A Little Misplaced Sweetness

My wife doesn’t like starches. She doesn’t like bread, nor rice. She doesn’t like potatoes, nor turnips, nor beans. She doesn’t even like plantains.

This isn’t a fad diet. She’s just autistic and doesn’t like them.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not a big deal to her. Autistic food sensitivities are not a joke; they’re almost the mental health equivalent of an allergy.

We order food at a Swiss place. I get the usual fare — meat, barley, milk or cheese, potatoes, cabbage. She reads the menu and asks the waitress:

Wife: “What doesn’t have starch?”

This sets the fairly sweet waitress off on a long rant about the importance of accepting yourself and how you don’t need a fad diet to look good. (My wife is short and stout, not exactly the figure of traditional American beauty, but I don’t care; she’s beautiful to me. The waitress is also short and stout.)

I feel really guilty about it, but during a break in the waitress’s story about how she learned to accept herself and how my wife should do the same and tell herself that she’s beautiful in the mirror, I say:

Me: “Um… It’s not about diet. My wife’s autistic.”

Waitress: “Oh!”

And then, she launched into another rant, this time about accepting the quirks and coping mechanisms of autistic people.

Well, at least her heart is in the right place!