A self-advocacy column by Eric Gmeinder

Almost a year after I and several other Futures Explored students had filmed interviews, The Nature of Autism is nearing completion. Autism is known for causing sensory issues, especially with noise, and I and one other student cited crying children as a specific noise we hated. In fact, I would say that crying babies are tied with loud vehicles as the sound I hate most for loudness alone. However, loud vehicles stoke my ire more because their drivers know better and young children don’t.

(Preschool TV doesn’t fare much better in my book. I used to think the reason I disliked these shows was because I’d outgrown them, but it may have more to do with the fact that many of them actually do stink.)

It’s actually fairly common for people to hate little children when they were the same age I was. I was also the youngest in my family and had no real exposure to them until I became an uncle within the past year. As the years passed, my tolerance of them outside of their crying grew, for a few reasons.

One of the few times I thought of being anything other than a filmmaker was in my late teens and early twenties. High school is often the hardest time of students’ lives, and it was far from perfect from me. But it was still a mile ahead of elementary school, which I’d tried (and succeeded at) forgetting about. One morning the fall after high school, I woke up and suddenly remembered. Over the next few years, I occasionally entertained the idea of being an instructional assistant, to save other students from having the same bad experiences that I had with mine.

I’d previously thought about teaching, but I still didn’t want to raise kids myself. But at twenty-two and a half, I got a feeling that I did, in fact, want to be a father, a sentiment that, until the most recent generations, was virtually nonexistent in both the autism community and the community I identify with within the LGBT community. Again, it has somewhat to do with wanting to make up for things in my own childhood that I’d like to forget. It also has to do with taking the qualities people praise me for and imparting them more thoroughly than I could have if I were an educator.

As for the “almost” in the title, on my worst days, crying children still bother me to the extent that almost I change my mind back to how I used to feel. But other than that, I’ve spent the past three and a half years feeling as ready as I’ll ever be to be Father of the Year.