Dear Emma,

If there was only one thing I could give you, I would give you a friend. Sadly, it's one of the things we parents are powerless to provide.

When I think back to my own childhood, I can't imagine how I ever managed to have any. I didn't have any particular "selling" qualities, no magnetism to draw others toward me. I don't think I had any "social skills." My parents certainly never expended any energy trying to set up "play dates." Yet I did have friends. One or two girls actually chose to pursue me as a playmate. For a while, we had a group of four smart girls who self-identified as "oddballs" or outsiders in the classroom. Where are those kids in my daughter's class? Assimilated, like the Borg? Or isolated within their bubbles, afraid of guilt by association? Has the pressure to conform become that much worse since the seventies?

My school-age friends were really the heart of my life, they made everything interesting and colourful and fun. I learned things from my friends that I could never have learned from my family or teachers. Playing, talking, fighting and laughing with friends -- these things give us a different type of information about life. Do you have any sense of what you might be missing? Is it true that people with Asperger's don't really want or need friendship?

I wish that you would talk to me more about it. I just see a gradual slipping away. There have been fewer and fewer attempts to talk and play with other kids. You stopped going over to play with the neighours' kids, or to chat with them while waiting for the bus; you would not tell me why. You chose not to have an 11th birthday party. I can understand that. I've spent the last several years in a state of rage and despair over the lack of reciprocity around birthdays. Where do people get off sending their kids to your birthday year after year, and never offering an invitation to you? Who do they think they are?  If I am angry or upset on your behalf, is my empathy misguided?  Are you lonely and isolated, or are these my labels for a condition that perhaps you've chosen for yourself?

As with many gifts we give to the people we love, my desire to give you a friend has a selfish element. To see you engaged with a kid your own age, to have you shift your focus from me to someone else, would allow me a degree of freedom I haven't enjoyed in years.  Turning the switch from "mom" to "buddy" and back again can be draining. And yet, it's really not all about me. Puberty is going to strike soon, and when it does, you'll need to complain about your mother. That's what friends are for.

Love,

Mom.