Tag: Asperger’s Syndrome

Colic, Part 2

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

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?

.

Asking For Help

Gillan Drew1 Comment

Despite what you may have been told by a song from the brownest decade of the Twentieth Century, sorry is not the hardest word. A side-effect of Western culture’s emphasis on individuality and personal freedom in the economic, familial, artistic, political and social spheres has been to make a sacred cow of independence. Since Victorian times, society has treated the nuclear family as the model for civilisation – autonomous units comprising a father, a mother, and children. And a proper man looks after his family alone. A proper man makes his own way in the world. A proper man does it by himself.

These days, the hardest word is ‘help’. It’s an admission that you’re weak; it means you’re not a proper man; it means you can’t look after your family. Men are trained from birth to hide their weakness. Women are bombarded with images of the ideal mother. And people with Asperger’s Syndrome are confronted with what it is to be normal. We spend our lives fighting to meet an unachievable ideal. Deep down, we know these images are utter rubbish, because everyone needs help from time to time, and despite what they like to pretend, most self-made men have had help from family, friends, and the special lady who hides behind the scenes. But even so, we act as though it’s true.

This doesn’t seem to be such a problem in the East. Over there, families comprise grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces, and various hangers-on in addition to fathers, mothers and children. There’s no arbitrary age at which people should leave home, cut the apron strings and become independent.

And why should there be? We never stop learning in life, and we never stop meeting situations we don’t know how to deal with. Each generation helps and teaches the next, but they don’t suddenly stop after eighteen years and now you’re on your own. I’ve never had children before, but my parents have, so they can guide me. Then, when my kids have children, I can guide them, and so on and so forth.

Help is not a dirty word. A dirtier word is ‘I got so overwhelmed that I climbed onto the roof, stripped naked and started throwing tiles at passersby while chanting nursery rhymes and calling myself Cthulhu.’ Which is a distinct possibility at the moment because we need help.

Before the baby’s born you think you’ll take it all in your stride, and you do, for a few weeks. In weeks 1-6, the moment the baby blinks you leap up and deal with her. And then the adrenalin wears off. Week 8, you see movement in the pram – a foot comes into view, an arm suddenly darts into the air – and you freeze. Don’t make a sound: she might settle. A gurgle in her throat: don’t cry, don’t cry, please don’t cry. Waaaaaah! Damn it.

Izzie has entered a phase called ‘making mum and dad’s lives a misery.’ It consists of crying and grizzling all the time, except when she’s screaming. Not charming, melt-your-heart screams like you hear in supermarkets, but nerve-shattering end-of-the-world screams, with crimson cheeks and floods of tears, and nothing you do can stop it. We’ve spent an arm and a leg on anti-colic bottles, anti-colic formula, anti-colic beanbags, a vibrating anti-colic chair, but all to no avail. She screams in the car; she screams in the pram; she screams in the garden and the kitchen and the woods. She screams in my lap, over my shoulder, lying across my thighs, cuddled in my arms. She screams when she’s feeding, for crying out loud, suck, scream, suck, scream, suck, scream.

And sleep during the day is a thing of the past. The other morning she started at six a.m. and we finally managed to settle her at midnight. Yesterday she went from five a.m. to eight p.m. She’s so tired she rubs her face with the backs of her hands, screws her fists into her eyes, lolls from side to side, and the bags grow black under her eyes, but still she won’t close them. It’s as though she’s afraid she might miss something, or if she falls asleep she’ll wake to find we’ve grabbed our passports and run away to Acapulco without her – and she’s right to worry, because that last one was a serious possibility yesterday afternoon. I love her to bits but good gosh I wish she’d shut up for five minutes. I don’t think I’m asking a lot.

The past three days in picture form!
The past three days in picture form!

And so yesterday, reaching deep, we asked for help. My mum came over and babysat for two hours while Lizzie and I went out for a coffee. It’s normal and natural – it’s the first time we’ve left Izzie since she was in ICU, the first time off in seven weeks – but boy did we feel like we were failing as parents. Because parents are meant to cope without any help. Because parents are meant to love their children so much they never need a break from them.

Help is not a dirty word. But it sure does feel like it.

Going Out

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

I’m going out for an hour. Phone, keys, wallet: check. Watch so I always know the time. Oven off, windows shut, door closed and locked. Route planned? Of course. Painkillers and diarrhoea medication just in case. Excuses ready so if someone invites me somewhere I can politely decline. Topics of conversation prepared: lovely weather we’re having; have you heard about the situation in wherever; I’m a new dad so forgive the stutter, it’s just tiredness. St. Christopher medallion, rosary and crucifix because they make me feel better even though I’m not religious. Smooth pebble in my pocket so I have something tactile I can fiddle with if I get stressed. Hat to hide beneath, beard to hide behind. I don’t need to wear glasses per se but it’s another barrier against the world so on they go. Hard-soled shoes because they make a reassuringly grown-up clip-clop sound when I walk. Shirt with collar so my neck doesn’t burn and my hairy back doesn’t show. Long sleeves rolled up so I can adjust the length to cover my wrists if I feel vulnerable. A Sheriff’s badge in my pocket so I can pretend like I’m a cowboy, and a lawman, and a thousand times more confident than I actually am.

Right, I’m ready to go.

As someone with Asperger’s Syndrome, I find going out incredibly stressful. Even if I’ve done something a thousand times, and know somewhere like the back of my hand, I am always anxious about what might happen, and if I’ll be able to cope with it, and how long before I can return to the safety of my home. I don’t know exactly what it is that I’m afraid of – I’m pretty sure aliens aren’t going to choose the New Forest as the spearhead of their invasion of Earth – but it never gets any easier. No matter where I go, it’s like I’m heading to the dentist for root canal surgery, even if it’s to buy a chocolate bar. Which, to be honest, happens so often it increases the frequency of my dental visits.

Not that you’d know that I struggle – they don’t call it the ‘hidden disability’ for nothing. John Lennon said, ‘Act the way you want to be and soon you are the way you act.’ Wise words, utter rubbish. I always act like I know what I’m doing. I never do.

But I don’t allow it to stop me. My motto has always been, ‘Feel the fear and do it anyway.’ So I do. But if I had a choice, I’d be a recluse and never go out.

I don’t have a choice. I have a baby.

I have vowed not to let my social anxieties get in the way of me being a dad and a partner, and that means going to parenting classes and baby groups, meeting other parents with infants, going out for coffee with family and friends, seeing midwives and health visitors, picnics, parties, and the endless rushing about to find the unexpected necessities of child care: bepanthem, infacol, fenugreek, variflow teats, and all kinds of other weird and wonderful things I’d never heard of six weeks ago.

Unfortunately, since I compensate for my social deficits, convoluted thought processes and sensory abnormalities by using my intellect, going out exhausts me. To make things worse, since having a breakdown in late 2006 my brain shuts down when stressed, leaving me drowsy and unable to see my way out of a glass corridor. And in addition, having spent the past fifteen years on antidepressants – my entire adult life – I spend every day fighting against the lethargy that comes as a side-effect of chemically damping down your central nervous system. I therefore have to manage my energy use, pace myself to keep mind and body functional – or at least, as functional as they ever get – and try to take on one stressful task a day.

At least, that was how I used to manage. Now when I hit the wall, I just have to keep running. And going out now is so much harder.

We’re going out for an hour. Baby? Check. Is she wearing enough clothing? Probably, but we’ll bring extras in case she gets cold. A sun hat and woolly hat for the vagaries of the weather. A blanket. And a backup sleepsuit for if she soils herself. And another backup sleepsuit for if she soils the backup. Dummy, dummy case, spare dummy in case she loses her dummy. That’s her sorted.

When did she last feed? Just now? Better make up a bottle of sterilised water to take, even though she’s not due a feed for three hours. And maybe a second bottle for if we’re unaccountably delayed. And two lots of formula. Plus some infacol. And three muslins: you can never have too many muslins.

How about nappies? Three, just in case. So let’s take five. Changing mat, baby wipes, bottom cream, Vaseline, kitchen roll, nappy bags and hand sanitising gel. Enough to cope with the worst explosion she could possibly manage.

Let’s add one more nappy, just in case.

Car seat, travel system base, carrycot and sling, so we have a choice as to how to move her. And another blanket. Rain cover, insect net, parasol. Now are we ready?

Let’s take the puppy – collar, harness, lead, whistle, treats, poo bags, water, bowl. All of this is in addition to the worries I have about going out anyway. So as you can see, my mind is a whirl of worries and problems and contingencies.

But you’d never know it.

Now where did I put my keys?

Learning to Switch Off

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

Nobody ever said that parenthood was easy, and no new parent seriously thinks it’ll be a walk in the park, but deep down you figure you’ll survive because, well, you’re more awesome than any other parent that ever lived. Nonetheless, after seven weeks of broken sleep, emotional upheavals, psychological torment and disrupted meals, it’s very easy to become run-down in body, mind and spirit. It’s not enough just to say you’ll survive – you have to figure out a way of doing it. And for me that is learning how to switch off.

As might be clear for regular readers of this blog, I think about things. A lot. I’ve always been driven by an insatiable need to probe beneath the surface and figure out why things are the way they are, how they work, is there a better way, what should I do, is it right, what are the consequences, is anything objectively true, what does it all mean? My brother used to call me Johnny 5 after the robot from the movie Short Circuit: ‘Input, need input!’

By way of illustration, the subject matter of the books I’ve read this year include the search for the North-West Passage, the Battle of Waterloo, the afterlives of dead bodies, the origins of English idioms, the life of Jane Austen, the war in Afghanistan, round-the-world yachting, serial killers, psychology, mythology and, of course, babies. Plus a smattering of fiction. And an awful book about how a cat changed its owner’s life by being an uncontrollable, violent, wild beast that also happened to look cute, but the less said about that, the better.

Certainly my obsessive desire to understand how the world works and my place within it could be said to stem from my autism, but where it comes from is moot considering I am my autism and my autism is me. The unfortunate result is that I’m almost incapable of switching it off.

Every minute of every day my mind is a whirring mess of thoughts and counter-thoughts, ideas and connections, fears and resolutions. When I go to bed I lie awake at least an hour, struggling not to think. But of course, that only makes the thoughts come quicker.

So yesterday I did something I’ve not done in a long time. I sat on a bench overlooking the sea, closed my eyes, felt the breeze wash over me and listened to the sounds of the world around me. Just me, alone. No babies, no partners, no trying to control things. Watching the thoughts come and go like waves upon the shore. My breath in and out. Accepting what is. Allowing it to exist in that moment. Knowing that it’s okay.

It’s a technique called Mindfulness. I learnt it many years ago during a course of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Like most Eastern philosophies adapted for a mass-market Western audience, I considered it pseudo-spiritual New Age pants. How can you ‘watch’ your thoughts? Who’s doing the watching? And what was the point? How could this possibly help me? Sure, for the duration of the exercise I felt peaceful, but immediately afterwards it was gone. Hardly a worthwhile use of my time.

Or perhaps I just wasn’t stressed enough to feel the benefit.

Somehow yesterday I managed to recentre myself in myself. I know that that sound like wishy-washy crap – or a euphemism for masturbation (‘I recentred myself yesterday.’ / ‘Well I hope you cleaned up afterwards.’) – but I found the resilience and sense of identity that was missing the past few days, enough to feel like me again. I think you spend so much time thinking, worrying, tending to and caring about and for your child and your partner, you find you can’t work out where they end and you begin. So for disentangling your thoughts and emotions from another, for that, Mindfulness is indeed a tool.

I used it again today. I sat on the swing chair, sheltered from the rain under the canopy, and watched the leaves on the bushes blowing in the breeze. No thoughts of babies – no thoughts at all. Just me with myself being me.

Of course, it doesn’t last. Izzie crying, Lizzie demanding my attention, phones ringing, people at the door, bottles need sterilising, dog to walk, nappy change, we’ve run out of baby wipes. But for those few minutes I’m managing to switch off, and I’m okay, and I’m surviving.

It’s not a miracle cure, and I still feel tired, and irritable, and paranoid that if I’m not there to sort things out then Izzie will grow horns out of her forehead, but I no longer feel quite so overwhelmed. And yes, I know it sounds bad that forgetting about the child you brought into this world to cherish and love can be therapeutic, but ten minutes of switching off can make the difference between coping with the day or burning out mid-afternoon. And if you burn out, well, who’s going to keep those horns away then?

Sense of Humour Bypass

Gillan Drew1 Comment

The hardest thing about looking after a baby is not a single, groundbreaking event like a giant poo or a sudden explosive scream just as you’re settling down to dinner. It’s not a night without once closing your eyes or an entire day of crying. It’s subtler than that, the accumulation of lots of little events, weeks of broken sleep, and the general running down of your energy reserves, but when it comes, it’s no less impactive than a Mike Tyson slap round the face.

One day you wake up and find that things just aren’t funny anymore.

At five this morning I came downstairs with the baby to discover the dog had, in her infinite generosity, left me some chocolatey gifts all over the kitchen. And not crisp, tempered chocolates, but some kind of squidgy, runny mousse that has somehow stained the lino black as though we’ve spilt oil on the floor. Normally I’d think, ‘Wow, what a great anecdote to add to my ever-growing pile of gross-out fun!’ Instead, I cleaned it up with about half a roll of toilet paper, disinfected my hands, and set about feeding Izzie.

How dull.

I think the funk set in yesterday. I’m particularly good at what we in the autism community call ‘masking’. This is using your intellect to compensate for your condition and thereby mask your symptoms. It was the reason it took until I was 28 to receive a diagnosis. It’s not being dishonest, simply that we’ve learnt to hide the more ‘out there’ aspects of our autism in an attempt to fit in.

Unfortunately, the more tired I become, the less capable I am of consciously suppressing my autistic behaviours. Thus, if I’m not paying really close attention, I start taking everything literally; I lose the ability to understand when someone is joking; my social filter stops working; I start being pedantic and pernickety; I become paranoid because I can’t figure out why people are behaving the way they are; my mind starts to trip over the rapid flow of thoughts; and I act out my obsessive tendencies.

Yesterday we went out for coffee with some family and family friends. Because I pay close attention to every little detail in a social interaction to know when to speak, what to talk about, I don’t miss a trick, so I noticed that every time I spoke, two of the people around the table looked at one another, made a face, and laughed. I watched them while other people spoke, and nothing. I spoke, same response – they looked at one another, made a face, and laughed.

Thinking I might be paranoid, I went to the toilet, cleared my head, returned and tried again. Same thing. They were mocking me.

I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. Was I speaking too loud? Off topic? In an odd register? Was I saying things inappropriate to the context? Sure, I was discussing how Izzie seems to have a hard nugget of poo in her rectum which backs up a sausage and a tin of mushy peas, but they had asked how she was doing and nobody was eating at the time. Then I was mentioning my orthodontic treatment as a teenager, how they wanted to break my jaw, bring it forward and insert a false chin to line up my teeth, but instead I opted for an agonising headbrace. I’m not sure what’s so amusing about that. One of them said they kept all of their child’s teeth and had them in a box – I said they should make them into a bracelet, but that was considered horrible. Well, you’re the one collecting teeth like a kleptomaniac tooth fairy!

Later, I had a row with Lizzie. As she is also autistic, she can similarly struggle to see things from another’s perspective i.e. mine. I didn’t feel she was giving me my due for doing the nights and allowing her to get a full night’s sleep, every night. In fact, I turned very much into a woman. ‘You just don’t understand how hard it is,’ I said in my whiniest voice. ‘You go out with your friends and come home and just watch TV. You don’t pay me any attention anymore. I feel like a single father. I just want a little consideration, and wah, wah, self-pitying wah.’

In the ensuing argument she grew defensive and said some things she shouldn’t have, and which I should have known not to take seriously, but I did. And all I could think during the argument was, ‘Why are you saying nothink? There isn’t a k in it, the word is nothing. And stop saying miwk, it’s milk. This Estuary English is entirely inappropriate for someone born and raised in Dorset!’

We made up, but when she went out in the evening with the baby, instead of having a rest I spent three hours obsessively looking up Spanish swear words on the internet. They mostly cast aspersions on the sexual behaviour of one’s mother. But I can think of better things I could have been doing instead.

So here we stand, or rather sit, with Izzie fixing me with her creepy unblinking gaze as she has done the past few hours. If she’d only cry, I’d be able to deal with it: why the hell is she just looking at me?

I need to regain my sense of humour. You lose that, next comes misery, self-harm and suicide. Or, at the very least, socks with sandals and an interest in snooker. And I need to find it fast: nobody can survive a baby without it.

Crying Kids Need Comforting

Gillan Drew3 Comments

It’s become a cliche to say that babies do not come with a manual. As someone with Asperger’s Syndrome who loves clearly defined rules and black and white instructions, even I can appreciate that no two babies are the same and need to be treated with sensitivity to their individual needs. Yet if we all know this to be true, why are there so many books and theories about how we ‘should’ be raising our babies?

To illustrate this point, when my daughter cries, I pick her up. I do this because when Izzie wants something, she cries. That is, when I have missed the subtle signs she makes to communicate that she wants something, she cries. It’s a ‘come on dad, why aren’t you listening to me’ sort of thing. If I’ve ignored the signs too long, it’s more of a ‘for crying out loud I’ve been asking for ages, are you blind and deaf or just stupid’ scream. Unfortunately I don’t speak baby, so crying and screaming are part and parcel of a new parent’s life.

What Izzie wants comprises a rather small list: feeding, changing, burping, holding. She’s too young to crave world peace and cigarettes. So when my daughter cries, I pick her up, because she wants or needs me to do something. It seems pretty simple to me.

But this is a major bone of contention between competing parenting theories. Child-centred philosophies such as Attachment Parenting advocate this nurturing, touchy-feely ethos, while this is anathema to parent-led approaches like the Ferber Method. The former believes that a baby needs to feel loved to create emotional wellbeing, so you should comfort her when she cries to show her she’s safe; the latter that the kid needs to find a way to comfort herself because the world’s a hard place and it’s about time she learned this, so you should leave her to ‘cry it out’. I’ve got to say, I’m definitely swayed towards the first, even though child-centred approaches are far harder on the parents.

I am, however, surprised by just how many people subscribe to the parent-led theories. This is the idea that the child needs to adapt to fit into the world it finds itself in, rather than the parent adapting to the child. So if Izzie cries, we’re told to leave her to self-soothe; by picking her up we’re making a rod for our own backs; she’s playing us for fools; she’s learning how to manipulate us; we have to be cruel to be kind; and we’re creating a needy, dependent child who won’t be able to cope with the pressures of modern life.

Can I remind everyone she’s six weeks old?

In the 1950s a scientist/sadist named Harlow carried out some truly horrific experiments on a bunch of rhesus monkeys to see what kinds of parenting they responded to. Separating them from their mothers at birth, he put them in cages with two surrogate mothers. One, made of chicken wire, had a nipple that provided milk; the other, covered in soft cloth, provided nothing. The prevailing theory at the time was that the bond between mother and child was based on food. The monkeys, in short, would prefer the chicken wire monstrosity.

Not so. The monkeys spent their days clinging to the soft and cuddly mummy, only going to the chicken wire to feed. They craved the comfort and cuddles of their parent, and not only did this soothe them, it was vital for their social and emotional development. Indeed, those monkeys placed in cages containing only the wire-nipple mother grew up disturbed, unable to socialise, horribly ill-suited to communal monkey life.

The detached parenting style claims that cuddling your baby when she cries makes her dependent, emotionally weak, but Harlow found the opposite with his monkeys. When he put scary objects in the cages with the babies without cuddly mothers, they cowered in the corner; those with cuddly mothers were far braver, going up to the objects to investigate because they felt safer knowing they had support. Proof positive that nurturing children makes them better adapted to life in general.

Well, at least in rhesus monkeys. But the theory is sound, I think. If the child knows they are protected, they feel more secure. Knowing she has a safety net means that, as she grows up, Izzie will be more confident in taking risks. Coddling her actually makes her more independent!

At least, to a certain extent. We don’t want to become helicopter parents that hover over their children so they don’t learn to do anything for themselves, but at this stage, with a newborn, I can’t see anything wrong with cuddling my child.

We don’t follow any particular parenting theory, instead creating our own. Perhaps we are masochists, making a rod for our own backs, but the Gillan-Lizzie-Izzie Method is working for us so far. Our philosophy is that crying kids need comforting. And until we see a reason to change it, that is how it’ll stay.

Knowing What’s Right

Gillan Drew1 Comment

As a new parent, you want to get things right. You want to do the right kind of feeding, whether breast or bottle, the right amount, the right products, the right process. What kind of teat, how fast the flow, normal or anti-colic, two-hourly, three-hourly, on demand? You want the right sort of nappies, the right size, the right comfort. Sleepsuit or outfit? Woolly hat or sunhat? Is she warm enough? Too hot? What’s the right thing to do?

Unfortunately, ‘right’ is a fluid concept. It changes depending on who you talk to, which books you read, the websites you consult. It changes from child to child, and no matter how much you weigh up the evidence for one thing against another, the answer remains ever elusive. Short of turning your baby into a test subject as you experiment on them with various methods and tools to see what works, which not only makes you and your child confused but damages your bank balance, you have to find some way of navigating through all this mess.

The answer seems to be a little esoteric.

I have known a few psychics in my time, mostly teenaged self-proclaimed witches and middle-aged divorcees with ‘the gift’ who go on to prove it by telling me I’m sensible when the situation calls for it, but also fun in the right circumstances, that I’m extroverted at those times when I’m not being shy, and that I am confident except for when I’m not. Wow, you should charge money for that. You are? No wonder my wallet feels so light.

Anyway, as an endlessly inquisitive and sceptical sort of fellow, I wanted to know more about the process of being, ahem, psychic. They told me they received ‘impressions’. Well then, what form did these impressions take? Did they see visions? Did they experience it as feelings? Did they hear it as voices? Thoughts? Some other sense that those of us on the non-psychic plane of existence couldn’t understand?

And how clear were these impressions? Were they vague and poorly formed? Were they a tangled jumble of thoughts and feelings? How did they sort out this bundle of interconnected data streams? How did they interpret them?

Apparently, that’s not how it works. You don’t ponder, you don’t analyse, you don’t question and evaluate and formulate. You just know.

As someone with Asperger’s Syndrome who has to think his way through everything, the idea that you can ‘just know’ is an alien concept. Like those other cliches ‘follow your heart’ and ‘go with the flow’, I can’t select a course of action without first weighing up all the available options and comparing the possible benefits and repercussions. My world is a rational world of thought.

At least, it was until last week. Lizzie and I were always averse to dummies (pacifiers for my American readers). Then one day we looked at a horribly unsettled, colicky baby, looked at one another and said in one voice, ‘Let’s get her a dummy.’ Neither rhyme nor reason, no analysis, no evaluation or assessment. We just knew, intuitively, in that moment, that it was the right thing to do.

And it was. For the past week, Izzie has been a calmer, happier baby. It isn’t lazy parenting, it’s doing what your child needs. I wouldn’t recommend it for every baby, but Izzie needed something to soothe her between feeds more than cuddles, rocking, burping and going for walks. In spite of the censure of people who don’t matter anyway, I know we made the right decision.

Loathe as I am to admit it, having a baby has made me realise you can overthink things. It is hardwired into our DNA to know what is right for us and our babies. If you’re faced with an impossible decision, switch off your brain and allow your instincts to take over. You might find that your intuition already knows the right thing to do.

But take my advice: if your instincts tell you to try the baby’s milk, they’re not to be trusted. You’ll be tasting that warm sour yoghurt tang the rest of the day.

Early Empty Nest Crisis

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

I’m pretty sure I’ve lost myself somewhere along the way. I forget where I read it, but the Roman approach to parenting was to fit your life into the baby’s for the first year, and fit the baby’s life into yours thereafter. Actually, I might have made that up. The Romans don’t strike me as the most enlightened of parents: they didn’t even give girls first names.

Wherever it comes from, the idea sounds rather good in principle. However, I’m starting to realise that it’s neither practical nor particularly healthy.

Before the arrival of Izzie, Lizzie went to her dad’s farm every Monday and Friday evening for a meal. This is a routine she’s done for years and one that suits us all – she gets to return to her childhood home for a nice roast, her and her dad get special family time, and I get a few hours to myself to unwind. And having Asperger’s Syndrome, downtime to unwind is very important.

Using your intellect to compensate for your social deficits is, frankly, exhausting. What neurotypical people pick up intuitively as they grow up we have to consciously process and learn. Like a lot of people with AS, my behaviour is not natural but the result of careful study of books, imitation of the people around me, and endless practice conversations I carry out in my head every night when I go to bed. So whenever I meet up with people, I’m also thinking about how much eye contact I’m making, the volume and tone of my voice, the possible alternate interpretations of the words I’m using, and trying to decipher their body language and paralanguage and verbal language to make sure I’m understanding correctly, as well as whatever we happen to be doing, from eating a meal to playing crazy golf. One-on-one is okay, but the bigger the group, the more I have to work to keep functioning.

Trouble is, people rarely act in ways I’ve prepared for, so social situations can be incredibly stressful, before, during and after. For people with Asperger’s Syndrome, doing something that requires a close attention to detail enables us to relax, switch off the social part of our brain, and recharge our cognitive batteries for the next encounter. So after spending a couple of hours socialising, I need five or six hours to mentally recover. Otherwise I start to get a little irritable and I’m unable to effectively process all the information I’m picking up on.

Living with Lizzie, and now Izzie, I am constantly ‘on’. While for neurotypical people, sitting chatting with a guest over a cup of coffee might be relaxing, for me it is hard work, and there have been more guests to the house of late than in the past three years. So when Lizzie took Izzie to her dad’s this past Friday and Monday night, I should have seen it as a welcome chance to recover.

‘What a gift,’ people have said. ‘A night off: how lucky are you?’

Except, I don’t feel lucky. Normally I would do a jigsaw puzzle, build a model, make a list of all the bands I can think of starting with each letter of the alphabet, from Alice In Chains, Bush and Cold through to X-ecutioners, Yellowcard and Zwan (it gets harder down towards the tail end).

I stared at the wall for three hours.

My identity has become so bound up with being a dad that when I do get time to myself I have no idea what to do with it. I’m having an empty nest crisis after four weeks!

If, as the Romans (might have) said, you need to fit the baby into your life after a year, you need to have a life to fit it into. So I need to find myself again, and fast, because who knows how much harder it’ll be to remember who I am after twelve months of this?