive. And that wasn’t including reading practice!)
We have stopped doing homework altogether with my 7 year old as a result of severe anxiety/depression and a learning disability. She had gotten to a place where she had so little self confidence and truly believed that she was stupid and worthless, not just because of homework of course – but every time we tried to sit down to do homework with her, it’d end in tears with her really vehemently berating herself, and no amount of encouragement could ameliorate the damage done. Now, granted, she’s got other things going on besides just an overload of school work. But in NO WAY did the homework help her, either academically or emotionally.
No little kid should have to spend an hour or more each night getting through homework. Now, my deal with Siena is that if she wants to give her homework a shot, I will absolutely help her if she wishes for help, but I no longer force her to complete all of it or to work on it for some set length of time before finally throwing in the towel.
Guess what? With the pressure taken off, she’s actually doing MORE independent work now, purely out of the desire to learn and practice, than she ever was before we’d decided with her therapy team and school that homework was just not a thing this kid could handle.
Luckily for my older daughter my school’s 3rd-grade team decided to hand out homework only 3x/week, and the sheets take no more than 15-20 minutes to complete. That is totally reasonable for 8-9 year olds!
Anyway tl;dr just because the school system may require it sure as shit doesn’t mean parents can’t, or shouldn’t, fight it. Do what’s right for your kid, and above all, let them be kids.
I eventually stopped doing homework because I was overwhelmed by it.
There was an article just the other day in the local paper about a primary school that’s abolishing homework! You can read it here (autoplay video, gives you a few seconds to stop it).
As a teacher the only “homework” my students get is the work they don’t finish in class. Assigning homework for work’s sake is the dumbest thing a teacher can do
I think part of the issue is not considering homework time as work. Like, 10 year olds shouldn’t be doing 10 hour days, and that’s pretty well recognised. But 7 hours in school, plus 3 hours at home? that’s fine/sarcasm
Obviously with older students they need to be writing essays on their own at home and so on, but making 7 year olds do maths practice at home isn’t going to help anything. If they didn’t grasp in it lessons, then they’re not likely to figure it out on their own at home.
I was really lucky. My primary school only assigned homework in year 6 (10-11 years) and it was supposed to be 10 minutes a night max. My secondary school had a 20 mins per subject rule, no more than 4 subjects a night, no homework to be due the next day policy, and least in the first few years (up to 14-15 or so). And no homework over school holidays. Your week off was supposed to be actually off, not doing schoolwork. Kids need breaks.
Is “I’m not actually a person, I’m just something that can pretend to be one for short periods of time, and I’m terrified that one person in particular is about to figure it out” relatable? I feel like that might be relatable.
I’ve heard some autistic people say they wouldn’t take a cure for things like stimming and special interests but they would take a cure for going nonverbal or for sensory overload. I wouldn’t take a cure for going nonverbal anymore than I would install an app that made it so I could never turn my computer off, never turn my notifications off, and never log out of any of my social media accounts. When languages is as intense and complicated and multifaceted and consuming as it is to me sometimes you sometimes need breaks. And the intense way I experience language is one of my favorite things. Also, being nonverbal can just be wonderful because it can be my brain going into a state that is really clarifying and freeing. I’m having trouble explaining my relationship with language here, but I kind of explained. I also do not want to cure my sensory overload. Any more than I would want to cure myself of the ability to experience sadness. Sometimes one can experience sadness or overload in a good way. Doesn’t mean I seek those things out all the time. I am lucky that I don’t get sensory overloaded a lot lately. Overload is a necessary part of the way I experience the sensory world, though I am glad I’ve gotten less overloady over time, and I love the way I experience the sensory world. I think maybe confusion is too. Being unable to talk can sometimes be inconvenient, but I actually really want to do it more. I have been doing it less which has been impairing my ability to get myself together enough to communicate in a more deliberate less autopilot way. Not that my autopilot communication is completely non-communicative or completely out of my control, not at all, but it seems like every time therapeople think they are helping me communicate more and that they have been successful they have actually really messed up my ability to like care about what the patterns of words I am spouting mean beyond like not doing the patterns wrong and making people mad or etcetera or to care whether I understand what’s going on or to like do all of the steps involved in having a specific idea you want to communicate and realizing that you can have a specific idea you want to communicate and realizing that you do have a specific idea you want to communicate and realizing that that matters and realizing that you can do something about that and realizing that you can communicate it and realizing that you can communicate it by deciding to communicate it instead of by like making patterns at people and hoping that it falls out in the patterns or by hoping someone at some point prompts you right or guesses or that information somehow gets from your head to their head through patterns and magic. And then after you realize you can communicate it by deciding to communicate it you have to know how to decide to communicate it and how to decide how to figure out how to communicate it and then you have to decide to communicate it and decide to figure out how to communicate it and then you have to figure out how to communicate it and decide to communicate it again. All of these can be complicated and hard and scary and feel fake or like something you should just give up on. Thinking that you can just decide to put ideas in people’s heads and then put them there (by like saying them the best you can) can feel ridiculous and like no, this is not how you get people to have ideas, you get people to have ideas by doing the patterns right and luck. When I say that they really messed up my abilities I don’t mean that my abilities were completely gone. But I did feel very trapped in my own head, babbling and babbling and enjoying the babbling and the patterns sometimes. Sometimes exerting control over what I said in a way that felt like a worksheet or drop down menu or fill in the blanks. Like that but also like a wave pulling me forward in patterns. Like a drop down menu but you don’t have time to make it as a tool or read the whole thing or realize you can say other things and figure out how. I really want to talk about this but I feel like I’m explaining it really inadequately and inaccurately. Communication has so many different factors and you can use and/or be trapped in the factors in many different ways and it ebbs and flows and it’s really not a binary between autopilot and not autopilot and there are many different related kinds of autopilot with many different factors each and you can use different types of autopilot different ways. Like algorithms and how much they are built by other people and how much they are built by you. I don’t really know how other people’s communication mechanisms work. Also being kind of trapped in my head like that did lead to my brain doing some cool things. But communication is important. And when people think they are helping me communicate more they are really messing up my communication skills. This makes sense to me but it’s hard to explain it. I think it has a little to do with external and internal motivation. And if you want people to think you are improving your communication you have to care about what looks most communicatey to them and how they want you to be and what words they like instead of caring about giving and receiving information with words. So it’s like if you’re trying to make people write down that you’re happy this can make you less happy. Also it’s about needing time to think and people won’t give it to me. And it can also be a bit quantity over quality. The patterns have many layers. Patterns of words and ideas. This went in a different direction than I was expecting but I would like to hear if other people have similar experiences and what other people’s communication mechanisms are like, autistic or not, if you would like to tell.
I mean for what it’s worth I really like the way you use words. Not necessarily conventional, but in a way that makes more sense than the conventional way. Because it seems like some concepts can’t be explained in conventional ways, and you’re very good at explaining those concepts.
I don’t think I’d take a cure for anything autistic because I’d be too different and I can’t get my head around it. Like, I hate sensory overload but at the same time I can’t imagine a me that doesn’t experience it. And you probably have to have the negative sensory stuff to have the positive. But I wish people understood more that not wanting a cure isn’t just about wanting the nice bits or the neutral bits, it’s also that even the bad bits can be integral to a person, and they might not be the same person without them. I’d like to reduce it maybe, but not just take it away entirely.
I don’t think I experience going nonverbal in quite the same way as you. For me, it’s inherently unpleasant, but that might be because it only happens when I’m afraid. And the words are there, but I don’t know the right way to put them together, or I’m afraid of reactions if I say them. And it can be very specific, like I might not be able to speak around certain people, or only around a few people I trust.
Or I might be limited to some scripted phrases, but they don’t always convey what I want them to. Like I say sorry a lot, and sometimes it just means sorry, but sometimes it means “did I do something wrong?” or “please don’t hate me” or just “I needed to say something and sorry is my default word”. And sometimes I plan out phrases really carefully, down to the ums and ers and I have to say it exactly that way or something will go wrong, like I can be convinced that if I don’t say er in that exact place in the sentence, that’s the difference between someone being angry or happy with me.
And it’s very frustrating because I love language, it’s fun and it’s beautiful and sometimes with people I trust I can have fun just saying nonsense or making animal noises or babbling about whatever comes to mind, but most of the time, my words or lack thereof are all dedicated to avoiding conflict.
! Thank you!
Yes, that makes sense to me. I think the brain is like an ecosystem where all the parts are connected so you can’t just cut it into pieces and cure one thing without changing the whole thing because every piece has an effect on the others. And like everyone has a different version of okay and no one can decide the version of okay for anyone else and everyone has a version of okay that involves some bad things in it. So some bad things are just part of some people’s version of okay and it’s not good to try and take them away from them.
Sometimes going nonverbal partly has to do with fear for me. But when it does it’s still a good thing mostly. It’s like a protective mechanism. Like I still exist in the dimension of words but there is a video game shield around my self that is made of words, kind of like my internal monologue, that gives it room to move and work and protects it from being twisted up and broken and compromised. Also, when I am going nonverbal very regularly I have more control over when it happens and it is less likely to happen at the literal most inconvenient time ever, or to happen every time I get freaked out, and if it does I am more likely to be able to override it. Kind of like how if you shut down your computer regularly it’s less likely to randomly shut down on you. Sometimes I also go nonverbal but only around some people. Sometimes I have a way easier more possible time talking to strangers than to people who know me or who know people who know me. Kind of related, I sometimes act more autistic around people I really like or trust but I also sometimes act more autistic around people I’m really scared of or who have worn down my communication abilities and it varies. Or people who are none of those things. And other stuff goes into it as well.
I also sometimes plan out phrases down to the ums. And I also sometimes have way way way less access to non-scripted communication or words that say what I actually want to say in a way that other people would understand then I would like.
Oh yes I like doing those last things too.
Yes, I like the idea of the brain as like an ecosystem. And I think there’s a huge problem with people thinking they can just pull it apart and say this bit’s good, this bit’s bad, we only ever want the good bits and there can’t be anything good about the bad bits either. Like, once something is deemed “abnormal” by society, many people seem to think it’s inherently bad and no-one would ever choose to live with it if they could do otherwise. And then, even a lot of disability advocacy relies on saying, look this is actually good instead of, actually some of this is bad but it’s us and it’s okay for us. And of course I’m not saying that’s always true for everyone, but I’ve seen a lot of cases where it applies.
Ah I think that makes sense, like your brain needs that time away from talking to process and things? And yeah, better to happen more often than at very bad times. I think to me, going nonverbal always feels like something being taken away from me. Because I’m very verbal at heart, and without words I don’t know what to do, and people misinterpret my body language and make assumptions. Maybe it’d be okay if I had it without the outside reactions, but it’s a rare thing to happen to me, and only in situations that are already very stressful.
I have no idea with talking to strangers tbh, I’m always waiting for them to be mean. Yeah, I think I do the thing sometimes about acting more autistic with people when I’m scared or my communication has worn down. In a very different way from with people I like or trust though. I think it has to do with control, like what you were saying about going nonverbal. With people I trust, I do it because it’s how I feel most comfortable and I know there won’t be a problem. With…the other thing, it’s like, normally I’d be putting up defences but I’ve lost that ability? Either that or sometimes acting autistic is part of the defences. Like, when I’m feeling less able but it’s not showing on the outside, I make it show so they won’t forget I can’t help certain things. Which idk might sound a bit manipulative, but otherwise I think I’m going to get hurt? It’s not really pretending, so much as making it look the way they think it should, so they recognise it.
So apparently last year the National Park Service in the US dropped an over 1200 page study of LGBTQ American History as part of their Who We Are program which includes studies on African-American history, Latino history, and Indigenous history.
Like. This is awesome. But also it feels very surreal that maybe one of the most comprehensive examinations of LGBTQ history in America (it covers sports! art! race! historical sites! health! cities!) was just casually done by the parks service.
It’s funny because it becomes more and more transparent every day that these people aren’t “anti-destructive protest” they’re just anti-protest, period.
When people riot they point to them and them alone as examples of what “protesting is like”.
You ask them what a good alternative would be, and they say “non-violent protesting.”
Then a peaceful protest that closes maybe one or two roads in a city happens.
Then when you ask them what their idea is of a “good” protest is, they say “one that isn’t disruptive.”
Then a protest that doesn’t bother anyone at all but still makes a statement happens, and you know what they do?
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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