Addressing my neighbor, they said, “Well what are you, 25?” In that voice that means that if she was, she wouldn’t matter, or something weird like that (the same one Sue M would’ve used recently in asking that guy, “What are you, 10?”).

She kind of laughed, pointed to me, and said “No, I’m 48, she’s 25.”

They looked a little dumbfounded and eventually went away.

But it’s fairly frequent that people ask me her age and then don’t believe me, with their estimate being “30, if that.”

I don’t really know how people identify age. So I don’t really know why people guess I’m a kid or teen so often. But they seem to. I even often get, when I answer the door, “Is your mommy or daddy home?” or some variant. (When new staff used to come to my house, they’d look around for my “mother” — “Amanda” — and then tell me they thought I was a 13-year-old.)

I wouldn’t have thought that people would think (there goes that second order theory of mind) you were that young.

On the telephone, my kid sounds to me much younger than 12, but in person, most folks might guess 12 just from the clothes xe wears, etc. We do try to find the most grown up looking clothing in that size.

That’s amazing about your neighbor.

When I was very little, 2-6 years old, we had a close neighbor… I suppose we all said he was retarded, after I was six we moved away (like 20 blocks away) and I didn’t see him much any more. Anyway, I see him now every once in a while as I live maybe 9 blocks from him now. He’s an old man, he has gray hair. He looks old to me. I don’t know how others see him, and if he had to get gray hair before people started to see him as a man…

Anyway, just doing my amateur genetecist thing, I’d guess that he has Fragile X. He remembers me from when I was 3 and remembers my family well. He’s a nice guy. He definitely autistic, too. He used to be really into cars. He’d hang out at the local race track, I think he could repair cars.

Interestingly, my 50-year-old autistic neighbor sometimes gets seen as my age, and rarely gets seen as much over 30.

Xe tells me quite often to stop treating xyr like a child. I tell her to grow up. (kidding)

I try to back off with the uber mom stuff when xe says that. My kid can still wear kids clothes, it might not help much, but at least you are adult sized, can you imagine being tiny? It must be really hard.

I’m so tall that I got treated like an adult prematurely.

And I had no idea what I was getting into when I got pregnant. oy.

I’ve noticed that I’m patronised more frequently now than when I used to try making my face twitch according to other people’s wishes, despite the fact I’m able to communicate more clearly now, since I’m not in constant panic over when and how to make faces. I guess weird signals are preferred over none at all.

As for being an adult, I’m still having a hard time thinking of myself as one, as when I tell people that I’m an adult and ask that they treat me as one, they say “of course you are” and continue treating me as a child. Not sure what the correct response to that is. I can’t think of one.

I also grew up thinking of adults as those people who could navigate the world of companies, papers and rules. I still can’t do that very well, and I haven’t managed to get rid of that prejudice, partly because very few are able to help me with those things without being patronising.