I dated a lady I met in an autism support group. We had both been recently diagnosed, so you can imagine that autism was all we talked about. One of our things was to humorously point out all the things we do that are autistic since we were so oblivious of our traits until that point. We actually had a lot of fun doing this. Anyway, she often pointed out how I reliably answered rhetorical questions, even when they were supposedly obviously not meant to be answered. I just didn’t want her to feel dismissed. 🤷♂️
my autistic father has a language tick where he starts every new topic with “i dont know if you know about TOPIC” then goes on to explain topic regardless of the answer.
normally i can just listen but sometimes the topic is literally my career field and he could not care less about what i know.
That could be framed as infodumping and a way of saying he cares about you. If he’s like me, I imagine his mental process is: JoYo is here, I feel good because they are here and I learned something cool recently, let me share that cool info I learned so that they can get the same joy I got from it, get their attention by using the script “I don’t know if you know about TOPIC”, start engaging memory of the info dump. He might not even be consciously aware that you’re answering him for the purpose of telling him whether to go on or not. Instead, he will take any response you give as saying, “I hear you and am now paying attention.”
If you ask him to stop, does he stop? If he does, then maybe having a talk about how you guys can agree on a way to communicate if you are interested in hearing it or not could help. If he doesn’t, then it sounds like y’all might need to work on establishing some boundaries.
I had some friends that were very passive in the way they communicated, so they would not directly say “I’m not interested in that right now.” Instead, I was supposed to somehow figure it out from context and cues. The thing is that I don’t get those. They do not register at all. What ended up happening is that they would then get passive-aggressive or pissy with me, but I had no idea why, so I would just stop wanting to be around them. They would later ask me why I was absent, and I responded that it seemed like they didn’t want me around. We did this dance until I got tired of being so self-conscious around them and started going mute. If they would have just been direct with me, I would have loved it and perhaps we could have saved the relationship. Rather, what I remember is that they were inauthentic and unstable, while they probably remember that I was inconsiderate.
He’s been like this my whole life. I don’t think young children that see you as a father figure know how to be authentic and stable.
So he did what you did and stopped wanting to be around his children.
He’s still like this, even when I make my annual visit from across the world.