I
had lost count of the number of times I had said I was not going to do any more step-parenting.
“I’ve had enough!” I told my long-suffering sister. “I’m not doing anything for him anymore.”
“Yes,” she would reply calmly. “I agree with you. But no one asked you to do it this time. Or last time.”
She was, as only my sister can be, right and loving, stern and kind, warm and logical. I had said so many times that I could not and would not try to parent someone else’s child, and yet over and over again I failed to implement my decision. It was driving everyone mad.
My autistic, sixteen year-old stepson was not always easy to live with. He was a teenager, with all the rebellion, emotional overload and communication incapacity that the teenage years can bring; and he was a stepson rather than the child of my genes; and he was autistic. His natural facial expression was a scowl, yet he wasn’t aware of it; he actively avoided any form of social interaction; he was lazy enough to make the proverbial sloth look positively industrious; and he sullenly resisted all my attempts at conversation, humour or friendliness. I felt constantly rebuffed.
Worse than that, his presence created a situation in which I, the neuro-typical, was the odd one out and they, the people on the autistic spectrum, were in the majority. It was unbearable.
During the three years since I arrived in his life, I had brought all kinds of new ideas: leaving his phone downstairs to charge overnight; showering daily (this coincided, of course, with adolescence; he had not been smelly before); eating at the table; a limit to screen time; reduction in fizzy drinks… It was all good, healthy stuff and straight out of the Good Parent Guide, but it did not sit easily or comfortably on the shoulders of the child who had previously been left alone on request because he found conversation taxing.
I had also brought good things. I had persuaded his parents to drop his music lessons, which he clearly hated. I had helped him to communicate with and relax with his father, whom his real mother had taught him to fear. I had introduced stepbrothers and their friends, who laughed and played and gently teased and included him in their conversation. 
It wasn’t all bad. But this was a youngster who would resist change even if it came in the form of an all-inclusive holiday in the sun, with wall-to-wall plasma television screens and a steady supply of Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food.
I just couldn’t turn off the parenting instinct. He needed to learn how to deal with life. More than that, though, he needed to learn how to deal with me. This house wasn’t big enough for both of us … and neither of us could easily leave.