I am 19 and my brother is three years younger than me and is autistic. Although we have always been very close and probably spend more time together than ‘normal’ siblings, it’s hard to think of concrete ‘things’ that we do together.
Conversations and texts
A lot of our time together is spent with him whittering about various topics he’s interested in e.g. Thomas the Tank Engine, Sonic the Hedgehog. A lot of the time he likes reciting scripts from various TV shows together; as he’s gotten older he likes to edit or expand on the scripts to make them funnier for him (and always expects you to somehow magically know the shows as well as he does, including the bits he’s made up. I like to think needing an encyclopaedic knowledge of all these TV shows has probably made my memory better!)
Even now I’m at uni most of the communication I have with him is him messaging me random lines from TV shows and wanting me to recite them with him over text. He’ll also ask extremely random questions that don’t always make a huge amount of sense but normally lead to some interesting conversations, e.g. ‘What would you do if you were trying to go to sleep and kept feeling sheep pushing you?’; ‘What would you do if a squirrel was trying to take a shower under a soaking wet Lara Croft?’ (Yes, those are direct quotes).
Enjoying TV and video games together
We played a lot of video games together when we were younger but as we got older we both got more interested in different genres so whilst we do still sometimes talk about that, it’s definitely less than when we were younger.
In terms of interests, we had a lot of TV shows we would watch together when we were younger but I think as we got into our teens and my interests became more grown up and his didn’t this became more difficult. There was also the added complication that if I said something at school about watching Danger Mouse or Odd Squad with my brother that obviously wasn’t normal and people would sometimes (unintentionally) say ignorant things. I’m not sure I’d describe my response as embarrassment; it was more just that it was more straightforward not to say anything in future.
There are still some Disney/Dreamworks films that we watch together but I could probably only list maybe three TV shows that we’re both interested in now. He often needs to watch the same film/TV show a few times before he decides to like it so it can be hard to work out what’s worth introducing him to or not. (I convinced him to give Ghosts a try by telling him it was grown-up Horrible Histories.)
Board and card games
In terms of games, as my brother got older and into his teens he started being able to play more board/card games that we would play together as a family or together as the two of us.
At one point in my teens I made a selection of personalised board games for us as part of a Girlguiding badge, including a Trivial Pursuit where each of the categories was something that a different person in our family was interested in, a Guess Who game with different trains (which was fun except his knowledge of trains is far better than mine and he would ask really obscure questions so I spent half the game on Wikipedia!) and a Cluedo set where the different characters were different Thomas the Tank Engine characters, the different rooms were different stations in Thomas and the weapons were train-related items like coal shovel.
Ultimately, I think having to be a bit more creative and try a bit harder to find things we can do together has led to us probably having more fun than most ‘normal’ siblings now we’ve found the things that work.
