A few days ago, we took the kids to a science museum – one of those vast noisy ones with exhibits of motors and magnets and various taxidermied animals standing around looking gloomy – and Cupcake and I ended up at a thing where you could put golf balls in a series of gutters. The golf ball would roll down and ping on chimes and go through hollowed-out wooden chickens and light up lights and what have you, all very fascinating to the shortest and bossiest member of the family. But eventually she found another little kid she wanted to befriend, so she gathered up all the golf balls and gave them to him, but he ran off. Twice. He would have done it a third time, but she hit him, roared, and grabbed the golf ball back.

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“Oh dear,” said the other kid’s mother.

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“Come-here-right-now-young-lady-we-do-NOT-hit” was the only thing I could think of to say, and it came out more squeaky than authoritative.

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As we were sitting in Time Out, it suddenly occurred to me that I was actually really glad to have witnessed the whole incident. Well, obviously, not the hitting, but the part where she tried to get someone else to play with her; it’s so normal. In many ways a young kid with mild autism, like Henry, is easy to take to a playground, because he’ll sit and do quiet repetitive behavior for as long as you can stay. I guess I’ve gotten used to his play habits, to the point where the other kids at the playground seem like wild animals – running, shouting, throwing things at each other, getting in fights – while the boy sits in the midst of the chaos, calmly digging and filling hole after hole after hole. That’s what I’m used to.

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At eighteen months, his sister shows no signs of having any autistic traits. She’s still young enough to regress, of course, and I know I’m going to be keeping a close eye on her developmental progress until that big third birthday, but so far we are all encouraged by her vocabulary, her imaginative play, and her wild-animalness. At the same time, dealing with these behaviors are going to require a whole new skill set (do I have the brains and energy to learn a new skill set?); it’s so different from anything we were used to with her brother.

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In last month’s Forbes, Simon Baron-Cohen talks about the autistic spectrum, and how he believes that most of us have some autistic traits. He thinks that autism is genetic, and therefore hereditary. This made a lot of sense to me; I prefer to be alone, and I have a lot of small, repetitive habits. Henry’s dad can remember phone numbers for years, and does math for fun. We are both quirky. We are both a lot like Henry.

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Yet our same gene pool has produced a child who goes by the affectionate nickname Girl-rilla (on a noisier day, Girl-zilla), who uses words to get things – Juice! Shoes! Up! – and tries to make friends with other kids, and gets mad enough to punch them when they give her the cold shoulder, while I sit there thinking, holy crap, what am I supposed to do now? Not only do I not know where she gets her bossiness from, I seem to be overeducated on how to avoid autism-related meltdowns, and completely at sea when it comes to a typical toddler one.

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I wish Simon Baron-Cohen would take a few minutes and identify the bossy gene, because it’s going to cause me many more sleepless nights than the autism ones. I mean, if she’s this assertive over golf balls, what’s it going to be like if she decides to enter politics? Because I know you’re not allowed to sit politicians in Time Out and let them scream it out.