I have a friend who has an autistic son. It has been a real trial for her as he has limited function. Perhaps her greatest struggle is with people's "good intentions".
Many times she has recieved comments that are both insensitive and ignorant. One person once told her that Autism is the result of vaccinations. How nice to hear that someone thinks you deliberately had your son injected with a vaccination riddled with autism. And then to live in regret, wondering, "if only I hadn't gotten my son vaccinated!" Well that would have fixed everything now, wouldn't it? Not only does it offer constructive help for her situation, it also leaves her feeling so much more positive about it. Not.
This is probably one of our strongest bonds between my friend and I. We had both been on the receiving of these well intentioned criticisms. Only I had to suffer in silence and nod dumbly in agreement. "OK! Let's just throw out a joke I've prepared earlier and deflect this whole conversation away from the grating truth!!"
My mother-in-law had innocently made a remark about a friend of hers who was struggling with IVF. She unwittingly made some comments that she would not have said if she had known about the struggle her son and I had in conceiving her grandchild. As her friend's husband worked away a lot, she remarked how the lack of sex wasn't helping. This really grated against my nerve, as we all know that you could be having sex 5 times every week and you still won't fall pregnant unless you do it in that small window of opportunity. And even then! It's not going to fix cysts on someone's ovaries. Or increase someone's sperm count. Or regulate someone's menstrual cycle. The sex isn't the problem. It never was. And the frequency of it has little to do with it either.
Unfortunately, it's easy for other people to apply a simple little band aid to fix the gaping wound of a problem they don't understand. Sigh.
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