Replies

My autistic nephew is so smart with certain things. But he repeats the same thing over and over...just like Rainman. About 5 years ago he ran into the mother of a girl in his class at the Circle K. EVERY SINGLE TIME he writes me a note, to this day (which is often on the computer), he says "we saw Kayla's Mom at the Circle K." It's so...hard to understand the way the mind works.

I know a woman who when she was a child was considered severely mentally retarded, and yet was capable of presenting every person she came across with a different impression of her capabilities and keeping it all straight. Whenever we have gone through an airport, she nearly always finds someone that she has met in the past and correctly identifies them.

She was part of a special program that taught her how to read, yet after she moved to a different school district, she managed to convince the staff that not only could she not read or remember most of her letters, but that she could not dress herself. It took a slip-up on her part where she was showing a younger child who was there how to spell her name and his name on a chalkboard during a conference to prove to the new staff that she could read. The staff all thought her parents were nuts.

She was retarded, but not THAT retarded. It was all a game.