Interesting conversation, definitely related to autism, that I’m mostly posting here just so I remember it in the future…
We were driving home from town, just N and me, and it was night-time, thus dark in the car, and N was in the back seat. This is important because of the detachment that provided to the conversation.
I told N that I loved him, and he told me (and this is now paraphrasing from my faulty memory, which was mostly consumed by driving b/c i was being tailgated) that he didn’t actually love anyone; he just pretended to love us and when he was old enough to not have to depend on us he would reveal himself as a fraud. He wasn’t joking; I thought he was, at first, and laughed, and then realized he was serious. He kept calling himself a fraud and saying that he felt that he had to pretend.
We finally decided that he does love reading, and he very strongly likes certain foods (mostly apples), and he does like certain people but he doesn’t love them. He only says it because he feels like he should, so we take care of him, so we wouldn’t hate him.
N then asked if we would still give him his college money that was in our bank account once we knew he was a fraud.
I tried to explain different kinds of love to him, and told him that no matter what I would always love him, as I’ve told him many times before, but I thought the conversation was interesting regardless and wanted to write it down before I forgot it.
