when we were younger

*TRIGGER WARNING FOR BRIEF MENTION OF PHYSICAL VIOLENCE NEAR THE END OF THE POST*

I got the idea to write this from reading a label on a Lean Cuisine entree………”cocine en alto” which is Spanish for “cook on high”. When we were younger, we used to think that “alto” was a language, because we heard a friend of our housekeeper talking about it……..didn’t realize it meant the vocal part she sang in the church choir. I knew she was from a different country so I thought that her language was called Alto.

We had another post about something very similar. It was about Peter Pan and his pixie cohort Tinkerbell. She was dying because she drank Peter’s medicine that Captain Hook had poisoned. Peter asked people to clap so she would get better. Our out-of-body sister Natalie (Not her real name) and I were sitting on the couch watching, and we clapped because we thought Peter was talking to us. Can’t recall ages now. This was definitely more than fifteen years ago.

We (myself Athena and Andrea; though at the time we didn’t know about plurals and DID or even autism) also had other things we liked to do alone. Weather intrigued us quite a lot, so we would go to our room, close the door and then take out our beads and pretend the floor was a weather map. We put clusters of beads on the ground to denote storms. We made bigger and more circular or spirally clusters to denote hurricanes. We called it weather for The Littles. We don’t mean littles as in “insider children”. We meant small people. Very small people. Like toothpick sized. And invisible too.
We didn’t want anyone else to see what we were doing. This was a long time ago, so I don’t know why. Perhaps it was embarrassment? Not sure. We would often close our door in poor Natalie’s face. Well, not literally but I’m sure it felt like that to her. We wanted that alone time. To enter the world of the Littles and tell them what kind of weather to expect for the day.

It was a ritual that happened almost every day, probably around the same time. We cannot remember now, how long it lasted.

When we closed the door on Natalie, she often cried. That made us more annoyed because of sensory aversion to crying. We probably couldn’t understand why she was crying. It didn’t occur to us that she could be upset about not getting attention from Big Sis.

So, she would retaliate, by closing the door on us. I had no clue the events were related. It didn’t make any sense whatsoever at first. And also, there was a sense of “she is doing it to be mean, but I wasn’t.” We certainly felt that she was bullying us, and didn’t think that she might have felt the same way.

I would get upset at her and hit her or sit on her. I didn’t know how else to behave. I was less than ten at the time. We weren’t diagnosed as autistic until much later (we were almost 22).

We are pleased to report that today our relationship with Natalie is very deep and loving. We lift each other up. She doesn’t have as much time to talk to us as she would like, because of work and her own social life. We are also busy with school, especially at this time (end of semester, preparing for final exams, etc.)

This is one of a few posts we plan to write about our childhood.

Andrea and Athena, collaborative