Regular readers of this blog might have noticed that the frequency of posts has dropped off lately. For this I must apologise and explain.
In my core I am a writer. Ever since I was a child, four or five years old, I’ve wanted to be a writer. I always said I’d write a book one day, and then when I was eight I wondered what the hell I was waiting for and started. The result was Mystery of the Samurai Kidnapper. Needless to say, it sucked, but I was hooked.
I wrote all kinds of stories and read everything I could – action, adventure, crime, horror, science-fiction, war. When I was sixteen I began writing seriously, and at eighteen started sending samples to magazines and agents and publishers.
Skip forward eighteen years and I’ve written nine books, several scripts and dozens of short stories – over two million words of creative writing. I’ve come close a few times – I had a call from Ian McEwan’s agent once to discuss my novel The Butterfly Collection, and nearly nabbed an agent from Blake Friedmann for Beyond Wild, only to fall at the final hurdle – but other than a few short stories, I’ve been remarkably unsuccessful at getting into print. It goes with the territory.
But earlier this year I felt I was on a roll. I entered twelve writing competitions. Normally I just take a punt, but these were twelve of the best best things I’ve ever written – I actually thought that this time I had a shot.
Some were for short stories, some for the first 5000 or 10,000 words of a novel. I worked like a dog, polished them to perfection, then waited with bated breath. I hoped to win, but I knew I’d be happy just to be short-listed in one of them. It would make all the years of sacrifice worthwhile.
Over the past few months, the competition results trickled in, one at a time. And with each one, my hope and joy gave way to bitter disappointment. I didn’t win any. I wasn’t short-listed for any. I wasn’t even long-listed for any. It might sound like sour grapes, but that last rejection in early July crushed me.
Rejection is part of being a writer, and you have to be resilient. To put it into perspective, JK Rowling recently spoke of her pain at having Harry Potter rejected twelve times. When that last competition declared, it brought my rejection count up to 327.
As a father, I have to act happy for my child. I have to make out like everything’s fine and dandy and be the same as I always am. So I did. But inside, I was broken. It took all my focus and energy to hide it. The last thing I wanted to do was write this blog.
So I sat, and I festered, and I wondered if I would ever bother to write again.
But, to quote a cliche, it is always darkest before the dawn.
I’ve been awarded a publishing contract! It’s for a book I’ve written on living with autism, provisionally entitled AnAdult With Asperger’s: A Guide for the Newly-Diagnosed. It’s being published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers and will be coming out in the spring, and so I’m working around the clock to get the final draft ready in time.
As you can imagine, my mood and my self-esteem have both improved no end. I’ll try to keep posting every week on this blog as normal and I’ll keep you posted on the book as more details emerge.
I guess the moral of this story is: never give up, because you never know what’s around the next corner.
You think you’re getting the hang of this parenting thing – dang it, you know you’ve definitely got the hang of this parenting thing – and then you enter a heatwave and have to learn it all again from scratch.
Where before you spent your time worrying that your child will be too cold, now you have to strike a compromise between keeping her cool and keeping her covered. Instead of cardigans and sleepsuits, you’re packing sunhats, suncream and sunshades, dresses, shorts, cotton shirts and sandals. You overload on water until you’re weighed down like a pack mule, and you start to spend all your time in gardens and parks because the house is like a freaking furnace.
At thirteen months, Izzie is happily walking, running, playing, and being a normal little girl, and that makes it worse. You’re constantly chasing her around the lawn, trying to steer her into the shade, rescuing her sunhat from the bush she’s thrown it into, surreptitiously spraying her with the sunscreen, pulling twigs and acorns from her inquisitive fingers, fending off over-friendly dogs and local children, and swatting away stinging insects, all the while trying not to trip over the pink plastic crap that has turned your back garden into a garish graveyard of slides, paddling pools, sandpits and water tables.
Since she’s wearing dresses without a vest, her nappy is exposed, meaning within minutes it turns into a grass-stained, leaf-carrying, twig-dragging mess. Add to this that her mother and grandfather have a penchant for throwing her into paddling pools and dousing her with watering cans – which she loves, by the way – it turns said nappy into a gargantuan jellyfish that collects around her ankles. Unsurprisingly, she’s now spending a lot of her time naked from the waist down.
While that’s totally normal, the downside to this is that although she can walk, she’s not exactly ready for the Olympics. Twenty steps, perhaps, before she loses balance and slams down onto her bottom, then repeats the process ad finitum. And being in the middle of a heatwave, the ground is like concrete. With a nappy on, there’s a certain amount of padding – without, and her bottom is a mottled black-and-blue mess of bruises. No wonder she fidgets whenever we put her in her high chair!
And that’s another unexpected difficulty of hot weather parenting. All the good, hearty, wholesome, home-cooked grub that she was eating fine before, she now treats as though we’re trying to force feed her dog poo. She wants crisps, cheese, ham, wafers, raisins, biscuits, toast – the kind of stuff that’ll keep you alive, but probably isn’t the most healthy diet three meals a day. So mealtimes have become a lesson in patience and torture.
Nights are tough, too. Her room got up to 29-degrees the other evening. We borrowed an incredibly noisy A/C unit and got it down to 23, but the second I turned it off and put her to bed it jumped back up to 26. But then, of course, it cools as the night presses on. The current procedure is that I put her to bed in just a nappy, then a couple of hours later I put a breathable blanket over her, a couple of hours after that I slip her into a sleepsuit, and around four in the morning she’s ready for a gro-bag. Then the sun rises, and by the time we get her up the temperature is starting to rocket again. And I find I’ve barely slept.
Then there are the little indignities. Because of the heat, nappies start to smell like cheese within minutes of a wee. You change them twice as often, but can’t eliminate the noxious odour that pervades your house, even after you’ve emptied the steaming nappy bin and consigned it to the dustbin outside.
And to add boredom, social isolation and frustration to your plight, none of the mother-baby groups run over the summer holidays so you have to entertain yourselves, in public places now overrun with screaming terrors and their children. The other day, Lizzie suggested we take the little one to a water park at a local recreation ground. It’s free, like a little play park with fountains and water features and a paddling pool. So as I have committed myself to going out with Lizzie and Izzie more as a family (since I’m a hermit), I agreed.
We went in the afternoon. In a heatwave. In the summer holidays. As expected, the place was RAMMED. A veritable cornucopia of colours and movement and noise, noise, noise! Kids splashing you, bumping into you, stepping on your feet, shooting you with water pistols, screaming, shouting, throwing things, urgh!
I may have mentioned before that, as someone with Asperger’s Syndrome, I get rapidly overwhelmed by, well, colour and movement and noise and touch.
Lizzie and Izzie loved it. I went and sat under a tree.
Historically, hysteria only affected those with wombs. Bizarrely, it was believed that the womb wasn’t fixed in a woman’s abdomen – it could go wandering about her body wherever the hell it felt like, going up and down and side to side like an animal within an animal. And depending on where it happened to be and what parts of the body it was pressing on, it could cause physical symptoms like headaches and nosebleeds and even bad knees. That’s the reason the words ‘hysteria’ and ‘hysterectomy’ are so similar – ‘hystera’ is ancient Greek for uterus.
By the time the Victorians got hold of it, knowledge about the location of the womb had moved on, but so too had the symptoms of being a woman. Instead of causing physical ailments, hysteria now described a cluster of mental symptoms typically associated with a drunk fifteen-year-old girl at a party: anxiety, excitability, irrationality, excessive outpouring of emotion, irritability, weepiness and fainting. Hence in modern parlance the word ‘hysteria’, and its derivative ‘hysterical’, means a ridiculously over-the-top reaction with a level of emotional performance not normally seen outside of musical theatre or reality TV.
I give this lesson in etymology because we have reached a phase with Izzie that can best be characterized by, you guessed it, hysteria.
Basically, multiple times per day for the past couple of weeks she has broken down in floods of tears, sobs and screams. Sometimes I think she’s broken a bone, she’s so distressed. She cries so hard she can’t breathe and starts to choke. She gets so hysterical, it’s scary, and she won’t be soothed. Cuddles, sing-songs, kisses, rocking, water, milk, biscuits, nothing. The only way to stop her sometimes is to run a bath and put her in it, stroke her back until she gradually gets her breathing back under control. And when she’s finally calm, you say, ‘My God, girl, you were hysterical!’ and she giggles.
It takes very little to set it off. One of the most regular is that she wants to hold your hand all the time and walk from every here to every there. The second you let go, she drops to the floor, her forehead touches her knees and the screeching begins.
Same with leaving the room. That’s all it takes. Your foot crosses the threshold and she’s reduced to a wreck.
The other times are weird and unpredictable. She undid the zip on her bag, right to the bottom, but as the zip didn’t keep going any further, she burst into tears. She ate her banana, then cried because she had finished her banana. The chair was against the wall and she wanted to squeeze through the inch-wide gap instead of go around it, and because she couldn’t fit, no matter how hard she forced her head against the wood, she started screaming.
She pointed at a cactus on the window sill and cried because I wouldn’t give it to her; she held a book horizontally with the spine at the top, and screamed because the pages wouldn’t open right to left; she sobbed uncontrollably because her right shoe had to go on her right foot when she wanted it on the left.
Then there are the times when you can’t work out what the hell is the reason. She’s sitting on your lap perfectly fine, and suddenly she’s out-and-out screaming and crying, and nothing has changed from one moment to the next. It frays your nerves and tests your patience. In your mind, a good dad keeps his kids happy, and this screaming, crying baby taunts you, every tear a knife to the heart saying, ‘bad dad, bad dad, bad dad, bad dad.’ She’s having a bath every day now – not to keep her clean but to stop the tantrums when they start.
So this is the phase we have reached. At least, I hope it’s just a phase and not her personality coming to the fore. In ancient Greece, the cure for a wandering womb was to get pregnant. If that’s the case, we’ve got a lot of years to wait until this passes!
One of the major milestones all parents look forward to is their child’s first word. After all, a spoken language is what distinguishes us from the rest of the intelligent apes, and the first word is the moment when your little bundle of neediness and poop becomes a fully integrated part of the human race. Every baby diary dutifully stipulates you must record this sacred first word, and people can often tell you what it was as it sinks into the familial consciousness as a treasured anecdote.
I’m finding it’s a bit more complicated than that.
Izzie talks. That is, she makes lots of babbling noises that she combines in long streams of phonemes. Every so often, she’ll therefore come out with something not simply resembling a word, but as clear a word as you’ve ever heard. By accident.
Do these random noises count as words? I bloody hope not. About five months ago when she was sitting on our bed, she looked at me, smiled, and said as plain as day, ‘Murder.’ When I was bathing her a month after that, she pointed at me, all innocent and sweet, and said, ‘Man-boobs.’ There’s no way in hell I’m writing that in her baby diary!
Then there are the words she uses that aren’t actual words. Whenever she sees my father-in-law’s dog she says, ‘Wo-wo,’ and does it consistently enough for us to know what she means. If a word is a bunch of sounds that carry a specific meaning that is used to communicate information, then ‘wo-wo’ is definitely her first word. But ‘wo-wo’ isn’t a word – at least, not in any language of which I’m aware.
And what about words she mispronounces? If you greet her and say, ‘Hello,’ she replies with, ‘Ay-oh’. There are two problems with this one. First, she’s simply repeating what you’re saying rather than volunteering the sound herself. Secondly, ‘ay-oh’ is not ‘hello’. So do these facts invalidate it as a word?
Anyway, what she can say seems, to my mind at least, far less important than what she can understand. It’s said that for every word they can say, a child understands ten. I think that’s an underestimate – Izzie seems to understand freaking everything.
Mummy, daddy, Nana, Granny, Poppa and Gramps are a given by this age, and there’s no doubting she knows her own name. Yes, no and don’t are also in the bag, even if she chooses to ignore them more often than not. And key events are well known – bedtime (rubs eyes), nappy change (runs away), bye-bye (waves).
More impressive are the actions. Most of them are quite simple, one-action commands. ‘Where’s so-and-so?’ will prompt her to seek it out. ‘Get it for daddy,’ results in her fetching it. ‘Put it in the box,’ will make her do just that, and she’s very good at ‘hands up’, ‘clap’, and ‘twinkle, twinkle’ (opening and closing fists).
Some, however, are far more complex. If you say, ‘Mummy needs to put on her shoes,’ she crawls over to a shoe, picks it up, brings it back, and tries to put it on mummy’s foot. Generally the wrong foot, but it’s still remarkable when you consider she can’t actually speak yet. Before you know it, she’ll be making daddy his morning coffee.
So if anyone asks, many years hence, about Izzie’s first word, it was ‘murder’, followed by ‘man-boobs’, ‘wo-wo’ and ‘ay-oh’. But until she says something like ‘mummy’, I’m leaving the baby diary blank!
The day you buy your child her first pair of shoes is meant to be a red letter day, the seminal event on her journey towards mobility and toddler-hood, and a time to pat yourself on the back for a job well done. Trouble is, there’s no time to savour this feeling of satisfaction because as soon as they’re on her feet, the world shifts beneath your feet again.
It’s not like walking is necessarily a new thing for Izzie – she was standing with support at two months, walking with support at seven, and took her first unaided steps at eleven – but now she can put a dozen steps together, everything has changed. As soon as we slipped on those cutesy pink shoes she decided that crawling was for babies. Even if she only has to move a foot, she’ll stand and walk it now. Her determination knows no bounds.
Bow before me and my big-girl shoes!
Unfortunately, and here is the reason her first pair of shoes is not a day for celebration, she has also now decided that she’s too grown-up for a pushchair. She just wants to walk, walk, walk. But not just anywhere – she wants to walk where she wants to walk, irrespective of you.
We put on her shoes in the shoe shop and walked her around in them and that was that. She screamed like a frustrated banshee when we put her in the pushchair, screamed like we’d never heard her scream, and in public too. We figured we’d let her walk since she had new shoes on, a little treat.
Holding onto both my hands, she wandered around the square. So far, so good. But the second I walked her into a shop, she let go with one hand, pivoted on her heel and walked out again. So I steered her in, and she walked out again. And again. So I picked her up.
Oh my gosh. More screaming. ‘I’m a big girl, daddy! I go where I like!’
And it’s been that way ever since.
If you’re taking her somewhere she doesn’t want to go, she either lets go and turns, drags you in another direction, or else drops to the floor. This spirit of independence is rapidly turning into a spirit of defiance that we’re really going to have to keep an eye on!
She certainly wants to run before she can walk – literally! When we’re not holding her hands, she runs everywhere, that whole ‘I’m-falling-forward-so-I’ll-just-walk-faster-to-counteract-gravity’ thing. Which means that when she falls – and she’s falling a lot – she lands with a bang. Her legs are covered in bruises and she keeps throwing herself headlong into the furniture with no regard for her safety. But when she does, she’ll just pull herself back up to her feet and run on again, the imprint of a chair leg down the side of her face.
This devil-may-care attitude has extended to her rocking toys too. Sitting down is clearly too easy for a girl with big-girl shoes, too boring for someone who can (sort of) walk. So she does stunts that terrify the hell out of her daddy.
I call this one ‘standing on the crossbar with my butt overhanging the back’And this is called ‘holy shit she’s on one leg and still rocking!’
I have no idea where she gets it from.
No idea whatsoever…
So beware the day you buy your child her first pair of shoes – it might change things in ways you never expected.
Like many parents, the thought of leaving my twelve-month-old daughter with somebody else overnight fills me with dread, regardless of who that somebody is. Therefore, the thought of leaving her for four nights with her Granny while I went on honeymoon was a real crisis of character.
Regular followers of this blog will be aware that, when booking said honeymoon, all was not well in the Galton-Drew household. Lizzie wanted to go away for seven nights; I wanted to go for a maximum of four. She accused me of being unable to let go; I accused her of finding it too easy to let go. She wanted our old life; I wanted our new life. And so it went round.
Ultimately we went away for five days, four nights, a result of both my need to be a dad and be there for my child, and the fact we’d misinterpreted the website and couldn’t actually afford seven nights anyway. Building up to it, I wasn’t over eager to leave my troubles (I mean, my daughter) behind. How would she cope without me? How would I cope without her? What if something happened? How could I possibly enjoy myself knowing I’d abandoned my parental responsibility in order to have a jolly?
You know – normal, obsessive, neurotic parent thoughts.
For all parents considering time away from the baby, it’s of course entirely up to you and you should always do what you’re comfortable with, but having now had a holiday without the little one, perhaps my experience will help you make up your mind.
I needn’t have worried. At all. About myself or the baby.
If we start with the little one, she was absolutely fine. She didn’t seem to miss us, went to bed without a fuss and was thoroughly spoiled by her grandmother. Actually, that’s possibly the only real problem: having been fed home-cooked finger food she could feed herself with, she now steadfastly refuses food from jars and food that requires a spoon. Thanks Granny!
Not to blow my own trumpet, but I think the reason it went so well is that we’ve done a great job creating a confident, outgoing child. We’ve been there in the background but we’ve allowed Izzie her freedom, been ready to catch her when she falls but let her explore where and how she wants. It means she’s fearless, ready to face the unknown because she knows there’s a safety net beneath her and rescue just a chirrup away. It’s certainly confirmed there’s nothing wrong with our parenting style.
Going back to the baby-less holiday, I was fine too. Surprisingly fine. I put her out of my mind and barely thought about her. True, there were moments – when I saw someone pushing a pushchair, when I heard a baby crying, when I saw a strawberry-blonde toddler waddling awkwardly along the quayside – but for the most part, I didn’t find it as crippling and debilitating as I thought I would.
Perhaps this is because I’m a person, and not just a dad. It’s easy to forget, when you’re at the coalface, that there’s a whole other side to you – several sides. Lizzie and I finally got to do what we love doing: exploring. We drove down unmarked roads and walked along overgrown tracks, ducked through caves and peered into rockpools, squeezed up spiral staircases and descended into dungeons, danced on beaches in the rain and stared at Pagan trinkets scattered around Neolithic stone circles in celebration of the solstice, and still somehow found the time for hot tubs, steam rooms and meals out. That is who we are as a couple, and what we haven’t been since the baby was born.
Despite my previous claims that you can holiday just fine with a baby, the truth is that you can’t do everything. You can’t just stop at the side of the road because you’ve seen something interesting poking out of the long grass, examine it for five minutes, then jump back in the car. You can’t decide on a whim to explore this ruined castle, or wander across that causeway, or climb down these two-hundred steps to that isolated beach. Around a hundred times I thought, ‘We couldn’t do this with a baby.’
And it felt so good! Not having to think about nappies and food and waterproofs, being able to hold hands with each other instead of constantly focusing on someone else, is amazingly therapeutic after a year of unremitting parenthood. I saw many young families out with kids, and all of them were struggling, arguing, flustered, overloaded with bags and equipment, and it was such a relief not to be similarly encumbered for once.
Lizzie and I connected in a way we haven’t since forever. Of course, when you become a parent you don’t cease to be a partner, but it’s very easy to cease making an effort for one another since you’re so knackered and emotionally overwhelmed by the whole world of baby care. The arguments that characterised our lives over the past six months have gone. And that doesn’t just make you a better partner, it makes you a better parent too.
Before this honeymoon I could barely countenance the idea of going away without my child; now I think it’s a great idea. Parenting is a team sport, and the occasional team-building weekend is essential to keep it running smoothly.
A night with a couple of hours of broken sleep is normal when you’re a parent, and while unpleasant, more than bearable.
What’s slightly harder is when that night of broken sleep is followed by a day of doctors and hospitals, a night with no sleep, a day helping prepare for the wedding, another night of no sleep, and another day preparing for the wedding, and then a wedding rehearsal.
This evening, after bathing the baby at Lizzie’s dad’s farm, I had to get someone to take the baby off me before I collapsed. Possibly because, looking after Izzie around the clock for four days, trying to get her to eat, keep her fluids up and soothe her, I was not only in desperate need of sleep, I had neglected eating or drinking myself.
Lizzie, of course, has been understandably preoccupied with arrangements for Saturday, leaving the brunt to unfortunately fall upon me. Izzie is very grizzly, has a fluctuating temperature, and chronic diarrhoea – all a result of her gastroenteritis. Worse, since Wednesday’s stint in the Children’s Unit, she has developed a phobia of syringes. Every dose of Calpol or Ibuprofen or gripe water is met with stubborn resistance and followed by two hours of misery.
As a result of the experience of hospitals, she has become remarkably clingy. I have never been hugged so hard. If I so much as lean forward an inch, this vice-like grip tightens around my shoulders and she starts to scream.
So she will only sleep on me.
That’s great if you’re able to sleep with a baby snoring on your chest. If you can’t, after a few days it seems to result in a spinning head, pink eyes, trembling hands, a stiff neck, an aching back, a sore chest, intermittent breathlessness, and a face that twitches as though attached to a whole mesh of electrical wire. All I need now is a rash that doesn’t disappear when a glass is pressed over it, and I’ll be really worried!
Tonight, for the second night in a year, I am sans baby. The night before my wedding. I was always meant to spend it alone, but after my near-fainting episode, they sent me home early. And instead of luxuriating in my aloneness or living it up, or at the very least working on my speech, I can’t open my left eye, my head feels like someone is sawing through it with a spoon, and no matter how hard I try, I’m too tired to fall asleep!
In all honesty, I’m a tad worried about my little one. But there are fifteen people there, including her mum, aunt, great-aunt, grandmother and grandfather. It’s an important lesson to learn: I’m not invincible and I can’t do it all alone, despite how much I think I can. I guess that’s what marriage is all about.
And on that note, I’d better at least try to get some sleep, or they’ll have to Photoshop my eyes open in the pictures!
They say that life is what happens while you’re making other plans, and they’re definitely not wrong. I had this week planned out in fine detail. I have to: I’m getting married on Saturday. So there is an awful lot to do and I couldn’t afford any hiccups.
You can guess where this is going.
When you’re a dad, hiccups go with the territory. I expected a few things to crop up. I hadn’t imagined that life, death, birth, suicide and viral gastroenteritis would feature quite so prominently, however.
It started Monday. I was already up against it as I had my stag-do that night, when, driving home along a country lane, I saw a ball of white fluff wandering down the middle of the road. Since it’s a busy road and people drive like maniacs, I stopped to move it out of traffic, when I realised it was something I really couldn’t leave to get run over.
There were no trees about – just bushes – and those on the other side of a ditch, and if I left it in a random hedge there was no way it’d survive. Now I know you’re supposed to leave balls of fluff alone, but these were extenuating circumstances. So I did what I thought was best – I picked it up and I put it in my car.
I had no clue what it was, but given it had a hooked beak and long, sharp talons, I had a fairly good guess.
Any ideas?
Since the last bird of prey I tried to rescue didn’t make it, I was determined that this one would. Luckily a few miles down the road is an owl, raptor and reptile sanctuary, so I took it there. Turns out it was a barn owl chick, far too young to be out of the nest. They’re going to get him well and then find a nest with similar aged chicks and slip him in, to be raised by a surrogate mother back in the wild.
My good deed for Monday was done – but it ate up a massive chunk of the day.
On Tuesday, I did a few wedding-related things like writing my groom’s speech, but I have to confess to being distracted all day by the wrens nesting two feet outside the back door. Every three or four minutes they return to the box with an insect, whereuopon three very hungry chicks lean chirping out of the hole. I guess I don’t have to watch them, but it’s hard not to when they’re so busy from sun up – around half-four in the morning – right the way through to after sunset – gone nine-thirty at night.
Industrious little buggers
Part of the reason I couldn’t look away was this whole parenting thing. I couldn’t help feeling a kinship with these tiny little birds looking after their kids, sacrificing their time and energy to care for their young ones around the clock. I admired them their energy, and felt it needed to be acknowledged, if only through my observation. And if I’m honest, I wondered if I’d be able to cope if I had to expend so much effort on my child as they did on theirs.
The answer wasn’t long in coming.
I put the baby to bed as usual around seven Tuesday night. At ten came the most horrible sound, and when I rushed in there I found little Izzie soaked in vomit. I picked her up and, my god, she was burning up! With a temperature of 38.6, I gave her some Calpol, two hours of TLC, got her to bed shortly after midnight, and checked on her every two hours.
By six o’clock this morning she was 39.1 degrees and very unhappy. It’s awful, knowing she’s unwell but unable to do much about it. So many thoughts and possibilities run through your mind, and after so few hours sleep, you jump to worst case scenarios.
I spoke to a doctor at 8.30, saw her at 11, when Izzie was 39.3, and was sent straight to the hospital so she could be assessed. And that was just the start of six hours of shenanigans.
Izzie was the most distressed I’ve ever seen her, and Lizzie almost as bad. As the stable presence in their lives, I have to take it in my stride, act confident and calm, reassure them that everything’s okay and we’ll deal with whatever happens, even though inside I’m just as churned up. Watching Izzie get poked and prodded and howl like a banshee must rank up there as one of the least comfortable experiences of my life.
Well, worse was to come. They needed a urine sample to test, and despite this being 2016, guess how you get a urine sample from a baby? You sit the over-hot, kicking, squirming, screaming sweetie on your partner’s lap on a waterproof sheet, crouch between their legs with a plastic tub, and get ready to catch whatever comes out.
I always figured that since they’re incontinent, babies drip-drip-dripped, little and often. Nope. They pee just like normal people – when they need to.
So we waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And waited.
For an hour and three-quarters. Crouched, ready to jump into action in a split second to catch that pee! And true to form, Izzie waited for the doctor to arrive and the precise moment I looked away to make her entrance to the stage. In the event, I got it all over my hands, but managed to salvage enough to test.
Meanwhile, doctors and nurses and mothers and boyfriends came to visit the girl in the bed next to us, a teenager who took an overdose this morning, and, by dint of still being classed as a child, was placed in a bay surrounded by screaming babies.
It’s impossible not to overhear things in a hospital – the curtains aren’t exactly soundproof, after all.
‘Did you intend to kill yourself?’
‘Dunno.’
‘Are you happy you’re still here?’
‘Dunno.’
She gave her mother a pretty hard time, lots of effing and blinding. And as a dad, I thought how odd it was that fourteen years earlier, she’d have been like Izzie, a little girl, an innocent, unsullied, perfect creature. I can’t comprehend how I would feel if in fourteen years time it’s Izzie in that bed following a suicide attempt, telling me to ‘shut up, I just don’t care, leave me alone, I don’t give a f**k.’
The stark contrast really struck me, two girls in two beds, separated by nothing more than a curtain and a few years; one so simple and dependent and full of the joys of spring, the other so complex and cynical and utterly jaded. And I want to cling to Izzie and stop her growing up, retain her innocence at any cost, arrest the passage of time.
But I can’t.
In one bed, we’re planning our futures together; in the other, she could have been dead. She might still be – it was paracetamol and they were waiting to see how much damage she’d done to her organs.
The thing is, in my life I’ve been suicidal. I’ve self-harmed. I’ve always been a little bit crazy. My teens are a blur of high emotions and antidepressants, hidden knives and hidden scars. I’m not always rational. People tell me I’ve said things, done things, and I have no recollection whatsoever. At times of high stress I become paranoid that people can hear my thoughts. I am the girl in the bed beyond the curtain – at least, I was. But I got through it. Saved, as it were, by the love of my family, a stubborn unwillingness to give in, and by the miracle that is my daughter.
I don’t ever want her to grow up like me. Stay this side of the curtain, sweetheart.
Long story short, after I wiped the piss off my hands, we discovered she didn’t have a UTI, and they diagnosed it as viral gastroenteritis. Eventually we were allowed to go home, after eight hours away.
Things have calmed a little this evening – Lizzie and Izzie are both snoring, but the latter wakes up every ten minutes, has a little cry, and drops back off. I’m monitoring temperatures, wiping up diarrhoea, and preparing for another night of broken sleep. In the test of whether I’m as good a parent as a wren, I think I’ve passed.
All day I’ve acted tough. Now the world has gone to sleep I can be honest. I feel tearful. Seeing Izzie going through all that, not knowing what was wrong – I was more scared than anyone can imagine. Because Izzie is my world.
So much has happened this week and it’s only Wednesday! If tomorrow is anything like today, I don’t know what I’ll do. Did I mention I’m getting married in three days?
[EDIT: I have just discovered from the Barn Owl Trust that I did exactly the right thing. It says finding barn owl chicks out of the nest before they can fly is not normal, they are only fed in the nest and parents will ignore one on the ground and leave it to starve to death, they have very little sense of smell and will not reject it if you handle it, and leaving it well alone is usually not the appropriate course of action. On the other hand, if it was a tawny owl chick, you should leave it as it is normal for chicks to be out of the nest before they can fly and parents will feed them anywhere – even on the ground. Barn owl chick = intervene. Tawny owl chick = leave alone. Yay me.]
When you have AS, you don’t process information the same as other people. We have rigid, systematic ways of thinking that give us excellent rote memory, but that hinder our ability to combine different pieces of data to create a larger whole or easily shift from one thought sequence to another. Sounds complex? Let me explain.
If you imagine each sensory input, thought or piece of knowledge as a sheet of paper, and the autistic brain as a giant filing cabinet, it goes some way to understanding how we operate. Every sheet of paper needs to be analysed, categorised, related to other sheets of paper and then filed in its relevant folder in the relevant drawer before we are done with it. It seems great in theory, but in practice? Bloody exhausting.
Processing information in this manner takes both time and huge expenditure of mental energy. Sometimes people with AS can seem a little slow when you’re talking to them, but they’re not – they’re just busily interpreting all those little nuances of social interaction that neurotypicals do automatically. Sometimes you can say something to an Aspie, and it’ll be minutes, hours or even days before they get back to you, because that’s how long it can take to work through everything you’ve said, figure out what it all means, and create an appropriate response. And if you give me a list of instructions, you can bet your bottom dollar that I’ll focus so intently on the first step to make sure I understand it that I’ll switch off from everything you say thereafter.
This is because we can only think about one thing at a time. With a mind like a filing cabinet, every detail is separated and stored in an individual folder. If we’re thinking in a certain way about a certain thing – say, file Z284 in Drawer C (the book we’re reading) – then how on earth can we suddenly start thinking about something else – file B827 in Drawer F (the gas bill), for example? So we focus on the first file, and the others cease to exist – at least until they come knocking on the door.
And when we try to do too many things at once, or switch from thinking about one thing to thinking about another, we often screw up our whole filing system. We open a drawer, take out a file, study the page; then we open another drawer, take out another file, look at it; open a third; and before we know it, all the drawers are open, we’ve got files all over the place, we can’t work out what goes where and can’t put anything away or let anything go, our thoughts spiral round and round and, unless we manage to stop this process, we go into what is affectionately called an ‘autistic meltdown’. That’s what it’s like having a filing cabinet for a brain (and that’s without mentioning how, because our thoughts are separated into different files, we focus on the details and miss the ‘bigger picture’ – we see trees instead of forests – but that is by the by).
Anyway, ‘what does all of this have to do with babies?’ I hear you ask. Simple. My house is a tip.
Actually, that’s putting it mildly. My house is, at current, a shithole. I know this because both of Lizzie’s parents have separately described it as a ‘disgrace’ and said that they would be embarrassed to have people over. Ouch!
To be fair, I don’t really notice the mess most of the time. We’ve been blaming it on having a baby – how can anyone have a baby and a tidy house? – but I’ve stumbled unannounced into two houses in the past fortnight who have kids the same age as Izzie, and their houses are freaking immaculate: toys put away, the sideboards clear of stained coffee mugs, no dishes in the sink, clothes hung up instead of strewn over the backs of chairs, everything in its place. Where in God’s name do they find the time or the energy to do that? What makes us so different?
The answer, which has been eluding me for so long, is horrifyingly obvious: they don’t have autism; we do.
To have a tidy house and a baby, you have to be able to multitask. You have to be able to keep one eye, or part of your brain, on the baby and the other on the washing, the ironing, the cleaning. And that’s not something I’m capable of doing.
When I look after the baby, I look after the baby. That’s my job, that’s my focus, and that’s what I do. When I tidy, I tidy. I can’t do both at the same time. So I leave the tidying to the evening, after Izzie’s gone to bed, by which time I’m exhausted and tend to flop down on the sofa or, to be entirely honest, obsess over random things like making lists of all the WWE wrestlers from my teens who are now dead, or researching the million-and-one rebuttals to 9/11 conspiracy theories, or writing 10,000 word treatises on why Jack the Ripper was not Arthur Sickert (take that, Patricia Cornwell!) – you know, useful, productive things like that.
Raising a baby as a person with autism is surprisingly mentally taxing. There is so much information to process, so many sensory inputs and new experiences to file away, my brain is constantly distracted. I used to go to bed between midnight and two every night, getting around six hours sleep – now, I’m lucky to be able to function past ten. That’s how draining it is.
I’m not entirely sure how to rectify this situation. I mean, the house is mostly clean – it gets hoovered, the sides are anti-bacced and we’re still sterilising the baby’s bottles; bleach down the toilets, dog poo picked up, nappy bin emptied regularly, rubbish put out – it’s just got stuff everywhere. And until I can figure out a way of thinking about two things at once without tying my thoughts into knots, that’s the way it’s going to remain.
But it’s all worth it to see that smile every day!
Aspie Daddy 