when i was sixteen, my father was sent first marriage offers from the various families of his native village (as is proper). he, being something of a cultural emigrant, politely declined them all (and i only found out later, as a family joke, of this happening), so this branch of my future was firmly snipped off (thank you, dad, you always had my back). mom, from her side, has tried setting me up on polite, genteel dates with polite, genteel boys with good career prospects, sons of her acquaintances; this also didn't take off, because if there's anything more excruciating than a genteel date of an autistic sixteen-years-old, i don't know what is.

this left me to fumble on my own - the prospect of family loomed on the horizon, not exactly unpleasant - my grandparents loved each other in noisy and complicated ways, but us children sweetly and without reserve, and my parents adored each other utterly, and adore each other to this day (it's maybe a theme for another of these pages, but i promised to spare no tangent, and so: by some miracle of grace, my unwittingly autistic, introverted, sensitive mother scored possibly a single guy in the time and place surrounding her who unflinchingly supported and revered her instead of grinding her down to the bone; the universe is full of miracles.) so family was something vaguely pleasant - passing on our family traditions and holiday celebrations, rearing the children, building a home of one's own - except that on the way to it laid the frozen, horrid wastelands of meeting people? and flirting?? and dating??? and things????

i was, i think, reasonably socially apt for an autistic child, in a sense that i was hopelessly awkward and spent many hours trying to mimic my classmates while being acutely aware that i'm mimicking and not quite successfully; but a lot of it could be attributed to just the difference in upbringing, and this blend of education-religion-class that's too complicated explain here. i had hopes of things getting better once i would leave the school for university, and things, indeed, did get better once i got a bigger playground. i usually made do by picking out one girl, latching on her and then letting the rest of the social interaction filter through her (you'll never read this, o., but you were my lifesaver and the most generous of gifts of my childhood and teenagerhood, and i owe you so, so much.) in university i made two close friends who i'm still close with, and had some timultuous friend groups outside, based on the common interest in anime (o, those tape swaps in the park by the pond) and such other things. but dating!

dating - aside from the thing where i realized, in my late twenties, after some semi-successful attempts, that boys were not going to happen even if they did happened, and the girls were where i was at - presented an absolutely unsurmountable challenge to me: there's a point where 'talking' becomes 'flirting', and also the point where 'flirting' becomes 'we're doing it now', and, sometimes at the same time and sometimes very much not at the same time, it also becomes 'we're a couple now', and reader, to that very day i have no idea how people navigate that. my best friend could visit a bar or a concert, see somebody who she liked, initiate conversation, find out if she did like him after all, see if he liked her in turn, and by the end of the evening successfully convey that she would like to continue their conversation somewhere more private. i spent literal months of talking with an occasional male acquaintance with a flashing neon ????? somewhere in the back of my head. realizing that i was into girls did not help at all: there were WAY more women i liked and spent time with than men, and aside from the additional difficulty level of sussing out if they were lesbian and bisexual without offending them or being offended in turn, they provided even less clues. what? and how? and when? and why? by my thirties i stumbled my way into a handful of weird and unsatisfying flings mostly by accident (and evaded the morass of abusive partners sometimes preying on autistic women, mostly thanks to my parents' relationship; dating might have been a mystery to me, but being loved and treated well wasn't), and just about gave up on the whole shebang.

by this time the shine wore off the vague picture of marriage - family - children i had, too. it never became something real, and the bits and pieces that i imagined suited me - the awkward, intense, easily depressed, in some way childish, dreamy me - less and less. i mourned it as one more example of 'normalcy', a milestone i just wasn't going to hit. i was lonely; i was trying to get used to loneliness

and then... and then i was not. i got to this point in the essay and realized that i do want to keep bits and pieces of myself private, here - of how i met my wife, how we began living together, how she became my wife and her daughter, who was seventeen at the time, is still her daughter and my friend, but her son became my son. how i met my second son and how we became family. it's a long and convoluted story, and it includes emigration, politics, wars, pandemics, travel, volunteering, animal rescues, literary salons, concerts and choir singing. it's been shockingly mundane every step of the way, and completely damn weird, and it ended up with a family that's our own - that's my own - where i'm still growing (as does my wife, as do our children) into myself, like a newborn in the incubator. this is who i am, this is what i feel; this is what i want; this is what i need.

and we celebrate holidays - the way we did in my house, but very differently - and we have our traditions, big and small, weird and weirder, and our doors are open to guests (sometimes, to my autistic hissing overwhelm from my bedroom, too open - but i won't trade it for anything.) and if somebody took a snapshot of this house and showed it to my eleven-twelve-thirteen-fourteen-years-old-self, i wouldn't have recognized it as such. so i would just say to her: hey, it's okay. it's going to be okay.