Raising Cubby.

   This is the name of a book written by John Elder Robison. John Robison was interviewed by one of the ABC presenters, I think at the Sydney Writers Festival. The interview was so interesting I borrowed the book from the local libray. Oh, maybe I should mention we have a new library now in Helensvale. It took about two years to build and is a lovely building. BUT……everything is on level 2 or level 3. So if you are like me and don’t like lifts, there are a lot of stairs to climb.

Anyway, I got the book and read it in just a couple of days. John Robison was a ‘different’ child, and into his adult years was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. He describes many of his symptoms and how his life as a youngster and teenager was affected. He tells a really good yarn.

 

In time he married and had a son, and his nickname was Cubby. This book is also the story of Cubby growing up. John was really worried about Cubby being affected by Asbergers. As it happens he was affected, and the story tells of Cubby’s life as a toddler and into the teen years. The thing that struck me was that although John was constantly on the lookout for signs, due to his own syndromes, he just couldn’t quite see it.  He looked for the symptoms and they were there, but he could not quite work it all out.

The story also shows how the schools tried but mostly failed Cubby, and how diagnosis was not an easy thing to come by at that time. I found the story to be riveting, and as I said earlier I got right through the book in two days.

I learned a lot from this book too. I had no idea that people with Aspergers were so clever. It seems that they usually have a brilliant bent in some direction. For John it was inventing things, for Cubby it was explosives.

If you have Asperger’s, I think you would really enjoy this story, and see how they worked around the daily obstacles they had to deal with. If you have friends or family who you suspect of having these syndromes, it is a good starting point. This is not a medical book and certainly does not replace a proper diagnosis and if anything, it proves the necessity of proper early  medical intervention in these matters, but it gives some very informative details about these problems.

Cubby ended up in court, hounded by a zealot of a D.A. who was trying to prove Cubby to be a terrorist.  How he got there and how it ends are fascinating reading. John Elder Robison has written several books, and I might try and find some more of them.

One of the most interesting pieces of information is this, from page 343. “We think of our country as free, but we have the highest rate of incarceration of any developed nation. In 1980 five hundred thousand Americans were in jail. Today that number has ballooned to almost 2.5 million. Less well known is how many adult Americans have criminal convictions. The shocking truth is that one in thirty adults is behind bars, on probation, or on parole. That’s more than seven million people. One reason for that is that we’ve criminalized so many behaviours. Americans end up with permanent criminal records for driving eighty-five on the interstate or for shoplifting at seventeen. I stopped to pee in a ditch by the side of a back-country road in Alabama last year, and a cop pulled up behind me. To my disgust he told me I could be arrested and that I’d be a registered  sex offender because I was ‘exposing myself by the roadside.” ”

These numbers are an amazing statistic to consider. You would enjoy this book I am sure.