Our family abandoned my orphaned autistic nephew. Sucks for them.

Subbed to this sub a few days ago because I have jack shit experience with raising a kid, but I know damn well that we're going to move to adopt him soon.Nobody told us he existed until he was a teenager. His POS of a sperm donor offered him to myself + my wife like an unwanted bag of chips. For context, this was my first conversation with said sperm donor since I was 6? He's had zero involvement with this kid since birth, so he can fuck off into the sunset and take his bizarre offer with him.But we still wanted to know more about the kiddo. For obvious reasons. So we started digging.Apparently most of my maternal family knew. They identified him solely as "your autistic nephew". My late mother apparently approached him at one point, then clearly realized he wasn't neurotypical and lost interest.They didn't even remember his name.My wife + I've been visiting him since we found him. We're having our first home visit right now.This kid is so wonderful. He just loves music, Minecraft, and playing outside. He's never mean, or judgmental, or apathetic. He doesn't mind being told "no". He's patient + gentle with our pets, despite the dogs barking a lot while they get used to him. He's going into high school soon. Gets jazzed about everything. All he needs is a home, really. If I'd raised a biokid, I'd be thrilled if they were half as lovely of a person.Hell, I wish my neurotypical but judgmental family members would take notes from him on how to be a decent dude. They've really missed out on getting to know him.I'm privately pretty sad and angry, though - because I had an identity crisis on our first video call. I realized that we have some identical tics. They're subtle on my end, but hey, that mother still screamed at me as a kid for having them.I'm probably low-key autistic too. I'm garbage at reading faces, and pretty "weird" in some ways. If she'd had confirmation that I wasn't neurotypical either, would she have given up on me too? Would they have identified me by a label, instead of my given name?I'm a disconcerting mix of extremely excited about the future, extremely sad about the past, and a little afraid that I'm about to be out of my depth.Does anyone have good miscellaneous tips on parenting a high-school-aged boy without making him feel like he's being treated like "a child"?Or adoption in general? via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/2Ou6VCd