It was many. It was the journalist arriving from the conurbano to “Kaos in the city”, the most disruptive program of her time, but it was also the one that interviewed the girl who put her face and name hunger in Tucumán. Then she was the partner of Jorge Lanata and the founder of her own communication experiment, called Border Journalism. Today is Antonio’s mother, a beautiful very bright eyes that steals his cell phone whenever he can and has her crazy love for almost nine years. Antonio was diagnosed with autism before he turned two and since then, his mother’s world began to have him as the center and measure of all things.
News: Is yours an antoniocentric world?
María Julia Oliván: (Laughs) Yes, as is. Sometimes it even appears in the notes because it is with me and I have nowhere to leave it. It is always very present at Border. It gets in the middle of the notes because, like all, I also have to walk with the kid everywhere.
News: Border, its producer, started as something small and now even has its own headquarters, the border House, attached to its house.
Oliván: What happens is that before I was always busy in other more important things. Now I am still busy in other more important things, but a time came, at the seven years of Antonio’s birth, when I realized that it was something I needed. In addition, only then we find the return because we got a house here next. If he shouts in the therapies, I come, I hug him, I take care of him, I’m going to look for him to school … that allows me to work.
News: His book is called “Mamis chat” (planet) which is how the WhatsApp groups of mothers and fathers of a degree are told. Something that can save your life but can also become a nightmare.
Oliván: Yes, it is an Embole. But I did not put the name like that but because- Literal- I chatted with moms all the time. After the birth of Antonio I chatted all the time with strangers, with mothers of neurodiverse boys from all over the country. Until today I call one every week when I see that I can help them think or solve a specific problem. We all need to listen to us. In fact they have helped me a lot of times and I put chat for that: because I associate it to chat all day. Although now perhaps with a little less intensity on the recommendation of my psychologist.
News: As a society, how do we take those who do not enter the fee, as with autistic boys?
Oliván: Now that I put the face so much to the issue, the truth is that, at least in Argentina, I find little intolerance. They no longer put me so much ortho (laughs). But the truth is that I, in the process, thought “what little empathy” but I also have to teach my son with autism that this is the world in which he lives. So, I also have to look for not fucking. I never leave, but he knew that I once leave, Antonio goes through the tables and gives kisses to everyone and people usually end up softening. Others look at you with an ortho barbara face and at the same time there are boys that are copied. That is why what I tell the mothers is: “Here we are and we are not to hide.” And we try to be in the best possible way. Because sometimes they put on an ass because they think he is a rudeness without having an idea of the millions of times that you tried to teach that baby something. But that happens, of course.
News: More than once there is talk of the state abandonment of neurodiverse families. How are they today with that topic?
Oliván: Payments to professionals are always delayed three months in all social and prepaid works. The occasional is in two months or a month and a half, but there are always arrears. Attending the disability costs a lot of silver and in no country in the world the State takes over as it does here. What happens is that there are many intermediaries and everything is wrong. I know a mother of a boy with autistic in London who told me that they only pay the baby’s school and nothing else. Here is the only country where we have the right to so many things, but we must organize it better.
News: How does all this not end up taking your head? How do you clear?
Oliván: It is that after this I was always headed. And I also had tremendous depression. I had never happened to not know who it was. My motto was always “the work is tireless” and I always thought that working accordingly you can get things forward. I thought, and I count it in the book, that this was going to be like a career and that if I gave everything I would be able to get ahead. But when I released everything to be with him I ended up wondering “And who am I?” I realized that, after diagnosis, I stopped publishing photos of Antonio. But then it was when I began to feel what they call “autistic pride.”
News: What does that mean?
Oliván: That I am going to show my son how it is, that I am not going to hide it. Now I have taken my head by two things: Border and Antonio. But when I was with depression I reached a point that had never happened to me and that is apathy. I didn’t care about anything at all. I didn’t care to dress, watch TV or know about the news. Nothing! I only cared Antonio. And in a moment, when I started to make “mamis chat”, I thought: “What I am doing here in the dark, in my house, at night, instead of talking with ten thousand people I talk to one and that several listen to me.” I knew I had to write this but I didn’t encourage me to remember. When I did the podcast it was also a cry and when I wrote it it was another because it is a trauma. It cost me. But I told myself: “Well, the time is going to come.” When Antonio was four or five years old, and I realized that I was not going to solve autism, which was not something to solve working, I came to acceptance. This is how I went back to work, while the baby was in some therapy.
News: Does anything fear in relation to Antonio?
Oliván: No, nothing, I never grabbed anything. And I also believe that a luminous kid and with strengthened confidence as him, who received and receives so much love, will be fine. They treated me crazy because I went to fight for boys to do gymnastics with others. There are also many legal issues of inclusive education that you have to know to be able to plant yourself, because when the thing plays it. But it’s a desaulote!
News: Are there “revived”, in the sense of people who play with the despair of fathers and mothers?
Oliván: Of course. There are many parents who say: “I need someone to solve this mess, how much to pay?” The bad news is that this does not exist. The good is that you are the only one that will be able to help it. I have seen friendly people who have boys who are not verbal, made a super strict diet that supposedly improves them but the boys still do not speak. They are nonverbal and so they continue, only less inflamed because they do not eat flours. As I said, there is a lot of Chamuyo and many people who believe that everything is solved with silver.
News: How did the death of Lanata live?
Oliván: Real because I already knew but I didn’t imagine it was going to be so fast. Above it was outside. Last year in all sessions he cried for Lanata. Now I am doing trauma therapy and I was very distressed by what they told me, so I saw that they made him take it out of a clinic and put him in another and all that. It seemed like a downturn. That is why I went out to talk about him and the girls, whom I know. I felt that they said things that would never have come out of another famous. Then, while I was spending the holidays in Miami, my husband -ariel- warns me while I was doing a streaming that had died. That was 30. I was thrown for several days because for me, even with all the fights we had, it was a father figure.
News: How do you see Argentine journalism today?
Oliván: The president is in a crusade against journalism and takes it as personal. He doesn’t answer me, he doesn’t give me notes or saw him, but one day he wrote to me for a note that he did not like and I told him that he was not going to stop talking about people who did not think like him or that he did not praise him. It was a common note, with Alvaro Zicarelli, about the “iron triangle.” He was respectful, quite educated for what he is, perhaps because he respects me of the era of “intractable.” I said: “Javier, you can’t get angry about that. You are president!” He told me that they said lies and explained that this happens to all the presidents and that this is the space in which he wanted to get. He told me that this is how he processes criticism. “I am not going to be silent in the face of unfounded criticisms, I process it like this,” he told me. I took the opportunity to tell him that he was spent talking about the journalists ensobiled, but I have a totally independent medium and is not coming either. He told me that I was not “part of his strategy” (laughs) and then no more attended me. I have spoken with Adorni, with francs, with Cneo and nothing else. Nobody gives me a note but I don’t care. And if the rule is not to ask, you better not come.
