Author: Gillan Drew

Struggling writer.

Sparrowhawk Update

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It’s a little off-topic, having nothing to do with parenting or Asperger’s Syndrome, but I thought I’d update you on the deceased sparrowhawk mentioned in the previous post (Clean Hands and Dead Birds).

I got in touch with the Predatory Bird Monitoring Scheme, who are sending me a box to forward it to them as they collect dead birds of prey. Not for nefarious purposes, mind – they autopsy them, take samples of various organs such as the liver (presumably with some fava beans and a nice Chianti), and test them for levels of toxins and pesticides to record long-term trends in avian populations.

So Jack Sparrowhawk is currently in my freezer.

Afterwards, they’ll send me an autopsy report, about which I’m a little concerned – if the cause of death is listed as exposure to extreme cold then my life-detection skills suck!

Clean Hands and Dead Birds

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Is it bad luck having a bird of prey die in your hands? Scratch that – of course it is. The bad luck is having a bird of prey die in your hands. Especially when you aren’t wearing gloves, it’s a wild animal that could have all kinds of illnesses, bacteria and bugs, and you have an eleven week old baby.

I opened the front door this evening to find a beautiful sparrowhawk sitting on the driveway. A young female by the look of it. Long toes, curved talons, mean yellow eyes, hooked beak. But it had a tear right across its face.

I crouched beside it and it fell onto its side, stretched out its wings, arched its back, spread its tail, tried to lift its head and balled its feet into tiny avian fists. At the time I figured it was trying to assess what was damaged; looking back, it was in its death throes.

I’ve always been sensitive to the suffering of animals. I can’t watch nature shows because I find it heartbreaking when things die. I can often relate better to animals than I can to people. This is actually quite a common thing for people with Asperger’s Syndrome, which I think stems from our difficulties with Theory of Mind. People are complicated, extremely so, and their lives and deaths, thoughts and feelings, are imbued with so much meaning, symbolic and literal, that it’s impossible to understand even one iota of what it means to be another person.

Animals are simpler. While humans have many layers – intellectual, emotional, moral, spiritual – and live in the future and the past, the spaces between thoughts and reality, animals live on instinct in the moment. They feel affection, hunger, fear, the need to protect their children, the will to keep living – things common to all of us, but distilled to their purest, most absolute form. You don’t need to second guess why an animal does something, or if it has an ulterior motive in wagging its tail, or what it really means when it says ‘miaow’. It means I can understand, and empathise with, animals in a way I often can’t with humans. And so a suffering animal is a call to action.

In my time I’ve rescued a litter of baby hedgehogs and two pigeons, one of which I put in a shoebox but sadly died and the other I took to the vet after finding it hanging from a tree wrapped in fishing line. If I’m walking in the rain and spot a snail on the pavement in a location it’s liable to be stepped on, I pick it up and relocate it to the nearest bush. And even though I accept that nature is cruel and animals eat one another – I’m not a vegetarian, in case you were wondering, though I have every sympathy for people with the strength to pass up a bacon sarnie – I must admit to freeing butterflies from spider webs.

All of which is a long preamble to the revelation that I decided to take the sparrowhawk into the garden, find it a box, feed it if I was able or otherwise allow nature to take its course – I couldn’t leave it struggling on the driveway where any of the local cats could torture it for fun. So I bent down, gently picked it up, and it was dead before I even straightened up.

I figure it flew into a window or wall and critically injured itself. When I picked it up, thinking I was a predator and in its weakened state, it died of shock. It was like switching off a light – instant. I knew it was dead. There’s something about holding things when they die – I’ve had dogs put down – you can feel the transition from a living, breathing being to an inert thing. You’re suddenly holding an object where a moment before you were holding a friend, and some intangible essence has left. It’s not simply that it isn’t moving anymore, it undergoes a complete change, from a fellow traveller on life’s highway to something no different from a table, and it happens in an instant. I’m not religious, but certainly when things die it’s as though an energy that we can feel through some deep-hidden sensory organ has departed – almost as though there is such a thing as a soul. But I digress…

I put the dead bird on the garden table and suddenly realised I had touched a dead wild animal. And in that moment, I started to itch all over as I pictured whatever fleas or mites could have been living in its feathers (I’m still itchy now hours later in bed thanks to my mind’s overactive paranoia manifesting phantom bugs all over me). Worse, what if it had diseases? I have a baby, what have I done?

I soaked my hands in scalding water, washed them in three types of antibacterial soap, and I’m still afraid to touch the baby. I’m sure I can’t do her any harm, but I keep wondering ‘what if, what if?’

In hindsight, as a dad with a young baby I probably should have left that poor beautiful sparrowhawk to its fate. But if I did that, I wouldn’t be me. And as Izzie grows up, I want her to see her dad isn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty helping those in need. Because if we teach our kids to look the other way in the face of suffering, then what the hell kind of world are we making?

Night Feeds

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Since around about the second or third week of her life, I have looked after Izzie overnight (my halo is in the post – I had to send back the original as it was too small!). But much as I complain about it, moan about how tired I am, and use it as leverage during the day (‘Can you sterilise the bottles? I was up three hours in the night.’), I must confess that I love my daddy-daughter time.

As part of my PADI training in a picturesque town called Kaikoura, I did a night dive. Kitting up on a long-abandoned wooden wharf on the headland, the van’s headlights pointed out to sea, snow-capped mountains silhouetted against the stars and the barking of seals resounding from the cliffs, it’s undoubtedly one of the most evocative things I’ve done. It was just me and my female dive instructor, no backup, nobody else to get in the way.

Linking arms so we didn’t lose one another, we stepped off the end of the wharf and descended into the inky black water. With your torches, all you can see is whatever comes into the ball of yellow light that extends a couple of metres around you. The whole world shrinks to the size of that bubble – all beyond, hidden in the cimmerian depths, ceases to exist. We became the only two people in the world as we swam along the seabed, alone but for each other.

We surfaced a couple of hundred metres out, the headlights mere pinpricks in a vast unlit universe. It’s weird being out in the water in the dark. You feel primitive somehow, in touch with your instinctive animal nature, experiencing the world through touch. And the person beside you is an extension of your own body. Night diving is the most intimate thing you can do with your clothes on – well, a neoprene wetsuit, BCD, air tank, regulator, weight belt, mask and fins, in any case. I’ve never felt anything like it.

Except when I’m doing night feeds.

At first, Izzie would go down around midnight and be up at half two and half five. Heading down to the lounge, Lizzie fast asleep, the dog snoring on the sofa and the cat purring on the bed, we were the only two beings in the world, daddy and his daughter.

Of course, feeding a baby isn’t exactly thrilling entertainment, so the first couple of weeks I’d switch on the TV and watch whatever was on – a documentary about a jaguar hunting a crocodile, perhaps, or how an American detective solved a murder case from the 1980s. After that, I started watching Monk  and Castle, half an episode at the first feed and the remainder during the second.

As time’s gone on, Izzie drinks larger amounts less often, so it takes a whole episode to satisfy her, but only once a night, around five am.

Now, every third night she sleeps right through from half eleven to seven in the morning. Of course, I wake up much more often than that, checking on her about every two hours – if she stretches, groans, breathes differently, I wake up in an instant. But our exclusive daddy-daughter night feeds look to be coming to an end.

I never thought that I’d miss getting up in the middle of the night, the broken sleep, the days when your eyes hurt from forcing them open. But it’s our special time, when it’s just us and the rest of the world have no claim on anything we are. At night, things seem bigger, and more important, than they do during the day, and I wouldn’t trade this time for the world.

Parents moan about the night feeds, the tiredness and the broken sleep, but it’s actually one of the best parts of being a parent. There is no better way of bonding with your child than holding them in the night when you’re the only two people awake in the world. I say that I do the night feeds to help Lizzie get a good night’s sleep, but really I do them for me, for my daddy-daughter time. Because every time I feed her, I’m night diving off Kaikoura again. And that’s worth a lifetime of broken sleep.

The Small Things

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A few days ago my life was a movie in which I played myself while my partner Lizzie was played by the Devil. Actually, that’s a little harsh. She was more like Kathy Bates in Misery. Now, things are a little better: she’s become Kathy Bates in Titanic – happier, jokier, with a trifle more backbone. And I’ve gone from Jack Nicholson in The Shining to Jack Nicholson in…actually, he’s pretty crazy in most things. Maybe that’s a bad analogy.

Putting aside which Hollywood characters we most resemble, I said that I’d keep this blog positive, and I’ve noticed my posts have become rather whiny and self-pitying of late. So here’s to all the small and wonderful things that make this endeavour memorable and worthwhile, the kinds of things you’d forget if they weren’t written down, divided into four categories: the physical, behavioural, developmental, and simply gross.

I want to remember the little physical things that might disappear as Izzie gets older. Like the uncatchable bogies that yo-yo in and out of her nostrils when she breathes, or the slimy green sleepy dust that collects in her left eye but never her right. How her strawberry birthmark, which looks like a strawberry to me, is more like a Rorschach inkblot test, since others have variously described it as a tomato, an apple, a pineapple and a maple leaf. Her belly button that can’t decide whether it wants to be an inny or an outy, and her snowplough penguin feet. Enough wax in her ears to make a candle. And she’s strong, too, like a baby Wonder Woman. A couple of years, she’ll be kicking my arse!

And I want to remember the behavioural things, like the way she somehow removes her shoes, socks and trousers no matter how high you pull them up or how tightly they’re attached. How she rather creepily smiles at me when I put Vaseline on her bottom, or chirps like a bird and kicks her legs if you lie her on her back without a nappy. The way she dances and sings to Smells Like Teen Spirit (or ‘writhes’ and ‘screams’ according to Lizzie) and chuckles at me when I sing My Girl complete with bass line (‘I got sunshine – bom-bom-bom-bom-bom, burm, on a cloudy day’). How she falls asleep with her mouth wide open like she’s catching flies, and screws the backs of her fists into her eyes when she’s tired. And she watches everything that’s going on, strives to stay awake in case she misses something – she’s more alert than I am half the time.

Then there are the developmental things that need to be recorded for this stage because they change so quickly. Like how at ten weeks Izzie is trying to sit up (my brother took nine months!), how she can stand if you help her balance, and with both as soon as she’s upright she beams with pride as if to say, ‘Look, daddy, I did it! I’m a big girl!’ How she can’t take her eyes off the TV if it’s on. The way she keeps trying to hold her own bottle while we’re feeding her, but given her poor motor control skills succeeds only in pushing it out of her mouth and then punching herself in the head. Give it another few years, she’ll be reading War and Peace and standing for public office – it’s scary how early she’s developing.

Which leaves the simply gross stuff, the anecdotes that are awful at the time but leave you laughing. Like how we have a vibrating poo chair – if she hasn’t gone yet in a day, we put her in her bouncy chair, turn on the vibration and within ten minutes she’s filled her nappy. Every single time. It never fails. Or how when I changed her the other day the inside of her nappy was entirely orange, except for two perfectly elliptical white ovals where her butt cheeks had been. How her grandmother spent ages dressing her in a pretty yellow vest, yellow trousers, yellow dress, yellow cardigan and yellow socks, only for me to remove them ten minutes later covered in sopping yellow poo. And how the other night while I was feeding her she did a massively warm, squelchy fart; I thought I’d change her after she’d finished her milk when I suddenly felt my leg grow wet, picked her up, and lo, my shorts had a large wet yellow patch of poo all over them. Yay.

These are the things that make up a life. Not whose turn is it sterilise the bottles again, where did that sock go, you forgot to buy nappies, and oh my God how can you sleep through all of this screaming? It’s about the little smiles, the laughs and the oddities. These are the things we want to remember in years to come, and the only things Izzie will care about. It’s easy to forget that the little things are by far the most important.

The Hidden Side of Postnatal Depression

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It is not exceptional for one of the parents to be better at this baby business than the other. Despite today’s fluid gender roles, it is normally the dad who goes back to work while the mum becomes the more confident and capable partner, not out of choice but necessity –  being left alone all day, having to rely on your own wits and instincts, and doing the legwork of feeds, nappy changes and constant soothing, means you become better at it than the absent partner through familiarity alone.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. You both have different roles to play in bringing up your baby, two perspectives, two approaches, and this breadth of influence can only benefit the child. They know who to go to for comfort, who for play, who gives them food, who bathes them. The absent dad tends to do the fun stuff, but he’s also the disciplinarian; the present mum does the nitty-gritty of the day-to-day and has to say ‘no’ more often. It’s impossible to say which role is more important, provided you’re working together as a team with the best interests of your child at heart.

The trouble comes when the dad becomes the primary care giver even though the mum wants to be, but can’t because of problems outside her control. Like when she has autism, dyspraxia and postnatal depression.

I’ve touched on this issue before but it’s time to really flesh it out. When one partner struggles to cope with the crying, the sleeplessness, the changes to your routine, the practical aspects of childcare and the emotional toll of the responsibility, while the other seems to be doing fine, it can cause very real problems, particularly if the one struggling is the mother. It can damage the parents’ relationship, the mother’s mental health, the father’s resilience and the mother’s bond with the baby.

To be fair to Lizzie, it can’t be easy discovering you’re not all that good at the thing you’ve been looking forward to for years, or watching the person who was meant to be the secondary carer acting as both mother and father, and doing so with such apparent ease. She freely admits that it’s ten times harder than she thought it would be, so she sticks to the things she expected to be doing: dressing Izzie in pretty outfits, taking her to visit friends in the pushchair, having happy bathtimes. The day-to-day graft is predominantly on me.

At night, I take over sole care of Izzie from sometimes as early as half-eight right the way through to around eight in the morning. And as I’ve been putting in the effort as both mother and father, Izzie responds to me in ways that she doesn’t to Lizzie.

Friday night was a case in point. Lizzie took the baby to her dad’s. Izzie started crying, nay, screaming, and after twenty minutes of neither mother nor grandfather being able to stop it, they rang me in desperation. I went round and Izzie was instantly comforted. She just wanted her dad-mum. And it has driven Lizzie back several weeks.

She’s scared of Izzie, that much is clear. Scared of her screams, scared of her needs, scared of not being able to meet them. And of course, she resents me because I can, because the baby turns to me for comfort. So the better I get at being a dad, the more it upsets Lizzie and the worse her attitude towards me. She’s always angry at me for being what, at the moment, she is unable to be.

And it is putting a strain on our relationship. I know she doesn’t mean the things she says – that she no longer loves me, that she wants me gone, that she’ll get custody of the baby if it comes to it because she’s the mother and ‘the mother always does’ – because twenty minutes later she’s apologising and telling me she loves me, she needs me, and she can’t do it without me. But some of the things she says are so nasty, and they come so often, it becomes more difficult to simply shrug them off. I’m a ‘loser’ if I want a nap in the afternoon because I’ve been up since 4am; I’m ‘lazy’ if I don’t want to take the dog for a five mile walk with a 12-lb baby strapped to my chest; I’m a ‘teacher’s pet’ for answering the doctor’s questions while she sat in silence; and I’m ‘boring’ because I’d rather Izzie was in a sleepsuit to make it easier to check and change her rather than a dress-trouser-knickers-socks combo. We talk about helping mums cope with mood swings- we never talk about the effect this has on the dad.

This is the hidden side of postnatal depression. The dad is meant to shoulder it without complaint, bear the burden that the mother cannot, until she’s back on her feet. And I’m doing that. What I wasn’t prepared for was that every personal success for me knocks Lizzie’s confidence; every time I manage to sooth the baby when she can’t, she resents me more. And I don’t know the solution.

Have I made myself into a crutch that actually keeps her limping? Should I step back, force her to do more? Or would that make things worse if she’s truly not ready, or capable, of coping?

The problem with Lizzie is that she’s an expert at hiding her problems for fear of being seen as weak. It’s the reason she wasn’t diagnosed with Asperger’s until her twenties. It’s the reason I wonder if she’s been honest with the doctor about how she’s feeling, or simply presenting the impression of someone that is coping. Of course, she wants to be seen as a good mother, and I don’t think for a moment it’s easy for any mother to admit they’re struggling because it goes against all our preconceived notions of motherhood – but until she faces it and accepts it, she can’t get better.

Luckily, the base of our relationship is very stable, and has been tempered in the fires of numerous crises. The surface might be full of holes at the moment, but the foundation is untouched. I love Lizzie to bits and it kills me that nothing I can do can make things better for her, and much of what I do to make things easier is actually resented.

So remember the next time you hear it mentioned that postnatal depression doesn’t only affect women – behind the scenes it puts added strain on the whole family. And if you see a dad out and about with his baby, please don’t congratulate him on ‘babysitting’ to give mum a rest – it may well be that he is the mum.

The Eight Week Check

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The eight week check and vaccinations is the first major milestone in your baby’s official development. Even though if there was anything wrong it would probably have already been picked up by the hospital, midwives, health visitors or yourselves, you approach it with mild trepidation in case the doctor ‘finds’ something, gives you a look that says, ‘Oh dear,’ and then starts to discuss further tests and how it’s too early to tell but you might want to start thinking about long term management plans.

And when he asks about your baby, you feel a certain pressure to give the ‘right’ answer, even though you don’t know exactly what that is. You begin to feel judged, as though it is your parenting ability, and not the baby’s health, he’s examining.

‘How much do you feed her?’

I tell him. He nods. What does that mean? Nod as in, ‘Yes, that’s what I’d expect,’ or nod as in, ‘Just as I thought, you suck as a dad. I could tell from the moment you stepped into the room. I mean, look at the way she’s dressed. Who are you kidding? You’re just playing at being a parent.’

Actually, it might just be me who thinks that. Maybe I’m a little sensitive at the moment because I’ve been having dreams again.

The first night I dreamt I was training to be a paediatric nurse, and I was really good at it. I thought I might go back to college and do a Postgraduate Diploma in Children’s Nursing: I seem to be doing rather well with Izzie, I can’t think of anything more worthwhile than looking after babies, and I’d surely be better than some of the uncommunicative, unfriendly and downright antisocial nurses who looked after us during our stay in hospital.

I pictured myself caring for cute little tots, reassuring worried parents, wearing a cool uniform and telling people that yes, I’m a nurse: how grand. My little one would look up to her dad as a hero, and they give you a bursary to train. What could be better?

Then the next night I dreamt I was training to be a paediatric nurse, and I was terrible at it. Deformed, terminally ill babies, emotional and aggressive parents, and horribly sarcastic work colleagues made my job a living hell. I started to think about the sick and dying children, the screams of anguish from horrified mums and dads as their babies slipped away, and my place in that environment. And it no longer looked quite so rosy.

The person specification for a children’s nurse describes an emotionally and mentally resilient individual with great intuition and impeccable people skills. Having been bullied in every job I ever had, and being rather sensitive to boot, I’m not so sure I’d cope with the stresses and strains of children’s nursing. Likewise my history of nervous breakdowns and diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome might not stand me in good stead. But doing a job that makes you suffer is what life is all about, right?

And then the third night I dreamt I was training to be a paediatric nurse on a hospital spaceship while battling an alien that navigated through the ventilation shafts and killed off my patients one by one. As good an indication as any that I don’t have the cognitive stability to be a nurse. So that idea is on the backburner for now.

I doubt I’d be able to give children injections anyway. When the nurse drew out the needle for the vaccinations, a full two inches long, I was wondering how much she’d actually insert when, without warning or preamble, she sank the full length into Izzie’s thigh. I have no idea how it didn’t go straight through and burst out the other side!

It was a horrible experience. Izzie’s eyes went wide with shock, her face turned purple, her mouth opened in unexpected pain and she started to scream. Tears streaming down her cheeks, she looked at me as if to say, ‘Why, dad, why?’ And then a second needle plunged into her other thigh and the horror on her face – ‘You’ve done it again, dad!’ – was heartbreaking.

They say it’s harder on the parents, and they’re right. By the time my irrational (rational?) urge to punch the nurse in the face for hurting my baby had subsided, Izzie was over it. The guilt has taken me days to assuage.

She didn’t suffer any negative side-effects, and on the plus side, it cured her constipation – if you can call following through every fart with a pea-sized poop a plus. Indeed, we’ve swung to the opposite extreme, from hard green nuggets with the consistency of plasticene once a day to multiple yellow liquid explosions. It also smells like vomit, I guess because it’s gone through her bowels so fast that it’s still mostly bile. And I know this because our baby who had only vomited twice since birth is now puking after every feed. But c’est la vie!

In all seriousness, though, it’s at times like these that we should take a moment to remind ourselves how lucky we are to have a healthy baby. Colic, constipation, diarrhoea and cradle cap are mere inconveniences – they’re minor in the general scheme of things – even if they drive us to despair. If they found out there was something wrong with Izzie, we’d take a deep breath and deal with it or adjust to it accordingly, because that’s the commitment we undertook when we chose to be parents, but it’s a relief to know that since she’s as healthy on the inside as she is beautiful on the outside, for now at least we don’t have to.

Medical Paranoia

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I sometimes wonder how people survived in the past without the modern medical industry and its intrusion into every stage of life. How did they manage without someone measuring weight, length, head circumference, and comparing it to a chart to make sure their babies were developing properly (50th, 75th and 75th percentiles respectively, in case you were wondering – tall, thin and big-brained, just like all the best supermodels)?

And developmental stages: at the eight week check (well, nine, because our appointments were late coming through) the doctor told us Izzie should be smiling, cooing and following things with her eyes by now, as well as beginning to support her head, albeit unsteadily, and drawing up her knees and splaying her feet when placed on her tummy in preparation for crawling. Luckily she can do all those things, but what if she couldn’t? Would we worry about her health, or would we simply wait until she did them naturally at her own pace in her own time? I think we all know the answer to that.

In the past, they simply got on with things, and I don’t think it was necessarily a bad way to do it. Do we really need all of this data when humans have been raising children for hundreds of thousands of years? It’s like when grandparents visit and make little pointers on how to do things. I was feeding Izzie the other day when my mother said, ‘Make sure her nose is clear so she can breathe.’ Gee, thanks mum. I’ve only been doing this at least six times a day for nine weeks: how did I ever cope without you here?

Of course, modern medicine is great when things do go wrong, but given that we, as new parents, know so much, and so little, about the health of infants, we err on the side of caution and rush our kids to the doctor when a wait-and-see approach might have been more reasonable. So in the past week, Izzie has been prodded and poked, measured, evaluated, stuck with needles, dazzled, pulled and manipulated during two trips to the hospital, an examination from the Health Visitor, and an outing to the doctor’s.

Nine o’clock on Friday evening I discovered a watery lump on the back of Izzie’s scalp and was worried her squishy head had returned. Wait till Monday and see if it resolves in the meantime? Not a chance. What if it’s an infection? What if it’s a fractured skull? What if she’s going to die?

The doctor felt it, looked at me and said, ‘That’s her skin.’

‘But, like, when she was born she had this swollen squishy head thing, and it felt just like that.’

‘Uh-huh,’ he said, nodding. ‘It’s still just skin.’

Ouch.

Of some consolation was the fact that the waiting room for the out-of-hours GP at the hospital was packed with worried parents clutching babies and toddlers. The old maxim that you wrap your first child in cotton wool while you let the second juggle knives seems to be true: they were all only children (only childs?). A bump on the head, a sniffle, a funny-sounding cough – how did they used to manage without emergency rooms?

We have an ultrasound for Izzie today. Lizzie had hip dysplasia as a child, otherwise known as clicky hip, and so they wanted to screen Izzie against it. She had no problems when examined in NICU, no problems when examined at her eight week check, but to be on the safe side we need to look at the insides of her joints. Pain free but awkward.

When she grows up, Izzie will be amazed to discover that not only have we seen every square inch of her outsides, we’ve seen her hip joints, the four chambers of her heart, her brain and nasal cavity, stomach, kidneys, lungs, liver, bowels and bladder too. Nothing is private anymore.

I guess that’s the price we pay for modern medicine.

Colic, Part 2

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Colic is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to deal with, and if I was twenty and not the thirty-five that I now am, I’m not sure I’d have the tools to cope with it. Although ‘coping’ is a relative term: as I said in my last post, all you can do is survive.

When you’re not experiencing it, colic is a very easy thing to dismiss. ‘It’s nothing to worry about, just a bit of colic,’ is what you hear from health professionals, while people whose kids are grown and gone reassure you that it passes, so don’t let it colour your perceptions of parenting.

Nobody should ever use the word ‘just’ alongside ‘colic’. It’s like saying falling down a flight of stairs is ‘just a little tumble’. And the fact that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel is no practical help when you’re standing at the coal face in the dark. This might sound melodramatic, and if I weren’t the one going through it, I might roll my eyes and say, ‘Oh get on with it, nobody ever said it’d be easy.’ But the unlikely truth is that an eleven pound baby that can’t verbalise, move, or consciously plan her behaviour can dish out punishment like a professional.

A colicky baby doesn’t cry. Crying is dainty, purposeful and reasonable. A colicky baby screams an angry, pain-filled shriek of accusation and exasperation. The volume, tone and pitch seem perfectly calculated to inflict pain, set your teeth on edge, and rattle your nerves. And the duration – hour after hour after hour – saps your strength and your ability to think clearly. You can’t eat, talk, go to the toilet, read, watch TV, listen to music, or in any way relax because you’re subjected to a continuous assault on the senses.

And assault is what it is. While Asperger’s Syndrome is often portrayed as a social condition, many of us are afflicted with sensory issues from extreme sensitivity to surprising insensitivity. Lizzie has no sense of smell, very little sense of taste, and while she is oversensitive to touch, she has an incredibly high tolerance of pain. But like me, she has hypersensitive hearing, able to hear whispered conversations from several rooms away. This means that when Izzie screams, it causes us physical pain and a rush of adrenalin that befuddles us even further.

Worse are the emotions it stirs up. People liken those of us with Asperger’s to Mr. Spock from Star Trek – logical, unemotional beings who live in our heads, not our hearts – and they’re right, but not in the way that they think. Because the Vulcans are not unemotional creatures, but are in fact so emotional that they’ve had to come up with a way to control and overcome their passions. I think that far from being unemotional, people with AS feel emotions too much, and so force them down and try to operate at the level of intellect. This means we don’t understand our emotions, don’t know how to control then, so do our best to keep them at bay.

Colic unlocks them.

Lizzie can cope with a crying baby for around three minutes before it becomes too much. She feels overwhelmed, afraid, guilty; she gets upset. Why is Izzie crying? Why can’t I stop it? I’m a bad mother; I can’t deal with this; I’m not good enough. Lizzie’s heart pounds, her body goes into defence mode, and she hands the baby back to me and leaves the room. It damages her ability to bond with the baby and her involvement in Izzie’s care. I catch her crying when she’s by herself. It means we’re floating around a diagnosis of something with the initials PND.

This isn’t exclusive to parents with Asperger’s, of course. Colic is well known to heighten stress and cause anxiety, postnatal depression, self-esteem issues and relationship difficulties. You feel helpless. You feel frustrated by your inability to do anything to help. But you know it’s not the baby’s fault, so you take it out on each other.

As a couple, during a bout of colic you communicate by shouted niggles and pointed digs, because you’re both stressed and tired and you can’t hear one another or have anything like a reasonable conversation. You start to think about how unfair it is that the other person is eating dinner while yours is getting cold, or that they’re having a nice relaxing bath while you’re gritting your teeth against a tornado. It’s no wonder it puts such a strain on relationships. By the time it’s finished, it’s so late that you collapse into bed and the last thing you want to be is an attentive partner. Cuddle? I just want to be left alone.

Given Lizzie can only cope for around three minutes, when Izzie cries for a solid eight hours, I bear the brunt for seven hours and fifty-seven consecutive minutes. Her screams make such an impact on my mind that I even hear phantom baby cries when she’s fast asleep. It’s lonely trying to console a colicky baby, a nightmarish fight for survival that breaks your heart in two.

But survive I must and survive I do, even if I despair sometimes, even if I’m driven to tears, because I’m a dad, and that’s what dads do. The true measure of a person is not how they cope when everything’s going well, but what they do when it’s all falling apart. I knew going in that I’d have to walk through hell for my daughter, and it’s a price I’m willing to pay.

One day it’ll be over and I can wear my scars with pride. Until then, I just have to keep fighting, and remember what it is I’m fighting for.

Yogi Bear

This. Always this.

Colic

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

As six o’clock approaches, the seconds seem to tick closer together like the theme tune to Jaws, a panicked heartbeat that whispers, ‘Something wicked this way comes.’ Around the world, I imagine there are millions of parents like us, watching the clock, asking those self-same questions over and over again as though driven to the edge of madness: will my baby scream tonight? Will we survive until bedtime? Or will the colic monster get us?

That’s actually a bit of an exaggeration. While on average, colic occurs between 6pm and midnight, Izzie tends to start crying between five and six and continues for at least five hours. And we don’t watch the clock – we just have a vague apprehension as the afternoon wears on that this could well be the quiet before the almighty evening storm. But the rest is true: colic takes you to the very edge of despair.

I must admit, up until a few weeks ago I had no idea what colic is. In fact, I still don’t, because nobody does. What causes it? Nobody knows. Why does my baby have it? Nobody knows. What can I do to prevent it? Is she in pain? Why won’t she stop screaming? Nobody knows.

Colic affects at least one in every five babies, so it’s not exactly a fringe subject, but we know more about Kim Kardashian’s backside than what’s making our babies scream their lungs out all evening.

In this modern age of super fast fibre optic broadband, 5G phones and viagra for women, it’s easy to forget that we don’t know everything. With a seemingly infinite number of academic departments and high-tech companies committed to spending vast amounts of money probing the smallest and furthest reaches of the universe (Large Hadron Collider, anyone?), you could be forgiven for thinking that the biggest discoveries left to be made are unimaginably far away in size, space or time.

But the truth is that while we know some complex things in great detail, we have no idea about a lot of basic stuff. We know the state of the universe in the split second following the Big Bang – ten to the minus forty-three seconds after the Big Bang, to be exact, or 43 zeroes after the decimal point – and that was around thirteen billion years ago, but we don’t even know why people yawn. We used to think it gave an oxygen boost to a tired brain, but since that’s been shown to be false, there’s no consensus among scientists on why we do it. Is it a social signal to synchronise bedtimes for people living in groups? A means of cooling the brain? A stimulus to muscle stretching? Nobody knows.

This knowledge disparity is equally true of medical science. We can use 3D bioprinters to replicate tissues, grow organs in Petri dishes, transplant pigs’ hearts into human beings. Thanks to the pharmaceutical industry, more than half of people diagnosed with cancer survive, while HIV is no longer a death sentence. And if medical TV shows and every Hollywood movie are to be believed, we can zap people with a jolt of electricity and bring them back to life after their hearts have stopped (news flash: we can’t).

Yet if you’ve ever spent much time in a hospital, you’ll realise modern medicine is based on guesswork. When Izzie was in ICU she had a temperature, so they started her on two types of antibiotic. Her symptoms went away, so we know one of them (probably) worked, but we don’t know what was actually wrong with her or why it worked. Same with the antidepressants known as Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs). It’s assumed they increase serotonin levels, but they’re not actually sure how they work, only that they do. The morning after pill? It prevents pregnancy – somehow. Modern medicine is less high-tech science and more ‘let’s throw a bunch of pills at you and see what happens. Ah, it’s cleared up? It might have been something we did. Or not.’ In other words, it’s somewhere between science, art and alchemy.

The diagnostic criteria for colic reflects the vague idea of what it is. Colic is defined as three hours of unexplained crying at least three days a week for at least three weeks in an otherwise healthy baby. ‘Unexplained’ in this context means ‘unstoppable’, in that she doesn’t want food, changing or burping, and the usual things that comfort a crying baby don’t work: she just cries. It normally resolves by the time baby is four months, but can last up to a year (heaven forfend!). And there’s not much you can do about it.

There are, of course, many theories about colic. The most likely is that it’s the result of wind trapped in the intestines as colic is often accompanied by a red face as though straining, hands balled into fists, knees drawn up as though suffering stomach cramps, and an abundance of farting. Since babies lack a functioning body clock, it remains a mystery exactly why it occurs in the evening, but gas in the pipes seems as good an explanation as any.

Soothing a colicky baby is an absolute nightmare. Yesterday, Izzie cried from five till ten in the evening, stopping only to swallow when she was fed. I offered her the dummy, put her in the sling, cuddled her, walked her in the pram, took her for a drive, rocked her, sang to her, read to her, put her over my shoulder, my lap, my thighs, swung her in the car seat, sat her in her vibrating bouncy chair, played music, played the guitar, massaged her belly, put her on the bed, the sofa, the beanbag, on her front, back, side, and all to no avail. Ultimately, it took a combination of swaddling her, rocking her in the Moses Basket with her dummy in her mouth, playing white noise loudly right beside her head and making shushing sounds to settle her. Even then, I’m not sure if she went to sleep because of what I did or because she had exhausted herself. Whatever the case, we survived another evening.

That is all you can think about during an episode of colic: survival. Beyond a feeling of utter helplessness, colic can have a very negative effect on the parent. I will discuss these in my next post, but for now it’s enough to say that having a baby with colic can cause frustration, exhaustion, anxiety and depression, and puts added pressure on the parental relationship.

If you have a baby with colic, it might be a small consolation to know that you’re not alone, you’re not doing anything wrong that’s causing it, and colic doesn’t seem to cause any long-term effects. Of greater solace is the fact that, whether in a few weeks or a few months, this is going to be over. It will end. And once we’ve conquered this, teething is going to be a doddle!

Baby Talk

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

There’s something called Dunstan Baby Language that seems quite popular at the moment. It’s the idea that all babies have five ‘words’ that they use to communicate from birth, irrespective of culture. These are:

  1. ‘Neh’ – I’m hungry (listen for the ‘n’ sound);
  2. ‘Owh’ – I’m sleepy (watch for the wide open mouth);
  3. ‘Heh’ – I’m in discomfort (listen for the ‘h’ sound);
  4. ‘Eairh’ – I have lower-abdominal gas pains (a long, drawn-out sound);
  5. ‘Eh’ – I have an upper-abdominal air bubble I’m trying to shift (short or staccato, like ‘Eh-eh-eh-eh’).

I think, to a certain extent, these are fairly accurate. Izzie does make an ‘n’ sound in her screams when she’s really hungry, while her favourite cry is ‘eairh’, and I know for a fact she’s very gassy – she’s farted nineteen times already today, not that I’m counting, and not dainty little lady farts either but truck-driver tear-a-hole-in-the-seat-of-your-pants style guffs. The rest of the sounds are rather tough to distinguish from each other, and when Izzie goes, ‘Eairh-owh-neh-heh-eh,’ it muddies the water somewhat.

What is really good about this system is that it stresses the main problems with babies: they need feeding, changing, burping, cuddling or you just have to endure their pain. If only Izzie would stick to five sounds and these five alone, we might be getting somewhere. Instead, she’s confusing the hell out of me.

You see, at root, Asperger’s Syndrome is considered a developmental disorder affecting communication and social understanding. We struggle to comprehend the nuances of everyday verbal and non-verbal language, find it difficult to form and maintain relationships, and fail to appreciate the thoughts and feelings of others. So far, these aspects of my condition have had very little impact on my parenting ability, but they are beginning to make themselves felt.

Up until about a week ago, Izzie was a socially simple baby. That is, her wants and needs were easy to understand and fulfil. She was either asleep, staring blankly at a lightbulb or window, or screwing up her face as she experimented with her muscles – no action needed – or else she was crying, so needed feeding, changing, winding or cuddling. It didn’t require a great deal of imagination or interpretation.

But all that has now changed. I was looking forward to when Izzie started smiling, and it’s undeniably cute, but I had no idea that alongside the grins would come a range of facial expressions and vocalisations communicating the whole gamut of human emotions, entirely in the non-verbal sphere. And that’s what I’m battling with right now.

When Izzie’s sad, her little bottom lip folds back and tears come into her eyes as she lets out a heart-rending whimper; when she’s tired, she yawns; and when she’s hungry, she sucks her fingers. In addition, when I chirrup like a bird or make funny faces at her, she frowns as though bewildered, and when I lean in close to her, her eyes go wide as if alarmed. And that’s the limit of what I can decipher.

Alongside these expressions, she sticks out her tongue, rolls her eyes, chews on her fists, kicks her legs, swings her arms, wiggles her fingers, grips onto things, claws her face, rubs her eyes, thrashes her head from side to side, grabs her nose, kicks off her blankets and booties and trousers, slaps her cheeks, purses her lips, goes rigid like a plank or scrunches tight into a ball, lifts her arms above her head (don’t shoot me!) or reaches one up with the other at her waist (Superman!), and that’s just scratching the surface. None of these gestures seem consistent or communicate very much – sometimes the tongue out means she’s hungry, sometimes not; pursing her lips means she’s peeing except when she isn’t; and she rubs her eyes when she’s tired or else about to spend the next eight hours awake. So I watch her and feel helplessly confused.

The babbling is even worse. Whenever Izzie’s now awake, she’s constantly talking, cooing, muttering, coughing, squeaking, grunting, spitting and spluttering. It makes me surprisingly anxious. What on earth is she saying? What does she want?

Every time she ‘says’ something I leap up to see what she’s asking for, what I as a dad need to do. I feel like I’m letting her down because I don’t speak baby and can’t figure out what she’s blathering on about. Sometimes I find myself hoping she’ll cry, because I can deal with that – it means something’s wrong and I can fix it. But I can’t fix something when I don’t know it’s broken.

Apparently, I am told, most of the time Izzie doesn’t want anything. I should just let her talk. Or talk back to her. But what about? I explained how laser printers worked yesterday, the tripartite division of government the day before, which I’m not sure she got because she had a good chuckle midway through. And at least when I talk to the dog, he pays attention – Izzie couldn’t seem to care less if I was there or not. And none of it sounds like neh, owh, heh, eairh or eh!

Nobody prepared me for this phase. Roll on when she can use actual words. That’s only a couple of weeks away, right? Right?

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