Five months ago I started this blog with the question: what happens when a guy and a girl with Asperger’s Syndrome have a baby? I can answer that very simply: we have a gosh-darned gorgeous daughter. Beautiful, inquisitive, intelligent, happy and healthy. And it’s not just me that says that – health visitors, midwives, nurses, doctors, childcare specialists, social workers and swimming teachers all agree, and they have no reason to suck up to me so it must be true. Yay.

But of course, that’s only a fraction of the answer. How has our autism affected our parenting thus far? How has it affected our relationship? How have we compensated for or overcome our foibles and idiosyncrasies? What have we learned? These are the real meat of the answer, and I’ll do my best to cook them for you.

In this post, I’ll cover the small, humorous parts of autistic parenting. The next post will detail the larger, more serious problems of parenting with Asperger’s. So hang on in there if that’s what you’re looking for.

Firstly, I have to mention the mobile over Izzie’s cot because it drives me freaking insane. Why? Because you have to turn the mechanism ten-and-a-half times to wind it up fully. What kind of sadist designed that? Why can’t it be ten? Why ten-and-a-half? I’d even accept it if it went up to eleven (insert This Is Spinal Tap reference here). But leaving it with a half is plain belligerence. It’s practically warmongering. (For future designers, I would accept fifteen as well – multiples of five are always good).

This same sadist also made it run out of steam one solitary note from the end of its repetitive tune. Yes, one note. I lie awake listening to that simple tune on the baby monitor, round and round, knowing that soon it’ll stop short and leave me with a horrible sense of incompleteness. It’s like watching a firework shoot up into the sky and then splutter out without so much as a ‘fzzzzt‘.

The play mat bugs me too. All the tunes it plays are almost nursery rhymes, but not quite. Whether for copyright reasons or simple hatred of children, they’ve changed the last line of each one so you’re singing along and suddenly – boom – you can’t finish it! So Incy Wincy Spider never gets to climb up the spout again, the little boy who lives down the drain never gets his bag of black wool, and Frere Jacques doesn’t end with a ding, dang, dong. So annoying.

The monitor is a pain in the ass too. The first sound the baby makes switches it on, and then you’re treated to ten seconds of the microphone trying to pick up whatever white noise it can find. So, if the baby coughs, you don’t hear her cough – you hear the monitor come on, ten seconds of humming, buzzing static, and then it switches off again. She coughs again, the microphone comes back on. So you lie in bed listening to the monitor switching on and off without once hearing any baby noises. It drives me crazy.

But infinitely worse is when you can hear noise through it, specifically screaming. Izzie screams so loud, I imagine the neighbours wake up thinking, ‘Whose bloody baby is that?’ And when I say ‘neighbours’, I mean ‘the people in the next village’. It’s bad because I can hear Izzie screaming through the wall and I can hear her screaming in my ear through the monitor, so I get it in stereo.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, there’s a slight lag between the microphone picking up the sound and the speaker relaying it, so the screams are slightly out of sync. If you want to make a noise so unholy it could summon the devil, come to my bedroom around eight pm. Bring cake.

In truth, I’m not sure whether it’s my autism that makes these things bug me or if it would bug every parent. Certainly, my autism makes me pedantic and pernickety – I like completion, efficiency, accuracy, things working as they should and doing so logically – and whoever designs these things for babies seems to enjoy torturing parents like me. Grrrr.

Probably more directly related to autism is my dislike of slimy stuff. Autism is often accompanied by sensory issues, including a strong liking or disliking of particular textures, temperatures, smells, sights and sounds. One Easter at Sunday School when I was about eight we had to do egg-blowing, and I absolutely hated it – disgusting, squidgy raw egg dripping out the hole in the bottom of the shell. Yuck. The teacher lady, knowing I didn’t like mud, grass stains, getting dirty, told me I wasn’t like other boys – in hindsight she might have been suggesting I was gay. But she was right – I cannot stand slimy stuff.

Which means changing Izzie’s poopy nappies, especially when the crap has spilled out and soaked into her vest and top and trousers and I have to slip it off over her head and then there’s faeces in her hair, is particularly difficult. And when I get it on my hands I run to the bathroom screaming to wash my skin in scalding water with antibacterial soap and a wire brush.

Worse, though, is feeding the baby her solids. I’m not sure why they’re referred to as solids because, as everybody knows, baby food is sludge. Watery, slimy, smelly sludge that stains everything it comes into contact with.

Since babies learn about the world by watching our reactions, I’ve been told we have to act as though their food tastes lovely and there’s nothing we’d like to be doing more than feeding them this gunk, or else it might put them off. Now imagine you’re someone who is horrified by the feeling of sludge and who squeals if he gets mud on his Wellington boots. Yeah.

I spoon that gloopy, dripping, phlegm-like goo into Izzie’s mouth, force a smile onto my mouth as she dribbles it onto her hands then smears it over her face, try not to react as she grabs my forearm with her cold, slimy fingers and rubs that delightful substance into my skin. Mealtimes have become my least favourite activity by far – I’d rather clean out the cat litter, and that’s saying something.

And this fakery of enjoyment leads me onto the final and most profound observation on autistic parenting in this first part of the post. As someone with Asperger’s Syndrome, my life is one giant performance. My body language, facial expressions and tone of voice are not natural, but the result of study and conscious manipulation. I project confidence, contentment and cheerfulness when in truth I am filled with hidden insecurities and neuroses, discontentment and confusion, and I spend my life battling against my thoughts with a violence that nobody could ever guess at. How does this relate to parenting?

Since our babies look to us to learn how they’re supposed to react to new situations – should they be afraid, relaxed, excited, upset? – we have to act as though we know what we’re doing and everything’s fine and dandy. Well, having had a lifetime of practice hiding (masking) my problems, I’m an expert at making Izzie feel safe and secure. I might be terrified of setting foot outside my own front door, but Izzie will never see that, so she won’t grow up infected by my fear of the outside world.

So my autism is really a double-edged sword. Without it, I probably wouldn’t be a reclusive, hysterical pillock; with it, I’m able to pretend that I’m not a reclusive, hysterical pillock. What kind of parent does this make me?

The best that I can be.