"Different, not less."

Since it is summer break, I occasionally have a bit of this enigma some people call spare time, and in order to spend some of this glorious spare time, Ben's dad rented the movie Temple Grandin and we finally got to watch it.  I have read articles by Temple Grandin and watched her speeches on line, but I had not had the chance to see the movie until now.

I am not a professional movie reviewer, and my taste in movies is probably questionable at best, but you should really see it if you haven't.  You really, really should.

If you aren't familiar with Temple Grandin, she is a woman with Autism whose mother was told to institutionalize her when she was diagnosed at the age of four in the 1950's.  The doctor called it "infantile schizophrenia" (which really made me angry) and thought that children with it could never talk or take care of themselves or learn.  Her mother (played by Julia Ormond in the movie; Claire Danes plays Temple) refused to follow this advice, worked tirelessly with her on speech, manners, rules, and many other issues, and had Temple attend a boarding school and then college.  Temple is very successful; she has earned her PhD in animal science and is a professor at Colorado State and has famously redesigned slaughter houses to create safe, humane, environments for the animals that are also more efficient and has written many books about that and also about Autism, including The Way I See It.  She is an inspiration in herself, but this movie is really something.

I cannot get over how well it was done, and how thoughtfully she is portrayed, both as an awesomely successful woman and as a person with Autism.  It shows her social awkwardness, her differences from other people, the bullying and teasing she was subjected to for being a "freak," and the way other people couldn't understand her interests and focus, but it also showed how she thinks in pictures by presenting a series of photographs to represent that and it amplified different sounds to show what would be uncomfortable and frightening to her.  It showed her sensory issues, like the "hug machine" she designed and built for herself because she needed the pressure of a hug to calm herself but couldn't tolerate human touch, and also her inability to eat food with texture, other than that of yogurt and jello.

It also showed how much of a difference small gestures of kindness by others made to her life.

I spent a large part of the movie comparing her to Ben, for some reason, perhaps because I am constantly trying to understand the differences in symptoms and gauge Ben's.  There were a lot of differences because he is very high-functioning and she is more classically Autistic, but there were a great number of similarities, too: the intense focus and inability to be side tracked, the lack of understanding of social cues, and the need for pressure, which Ben satisfies with back rubs, a bean bag chair, or his weighted blanket.  But I absolutely began to cry during the scene of the movie where she leaned toward her mother without touching her so her mother could hug her.

Ben does this.  Not with me or his dad or his grandparents, but he definitely does it with people he doesn't know as well or see as often.  Ben has always been affectionate and loving, always, but with less familiar people, he is more guarded in many ways.  He also gives what we call "head kisses."  If you ask him for a kiss and you are not immediate family, he will most likely lean toward you with his head down so that you may kiss the top of his head.  He complies, but in a way that is comfortable for him.  I don't know why that scene made me cry, maybe because it was at the end of an emotional movie, or maybe because it reminded me so much of my sweet Ben, but it did make me cry.  The movie as a whole gave me a great deal of hope for Benjamin.

See the movie.  It's incredibly well done, Claire Danes does an outstanding job, and it is a very helpful tool for spreading some awareness that people with Autism are different, but definitely not less, than others.