Tag: baby

Alone and Afraid

Gillan Drew1 Comment

It’s amazing how kids can unlock parts of you that have long lain dormant.

As an adult, it’s not often that I’m afraid. I was often afraid as a child, especially of the dark, but as soon as I realised there were no monsters hiding in the woods – no supernatural ones, anyway – that visceral, uncontrollable, preternatural fear that was programmed into our ancestors’ DNA to keep them safe faded into an erstwhile caution. Of course, having autism and social phobia, I’m used to an all-pervading anxiety, but out-and-out fear is a different entity entirely, and something I’m not particularly familiar with.

I’m far too rational, sceptical and sensible to feel true fear. I went through a period in my early twenties when I decided to test myself, so I did bungee jumps and threw myself out of airplanes, climbed mountains, descended into caves, watched every scary movie I could lay my hands on, visited witches and mediums, hung out in graveyards after dark, crossed rickety rope bridges, trekked through rainforests, slept in wooden huts on barren hillsides, and learned to scuba dive down to a depth of 100 feet in a place called Shark Bay. I’ve been nervous, sure; anxious, definitely; but afraid? Not really. I analyse, process, plan, prepare, adjust, and execute. Control the variables. Assess the risks. And trust in myself. What’s to fear?

Which is why I was thoroughly unprepared for how afraid I felt in the early hours of Saturday morning.

Late Friday evening, my wife Lizzie fell ill. Like, end of the world in a frying pan ill. So I packed her off to bed early with a hot water bottle and a handful of drugs, and the understanding that she would be of no use for at least the next 24 hours. If the house caught on fire, the dog grew an extra head, the chickens started eating meat, or the fish learned to fly, it would be up to me to keep it all together. But I’m used to that, so without a care in the world I put the baby to bed and settled down to a pleasant evening of reading/watching TV/killing aliens, depending on which took my fancy.

Half midnight, my daughter Izzie started screaming. So far, so normal. Except this screaming didn’t stop when I put her dummy back in and laid her back down in the cot. If anything, it got worse. If anything, it was the worst screaming I’d ever heard.

I picked her up, I cuddled her, I sang to her, I danced, I whispered, I begged, but she only grew more agitated, trying to fight me off, choking on her own screams. I took her downstairs, tried milk, tried water, tried biscuits, all to no avail. She was frantic, distraught, so agitated I thought she might suffocate or have a fit. Her face was bright red, her expression horrible. Tears and snot and dribble were everywhere, making her choke, and still the dreadful sobs, the heart-rending screams. Oh God, I just wanted to be able to do something, anything, to help, to stop the screaming, the distress writ large across every aspect of her being.

And it was then, one in the morning in the lounge, unable to do a thing to comfort my daughter and knowing I was totally alone, that I felt afraid. Terrified, in fact. And there was something instantly familiar about this fear, because I’d felt it before. When I was twelve. In a heartbeat, I was twelve again.

This story begins when I was ten. We were on holiday in Spain, and with my twelve-year-old brother, we befriended an older boy on the campsite. I suppose he must have been about fifteen. At some point we went to the swimming pool, at dusk, unsupervised, which was fine because my parents were having drinks with his parents in the caravan awning and he seemed a nice kid and there was a lifeguard and they told us to stay at the shallow end and this was completely normal. But that night wasn’t normal at all.

In the pool he had a couple of other friends who were a few years older than him. One of them had long hair and stubble and I’m sure was eighteen, the other maybe seventeen. And at some point, the three of them thought it would be fun to drag little ten-year-old me out of my depth into the middle of the pool and duck me under the water.

The sky was dark by then. I wasn’t a big fan of water. I hated being under the water. They held me under. I writhed, I fought against them, my arms flailing. My terror seemed to amuse them. They ducked me again and again. I couldn’t touch the bottom. They’d let me up for a breath then hold me under again. My brother watched from the shallow end. Each time my head broke the surface my ears would ring with their laughter. They kept passing me between them. Sometimes they’d let go, and I’d try to swim away but they’d grab me and start up again. I thought I was going to die. Between mouthfuls of water I screamed at the lifeguard for help. He watched with a smirk on his face – the one adult, the one person who was meant to keep me safe, enjoyed my suffering. I was frantic.

Eventually, they let me get too close to the side – I grabbed the metal steps. They were bigger, holding onto my arms, and there were three of them, and they certainly didn’t want me to escape and ruin their fun, but there was no freaking way I was ever going to let go of that railing – I thought that if I did, I would die, and thus I literally clung on for dear life until I managed to drag myself from their grasp.

Afraid they’d now target my brother, who was stupidly sitting in the shallow end, completely oblivious to the danger, I shouted at him to get out and fled from the place I had been sure I would die. Maybe it didn’t look so serious from the outside. Maybe they only held me under ten seconds at a time. But if you’ve ever been held under water by strangers when out of your depth, ten seconds might as well be a lifetime. I was traumatised.

Skip forward a couple of years. We were on holiday in the south of France with three families my parents were friends with, each of whom had kids the same age as my brother and me. We spent a day at a lake and, in two inflatable canoes, the eight of us kids paddled out to an island in the middle. It was meant to be great fun, exploring the unknown – I was excited by it. It might even have been my idea. But it went horribly wrong the moment we got there.

The second my feet hit the sand, I freaked out. It was, without a doubt, my first panic attack. The rest of the kids ran up the beach, darting about the rocks, climbing into the dunes, flitting about the bushes – I sat on a boulder, hugging my knees and rocking forward and back, my skin crawling and every sense telling me that something was wrong and I wanted out. I asked to go back, I demanded we go back, I kicked up such a fuss and ended up so crazed they finally boarded the boats and we set off.

The end of this affair was captured on that ultimate early-90s status symbol – the camcorder. My parents filmed our return journey, the arguing in the boat, and my decision to leap into the water half-way across and swim the rest of the way to shore as it was taking too long. It even made it onto our yearly Family Video – that kooky Gillan, what’s he like?

My brother put my behaviour down to me being an arsehole, and my parents probably agreed – in all fairness, erratic, disruptive and destructive behaviour was hardly out of the ordinary for me, given I had autism and it wouldn’t be diagnosed as such for a further sixteen years. But the feelings that triggered the episode were certainly new, and being an introspective sod, even as a twelve-year-old, I decided I had to get to the bottom of why it happened.

Ultimately I realised that my fear on that beach beside a lake in the south of France was a direct result of my experience two years earlier in a swimming pool in Spain. The moment I stepped out of the canoe I was alone with a bunch of children, no adults around, no rescue, no safety, and my vulnerability in that situation was more than I could bear.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, as Izzie screamed and choked and sobbed, while upstairs my wife lay ill in bed, I was back on that beach. I was a child again, with nobody to save me, nobody to protect me, only myself to rely on in all the world. I had no idea what to do. I was trapped in the situation as surely as I had been years before in a swimming pool at dusk. And I was afraid.

I hadn’t thought of those experiences in years. I hadn’t felt those feelings in forever. I have been an adult almost all of my life. My daughter made me a child again.

And then she vomited all over me.

And I’ve never been so relieved.

Autism and OCD: the Sacred Half-Banana

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

Thanks to the nature of autism, many of us with the condition have other psychological problems that are either caused by our autism or overlap with it. Combine the rigid, obsessional thought processes associated with autism with the anxiety and poor coping mechanisms that are often part and parcel of living with the condition, and you have the recipe for obsessive compulsion. So it is, then, that at times of stress and anxiety we can slip into full-blown obsessive compulsive behaviour and lose all sense of proportion, driving the people around us to despair.

And when I say ‘we’, I mean my wife Lizzie.

And by ‘people around us’, I mean me.

And instead of ‘being driven to despair’, a better metaphor would be that I am steaming uncontrollably towards a mid-Atlantic collision with an iceberg on a dark April evening. All because of half a freaking banana.

It all started a month ago when we returned from holiday. Every night after I’ve put Izzie to bed, Lizzie goes around the lounge and tidies up the baby’s toys. And given that Lizzie’s other big obsession right now is buying toys for the baby, we have an awful lot of them. Before going to Toys R Us to get something, I just check the massive pile of plastic bags stacked up in the corner of the study, and odds are we’ll already have at least two of what I’m considering buying.

Anyway, Lizzie’s particular inclination is that all the toys have to go back complete – if the toy food blender has six shapes that go inside it, then when it goes back on the toy shelf it needs to have six shapes inside it. Not five inside it and one in the box of building blocks, but all six inside it. This is non-negotiable and woe betide anybody who forgets.

So, a month ago we return from holiday, play with Izzie for a couple of hours, and then I put her to bed as usual. Lizzie tidies the lounge and – gasp – half the toy banana from the kitchen set is missing. We have both halves of the tomato, the pepper and the carrot, and the three parts of the cucumber, but only one half of the banana.

In the normal scheme of things, you might think this is minor. I thought so myself, it being a two-inch long piece of yellow plastic with a bit of Velcro stuck to it. Unfortunately, I hadn’t realised that in Lizzie’s mind it was the Holy Grail and it had just been stolen from us by person or persons unknown.

My reassurance that ‘it’ll turn up eventually’ didn’t cut the mustard. Before the holiday, the sacred banana had been complete, entire, unsullied – Izzie had only been in the lounge a couple of hours upon our return, thus it could not have gone very far. We had to find it.

Many hours after midnight, having overturned the sofas, emptied all the drawers and cupboards, removed the building blocks piece by piece from their boxes, turfed the dog out of her bed, checked behind the fridge, in the cat litter and around the driveway (as if!), I managed to persuade an increasingly irascible Lizzie to come to bed, we’d find it later. Problem solved – or so I thought.

The following day we repeated the exact same process, double and triple checking all the places we’d already double and triple checked the night before. I ended up checking through the bins, the nappy bin, the freezer, inside the guitars, stretching my hands into deep, dark crevices no mortal ever dared to delve. Still no banana.

Long after midnight, I managed to persuade Lizzie to come to bed, where she tossed and turned all night, no doubt dreaming of incompleteness.

It was two-thirds of the way through the third day of the search, after putting the baby to bed and moving the sofas for perhaps the eighth time, that I finally declared enough to be enough. Actually, I think what I might have said was something along the lines of, ‘I’m all out of f**ks to give about half a goddamned plastic banana! Don’t ever mention it to me again, I don’t care anymore, there’re another two plastic bananas in the corner of the study anyway, for God’s sake, let me live, why won’t you let me live!’ And suchlike and so forth.

Two days later, Lizzie stopped moving the furniture. Two days after that, she stopped talking about the banana.

But the stage was set. The anxiety was there. And it manifested itself late every evening with the words, ‘Have you seen…?’

Every evening for the past month, Lizzie has lost something and pressganged me into helping her find it. Mostly it’s Izzie’s hairclips, less than an inch long, or her dummies, transparent. Sometimes it’s pieces of paper, a scrap torn off the back of an envelope on which she has written the world’s most important information. Quite often it’s socks, which necessitate going through the sleeves of every item of clothing we own in case it’s become lodged inside in the wash. Occasionally it’s earrings, tiny, insignificant, nigh-invisible earrings. Every single evening, give or take.

I’ve been under the sofa so many times now, I can describe it better than the back of my hand. The inside of the dustbin no longer holds any mysteries. The sound of building blocks being removed from the box one at a time fills me with dread, and every time I hear the words, ‘Have you seen…?’ my blood chills within me. No, I haven’t seen it. But I guarantee we’re spending the next two hours searching for it.

There are two possibllities for explaining this behaviour. The first is that, because both sets of our parents were away, Lizzie has been anxious for the last month, and this anxiety has triggered an obsessive need to have control over the minutiae of our household to distract her from her own feelings of vulnerability. Once triggered by the missing banana, her mind became stuck in a loop of repetitive, obsessive behaviour, fostered by her rigid autistic way of thinking.

The second is that she’s faking all these disappearances and we’re still searching for that flipping plastic banana!

Which does, to be fair, remain something of a mystery…

A Father’s Role

Gillan Drew1 Comment

 

In the olden days – like, the really, really, really olden days – a father’s role was simple: catch food, drive your enemies before you, hear the lamentations of their women. Okay, maybe that’s not exactly simple, especially when all you have is a wooden club, but cavemen knew what it was to be men.

Years later it was decided that, while the father still had to provide for their children, they should also guide them towards successful adulthood by administering discipline, principally using ‘the rod’, ‘the birch’, ‘the staff’, or ‘the belt’, depending on their particular inclination.

Then we had this pesky thing called the sexual revolution, in which women decided they no longer wanted to sit around raising babies, baking cakes and waiting for their husbands to give them their pocket money, and instead go out and earn money for themselves. No bad thing in itself, but it upset thousands of years of a clear gender split in parenting roles.

The father is no longer the provider, because the mother can do that too. He’s also equally expected to help out with the night feeds, change nappies, give baths, nurture, cuddle, sing songs, mollycoddle, encourage and entertain. And discipline is hardly an exclusively masculine preserve. As a result, many men have lost their way, with nothing they can cling onto as an exclusively XY domain, unlike women, who have a sacrosanct arena of XX dominance: no matter how much I might want to, I shall never be able to give birth, breastfeed, or discuss pelvic floor exercises with my girlfriends – at least, not without embarrassment.

The thing is, we men are full of testosterone, ready to contend with nature red in tooth and claw, but there’s little call for that on the way to the chemist to get more baby wipes or when choosing between pink paint or floral wallpaper. So modern man channels all his brutish, preternatural manliness into the one thing we can make our own, and in this find fulfilment and transcendence: personal safety.

You mothers can wander about with the baby, smell the flowers, watch the sunshine; we fathers will protect you. That’s something we can do. That’s something you have to let us do so we feel like men. While you play in the play park, we’ll stand sentry, intercepting any and all potential dangers and inconveniences. We are a cross between Secret Service agents, bodyguards and ninjas. We stand ready to do violence upon those who would harm us and ours. We are men. Hear us roar! Miaow!

Trouble is, since I became a dad, I’ve realised that the world seems to have become an incredibly dangerous place, and I’m not at all sure I’m up to the task. Every hitherto friendly dog I pass in the street is now a potential child-killer, just waiting for me to drop my guard so it can maul my baby to death. I’m not just talking about Alsatians and Rottweilers – the village is full of prissy little Lhasa Apsos, fluffy, self-important, ten inches tall, all of whom will turn into Cujo if I’m not watching them. That’s without mentioning the cats, the size of tigers, that prowl between parked cars, sharpening their claws as they lust after toddler blood. It’s a freaking jungle out there, people.

And people too. The postman has morphed from a friendly chap who delivers the mail into a blood-thirsty psychopath who wants to take my baby away with him in his post bag. Elderly neighbours ask us if we have any plans for the day: why do you want to know that, are you planning on ambushing us and stealing our baby? You would not believe just how many kidnappers lurk around our village, ready to steal my nearest and dearest if I look away for even a second. Man with walking stick = man with offensive weapon, best avoided. Every bush, every tree, could be hiding the human equivalent of Rumpelstiltskin, and it’s my job to keep these bastards at bay.

Then there are the drivers. One mile an hour over the speed limit is one mile an hour too much: ‘Slow down, Lewis Hamilton, you’re not in Monaco now!’ The car park at the supermarket has changed from a place to dump my vehicle in order to purchase goods into a nightmare murderfest organised by the prison guards in Death Race 2000, filled with elderly people who reverse without warning and ignore the one-way traffic-flow system, yes, ignore it! And by the end of each car journey these days my eyes are bloodshot from glaring at every person along the way who has the potential to cause an accident which might harm my daughter – which, to be frank, is all of them.

Nature is just as violent. I see dog poo and wonder what diseases it might be able to pass on; I look at the sky and ponder whether or not little Izzie will make it home alive if the weather changes suddenly; I question if the trees I have walked under a thousand times will choose this day, this moment, to come crashing down upon us. Are those cows going to stampede? Can that bull get out of the field? Is the slurry pit giving out noxious gases? What if? What if? What if?

And that’s just outside the house. Inside, I’m increasingly suspicious that the TV might mean my daughter harm, or the dishwasher, or the tumble-dryer. Radiators are steam-filled pipe bombs, the boiler wants to kill her with carbon monoxide, the toilet is full of water to drown her in, the bedding can suffocate her, the plug sockets might arc electricity across the room, the carpet might cause burns, the food might poison her, the picture frame might brain her as she walks past and there’s the ever-present threat of the sofa swallowing her whole. I lie awake at night wondering if I’m doing enough to keep meteors from crashing through the roof or foxes from scaling the walls and sneaking inside through the air vents.

My parents asked me what I want for my birthday.

‘A fire extinguisher,’ I said.

All in all, I’m coping really well with my paranoia. But this, you see, is a modern father’s principal role: keeping our children safe. It’s what makes us men. It’s all we’ve got. Don’t take it away from us. Because you’ll need us when the zombies come.

Provided we haven’t worried ourselves to death first!

Mummy’s Girl

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

Izzie’s first word has well and truly arrived. I’m not talking about the rather funny imitations she does – pronouncing buzzard as ‘buggered’ and beach hut as ‘bitch hoe’ – no, this is a real, bona fide, unmistakable word, used without prompting and in the appropriate context.

Unfortunately, that word is ‘mummy.’

I say ‘unfortunately’ because now that she has learnt the word, she has decided to use it in earnest. ‘Mummy, mummy, mummy,’ she says as she wanders about the lounge. ‘Mummy, mummy, mummy,’ she mutters when she’s supposed to be napping. ‘Mummy, mummy, mummy, mummy, mummy.’

This is a particularly galling word to hear when you’re a daddy, and you’re the one getting her up in the morning, or changing her nappy, or bathing her, or feeding her, or playing with her, or cuddling her, or all of those things you do that you really wish she’d be grateful for, and for which she might reward you by saying ‘daddy’. It’s hard to remain upbeat at three in the morning when she wakes you up crying, and as you try to settle her down all she can say is, ‘mummy, mummy,’ as she gets snot all over your shoulder. And it’s rather difficult not to feel a little aggrieved when you put her to bed, kiss her cheek and bid her goodnight for her to reply, ‘mummy, mummy.’

You might think she’s simply saying the word without knowing what it means, or because she likes the way it rolls off the tongue, but you’d be wrong because she knows exactly what it means. I’m not sure which came first, her obsession with the word or her obsession with her mummy, but she’s decided that mummy is the coolest person on the planet and daddy is just some guy that mummy lives with. Yes, I have been pushed aside in favour of a person with bigger boobs.

Who does Izzie want to see in the morning? Her mummy. Whose lap does she want to sit on? Her mummy’s. Whose hand does she want to hold when we walk down the street? I’m sure you can identify the pattern in this. I jokingly asked her this morning who her favourite parent is (like she’d be able to understand, ha!) – and she pointed at Lizzie and said, ‘mummy.’ Ouch. In retrospect, I’m not sure what I was hoping to gain from that question!

Following quickly on the heels of Izzie’s first word came her first full sentence yesterday – we often show her how to do something and then say, ‘Izzie do it,’ so when she was struggling to fit the shapes through the correct holes on her toy, she picked it up, plonked it down on Lizzie’s lap, and said, ‘Mummy do it.’ It was a revelation to her – now she can ask mummy to do everything!

It has been a week since this started, and while Lizzie initially rubbed it in – ha ha, she’s not saying ‘daddy’, is she? – even she’s getting a little tired of the constant, ‘mummy, mummy, mummy’. More worryingly, when I tried to kiss Lizzie earlier, the little tyke clambered up into her lap and started slapping me in the face, as if to say, ‘Get away from my mummy, you horrible man, she’s mine, all mine!’

A few weeks ago she was definitely a daddy’s girl. Now when I cuddle her she reaches out for mummy. I figure this is all just part of growing up, and toddlers being toddlers, and it’s not like Lizzie and me are in competition. Still, I’m looking forward to the day that as I close her bedroom door I’ll hear the words, ‘Night, night, daddy.’

Casualties of the Parenting War

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There’s a line in The Hunt For Red October where defecting Russian submarine captain Marko Ramius says something along the lines of, ‘It’s a war without battles, without monuments…only casualties’. He’s talking about his dead wife at the time, but I’ve always taken it as a description of the Cold War as a whole: two great nations circling one another like prize fighters, watching, waiting, testing, provoking, through storm and shine, day and night, summer and winter, year on year, the dead on each side mounting up from accidents, collisions, clumsiness, fatigue, bravado, without a shot being fired or any open form of hostility being declared.

The relationship between parent and child is a lot like that.

I have been kicked in the nuts more times in the past few months by my daughter than I ever was by the jackasses I went to school with, and believe me, I used to get kicked in the nuts a lot. I’ve been punched in the face, headbutted on the nose, had fingers rammed into ears and nostrils and down my throat, been strangled, throttled and choked, and had almost every hair on my body pulled, tweaked or ripped clean out. At the moment she enjoys jumping on me, hitting me, throwing things at me and smacking me around the head with whatever’s at hand. And lately she’s discovered the joys of poking her plastic toy forks in my eyes – cheers for that, sweetheart!

Then there are the accidents: as a person with autism, I have a tendency towards clumsiness, which generally translates to walking into things, banging my head on things, tripping over things, and falling down a lot. Many times I’ve hooked my foot around the leg of Izzie’s high chair, refrained from grabbing onto it as that would be dangerous, and thus fallen like a ton of bricks to the floor. Many times I’ve been holding her hand in the street and watching to make sure she doesn’t walk into anything, only to crack my shin on a bollard myself. And getting her lunch out of the oven today, I burned the back of my hand on the shelf.

The worst thing at the moment though is my back. The other day I was opening her pushchair on the quayside, pressed down on the foot-plate, got my shoelace caught in the mechanism, and fell flat on my back in front of a whole cohort of leather-clad bikers, pulling the pushchair over on top of me, bruising my ribs and wrenching my spine and shoulder in the process – I couldn’t lift my right arm for hours after.

Perhaps as a result of this fall, or perhaps because I carried her around on my back up and down cliffs and over hill and dale all last week, I made my back susceptible to further damage. You see, I have a semi-slipped disk in my spine, not bad enough to do anything about, but bad enough that every few years it trips and leaves me bedridden for days. And it’s tripped.

A couple of days back I put Izzie in her cot for a nap, bent down to pick up the nappy I’d just changed, and the next thing I knew I was on my elbows and knees with my forehead pressed into the carpet and my lower back muscles in agonising spasm. And a poopy nappy right under my cheek. Luckily, although I can barely walk, hobbling around like the Hunchback of Notre-Dame, I can actually walk. For now. Izzie still needs putting in and out of her high chair and her cot, bathing, changing, dressing and all the other back-breaking tasks of parenting, and in spite of the pain, it’s what you have to do. But in all honesty, it hurts like hell.

For her part, Izzie has the good grace to freak out every time I fall down and hurt myself. And it’s not exactly all one-way traffic.

When she was on my back last week, I did on one occasion walk under a low branch and hear a rather dramatic thud. More than once I’ve knocked her head on the top of the car door when I’ve been putting her in her car seat. She tried to run away from her shadow the other day, tripped and face-planted on the patio, tearing open her knee. A couple of weeks ago I was lying on my back on the floor when she charged at me and stumbled, slamming her head against mine and cutting her chin open on my tooth (I felt so freaking guilty as the blood poured down my T-shirt!). And every day she adds to the bruises on her legs and arms and forehead as she trips and falls and bashes into things and bounces off your knee and tumbles off the sofa. It’s a jolly good thing toddlers are resilient or else she’d feel as rough as I do now!

And that, fair readers, is one of the little-discussed aspects of parenting: without battles, without monuments, you will injure the crap out of each other. There will be blood, there will be tears, and sometimes you’ll feel like you’ve gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson, but ultimately you’ll look back on it and laugh – that is, unless she puts your eyes out first!

The Fear

Gillan Drew1 Comment

This week I encountered The Fear. He was on a holiday park in North Devon, of all places, roaming between the static caravans that sit on a hillside overlooking the bay. I’m pretty sure most parents meet him at some point, but this week was my turn.

I’ve been anxious about Izzie before, concerned about her safety, worried about the future, but it’s always been small scale, fantasy-land fear, the kind you get before the dentist or a particularly unpleasant meeting – you’d rather avoid it, but you know that if you have to face it, you’ll get through the discomfort because it’s not really actually all that bad. The Fear is another matter entirely.

It crept up on me unannounced. Everything was fine – a bright, crisp morning, fluffy white clouds scudding across an azure sky, the ocean stretching out below us towards the horizon. Lizzie was walking down the hill holding Izzie’s hand and while I locked up the caravan, my little girl looked over her shoulder at me, the breeze tousling her hair. Her face was a picture of innocent joy, her toothy smile so infectious as she waved at her daddy that in that moment I knew what it was to be loved and what true happiness felt like.

And an instant later I was struck by The Fear – the all-pervading, nausea-inducing, gut-wrenching, knee-weakening presentiment that I would lose her.

The closest I’ve come to this feeling before is when Izzie was around three months old. I went into her room in the middle of the night to check on her and she was so still and quiet I thought she was dead. My first thought – nay, instinct – was to travel to wherever she had gone, because she needed me and I couldn’t bear the thought of not being there for her. Short story even shorter, she wasn’t dead, she was just asleep – but the incident cleared up any lingering doubts about whether I truly believed in the hereafter.

The Fear wasn’t like this at all. It didn’t come from anything scary but from something joyous. It was as though upon reaching the heights of happiness, my body reacted and rebelled, viscerally and violently. Out of the clear blue sky I was filled with the most terrible and heartbreaking dread.

I’m not just talking about death, though that’s a given – cancer, meningitis, kidnap, murder, an accident, The Fear showed me it all – I’m talking as much about change. If I could have frozen that moment she waved at me with innocent joy, I would have done, because right now Izzie adores me – I’m the smartest, coolest, funniest, most-lovable chunk of a man she knows. But all that will change, and quickly too. My days as my daughter’s faultless hero are well and truly numbered.

I spent all that day with The Fear. Maybe, I thought, it’s here because I was talking to somebody about Seneca a few days ago, and his belief that your mind is the only thing you can rely on as everything else you can lose – friends, family, status, job, home, health, hair, all of it. Or maybe, I thought, I’m preoccupied with losing Izzie because police believe they might be days away from locating the body of Ben Needham, a British 21-month-old who went missing 25 years ago in Kos. Or perhaps it’s because I had the unfortunate experience of overhearing a fourteen-year-old girl and her mother screaming life-affirming statements at one another like, ‘I’ve effing had it with you,’ ‘you effing well ruin everything,’ and, ‘I wish you were effing dead!’

But that’s not it at all. If it was, The Fear would be with me all the time. No, it’s because in that moment of perfect happiness I realised my unbridled love for another person – and simultaneously my utter and total vulnerability. Izzie has me, heart and soul, and if anything happens to her, I would be destroyed. The Fear was a safety mechanism, a reality check, because I was walking too close to contentment, and believed my happiness to be immortal. Keep away from the sun, Icarus, or you’ll fall into the sea.

And that is the dilemma of parenting. You give yourself and hold nothing back, but in so doing you risk everything. Your fate is tied to that fragile, fickle bundle of cells you call your child. And the price for your joy is The Fear, cropping up when you least expect him, reminding you you’re dancing with a moonbeam that can never be contained.

But in the meantime, long live this moment.

Imitation, experimentation, and intuition

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

How do children learn about the world? This is the issue dominating my mind right now, partly because fourteen-month Izzie is learning at an exponential rate and partly because I’ve ploughed through Sophie’s World over the last few nights and 3000 years of philosophy compressed into 400 pages is enough to make anyone’s head spin.

You can get really deep and complex and ponder the effects of sensory perceptions and experience versus the influence of innate cognition and primitive, pre-verbal mental reasoning. But if I’m not mistaken – which I might be as I haven’t really been sleeping – I’ve been able to reduce the entire field of infant learning down to three key processes:

  • Imitation: watching and copying;
  • Experimentation: fiddling until you’ve figured it out; and
  • Intuition: good god, how the hell did you know to do that?

Imitation is pretty simple. Since Izzie has seen us drink from cans, whenever she comes across one she lifts it to her mouth as though drinking. She does the same thing with deodorant cans, so it’s not a foolproof system, but the idea is right.

The good thing about imitation as a learning tool is that you don’t have to teach her – she just picks it up. Watching us press the pointy end of the pen to paper, whenever she gets her hands on a writing implement she now seeks out a newspaper, TV guide, or daddy’s book so that she can make lots of lovely little squiggles. Seeing us use the sponge to wash her face, every time I bath her now she grabs it off me, wets it, and washes my face – usually covering me with water. And when we tell her we’re going out, she grabs our shoes and tries to put them on our feet to help us get ready quicker – or not, as the case invariably is.

On the other hand, the bad thing about imitation as a learning tool is that you don’t have to teach her – she just picks it up. So when mummy playfully throws one of the baby’s cuddly toys at me, Izzie discovers that wonderful game called ‘throwing things at daddy’, but instead of limiting herself to soft, light toys, she thinks it’s all fair – books, coasters, wooden blocks, the kinds of things that really hurt when they connect with your shin bone, or elbow, or forehead. Likewise, because she sees daddy turn on his Xbox by pressing the on/off button on the front and hears a terribly interesting ‘beep’, at random times she’ll toddle over and press it – even if daddy has been playing a game for half an hour and hasn’t saved it! And because she sees Ozzie the dog chasing the cat around the lounge, for the last few days she’s been terrorising Korea (in case you’re wondering, she’s a rescue cat and that’s the name we’re stuck with).

Experimentation is a slightly more cerebral process. It’s all about taking an object and figuring out its intrinsic physical qualities. Whenever Izzie gets a new toy she starts out by bashing it against things (how heavy is it? What noise does it make?), proceeds to bite it (is it food? What does it taste like?), and then turns it all round and decides which is the most enjoyable way of interacting with it. So she’s gradually discovered that it’s more rewarding to press the keys on the piano thing we got her from a car boot sale (plinky-plonky style) than slap it or slobber all over it – although I kind of wish she hadn’t. And she’s discovered that if she pulls the oven door on her toy kitchen really hard, she can yank it off and then throw it at daddy – thus combining experimentation and imitation.

She’s also been using experimentation to discover how, if something doesn’t work one way, another way might produce a better outcome. Hitting her xylophone with the end of the beater that the string was attached to made a muffled thudding sound; now she uses the proper end and smacks the crap out of those metal bars with the volume and melody of a pneumatic drill. Drawing on paper with marker is all well and good, but drawing on her legs and/or dress gets a much more exciting reaction. And if she wants me to read her a book, she brings it to me and puts it on my lap, and if I don’t read it, she hits me with it, which is equally as fun.

You see, Izzie also experiments by varying causes to provoke multiple effects – a long-winded way of saying she tries various methods to manipulate her parents to get what she wants. Screaming, crying, stamping her feet, balling her fists – and if daddy doesn’t give in, she goes to mummy and repeats the process, and vice versa. She likes to point, to say ‘uh’ to indicate ‘that’, and failing that, to reach for it and clamber up on the furniture and move things about until she either gets it or gets given an equally attractive alternative. And if you’re walking in a direction she doesn’t want to go, she’s discovered that instead of resisting, screaming or crying, she can just go limp and sink down to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, refusing to budge until you turn the other way, whereupon she springs into life like Popeye with spinach in his belly. Too clever for her own good, that one.

Which brings us to the final learning process: intuition. Or rather, instead of a learning process it’s more like a remembering process because I have no freaking idea how to explain some of Izzie’s behaviours beyond the possibility that past lives exist. These are the things she does that she has not witnessed so can’t be imitating, hasn’t experimented with, and by rights should not have the reasoning power or cognition to achieve.

Like a few weeks back when I drank a Coke from a glass bottle and left it with a few dregs in the bottom on my father-in-law’s lawn. A few minutes later, Izzie totters over, picks up the bottle, sees it has some left in it, carries it over to the table, pours it into a glass, puts the bottle on the table top, picks up the glass, knocks back the Coke in a single gulp, puts the glass back on the table and toddles off again. If there weren’t other witnesses, I would have doubted the evidence of my own eyes. We’re not the kind of people who pour drinks from bottles into glasses – we drink it from the bottle or else drink cans – so where did that come from?

Similarly, I was bathing her the other day when she picked up her mum’s lady razor from the side of the bath, and despite never having seen or touched one before, proceeded to shave my forearm. Had it not had the plastic cover over the blade, I would have an arm as bald as an Olympic swimmer’s. The thing is, holding a wiggly-handled lady razor is quite a skill for a baby, especially getting it the right way up and to then run it down my arm multiple times in perfect imitation of a person shaving – where did that come from?

My mum took her to a toy shop and after looking around for a few minutes, Izzie took a box off the shelf, lay it on the floor, and then pressed it repeatedly with her foot. So far, so normal, except that inside the box was a mat you put on the floor then press with your foot to make noises – so how the hell did she know to do that?

And the other day we gave her a yellow duster, and what did she do with it? Yup. Started dusting the surfaces. I can guarantee she’s never seen us do that before!

So here is my treatise on child learning: imitation, experimentation, intuition…unless my daughter is the reincarnation of a Coke-drinking, music-mat-playing barber who likes cleaning, in which case I’m not sure I can generalise using her as my case study.

Failure and success in writing

Gillan Drew1 Comment

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 An Adult 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.

Thanks for reading,

Gillan Drew, author (yay!).

Asperger’s, Parenting and Negativity

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

When you become a parent you make a decision: you decide you’re going to sacrifice your own needs in order to look after those of another. You commit to giving up your time, energy, sleep and even your life, if necessary, so that your child is kept healthy, happy and safe. And you swear you will do everything in your power to create a well-adjusted, confident, stable and successful human being.

When you have Asperger’s Syndrome, you have to make a further decision: I’m not going to let my autism stop me being a good parent, come what may.

There are a number of natural deficits that afflict parents with Asperger’s. We love routines and struggle to cope with change, two characteristics that don’t really lend themselves to looking after an unpredictable ball of poop and pee. Our rigid thinking and difficulties processing information impinge upon our ability to do the multitasking required for effective parenting. Problems with motor clumsiness make baby handling somewhat awkward, while sensory issues such as hypersensitive smell and hearing make nappy-changing a horrific burden. But none of these are insurmountable.

When I encounter sudden change, I grit my teeth and bear it, fight down the anxiety that rips through my insides, and recover later, after the baby has gone to bed. Since I get easily distracted and can’t multitask, all I do when watching the baby is watch the baby – I can’t watch TV, read a book, enjoy a coffee or even go to the toilet, and when we’re out and about I pay scant attention to the outside world, but that is the price I pay, and the decision I’ve made, to keep her safe. And when I change her nappy I hold down the disgust and queasiness, smile as though everything is fine, and get on with the job at hand.

More difficult for the Aspergic parent is understanding and meeting your child’s needs. Given our difficulties interpreting social communication and problems understanding how other people think and feel, we can be oblivious to our child’s emotional state and struggle to give appropriate support. Since we often have limited social needs we can fail to appreciate our child’s social needs and thanks to social phobia fail to provide for them. And because we struggle to understand our emotions we can have difficulties regulating our behaviour in front of our children.

Again, none of these problems are insurmountable. Just because we do not intuitively ‘get’ our children the way a neurotypical parent might doesn’t mean we can’t consciously learn to meet their needs. I get advice from other parents, books and the internet to understand my daughter’s developmental needs and how to meet them. I study her noises and facial expressions to work out what they might mean. I take her to social events, the fair, the park, to give her the opportunity to mix with other children. I know she’s looking to me for reassurance so I make sure I smile and act confident even though inside I’m on the verge of panic. Going forward, I will encourage her to communicate her needs and feelings in an open and honest fashion, and I will discuss them and adapt my behaviour to meet them.

My life as a parent with Asperger’s is all about lists, and study, and systems, and hard-thinking. I compensate for my natural deficits by using my intellect. Since I spent 28-years without a diagnosis masking my condition, I hide my problems from my daughter and refuse to let them stop me from being a good parent. It is hard, it is thankless, and it is painful, but it is the decision I chose to make when I had a child.

And it is working. At thirteen months my daughter is a bubbly, happy, confident, outgoing, highly sociable little girl who only wants to run around the park playing with children she’s never met and get involved in anything and everything that’s going on around her. She is in every way the very model of a healthy, successful human being despite having two parents on the autism spectrum.

So you can imagine my anger and disgust when, upon entering ‘parenting’ and ‘Asperger’s’ into a search engine, I was confronted by pages and pages of horrendous, prejudiced, discriminatory anti-Aspie bile.

There is a paper by a psychologist calling for parents with AS to be labelled with a ‘parenting disability’. There is an article saying an Aspergic parent raising a neurotypical child is ‘the definition of abuse’. Everywhere you look there are articles and opinion pieces about how bad Aspergic people are at parenting, and how all children of autistic parents suffer long-term psychological damage, depression and low self-esteem. It is inevitable, apparently, that our children will suffer lifelong difficulties as we are such failures as human beings.

Autistic parents, so says the rhetoric, are inhuman unfeeling monsters who are incapable of expressing love or meeting any of their child’s needs; we should have our children closely monitored and/or removed for their own welfare; and we place a massive burden on child services and mental health teams. And even if we think we’re doing a good job, we’re actually not – we simply don’t have the insight or self-awareness to realise we’re crap, abusive, emotionally neglectful parents. While it is rarely explicitly expressed, it’s hard not to get the impression that a lot of people out there think that people such as myself should not be allowed to procreate. As parents, people with AS are the proverbial lepers.

As a parent with Asperger’s, it’s hard not to be affected by such bigoted negativity. It’s hard not to let that negativity seep inside and colour your parenting experience. But the fact is, they’re wrong, so, so wrong.

True, some people with Asperger’s Syndrome will make terrible parents, just as many neurotypical parents shouldn’t have a dog, let alone a child. But because I know I have Asperger’s Syndrome, it makes me a better parent because I am constantly assessing and evaluating my behaviour and consciously adapting it to better meet my daughter’s needs. Knowing kids need to feel love and Aspergic people are rarely demonstrative, I make sure to express my love in demonstrative ways. Knowing children need to develop their self-esteem and Aspergic people are too honest, when she brings home a picture from school that I think is rubbish I will tell her how good it is and put it on the fridge. I will study, and sacrifice, and tirelessly toil to be the best damned parent I can possibly be because that is the choice I have made.

And I will fight for the rights of any other Aspergic parent who makes the same choice, because saying that people with AS are incapable of being good parents is the real ‘definition of abuse’. 

Hot Weather Parenting

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

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.

It’s going to be a long hot summer.