Tag: child

The Greatest Spoonman

Gillan Drew1 Comment

I am 39 years old, give or take six months. That means I’ve been alive around 14,235 days not accounting for leap years. I’m good at some things, less so at others, but one thing I can say without any exaggeration or false modesty: I’m damned good at using a spoon.

Some people look at me and think I was just born with certain genetic advantages, but I wasn’t. My skill with a spoon does not come naturally but has been honed over a lifetime of practice and hard work. If we scratch out the first two years of my life (which are a little vague in my memory), let’s suppose for the next four years, I used a spoon an average of four times a day, or a total of 5,840 times. If you use anything that many times, you become an expert. You have to put in the effort to get the results.

Unfortunately, my dedication to spoons slackened off after that as life got in the way. After starting school, up until eleven, I probably used a spoon twice a day – once for my cereal in the morning and once for pudding at teatime. Although I wasn’t really focusing on my spoon-wielding skills, I still managed to get another 4,380 uses in my logbook. Quite good for the average person, but not enough if you want your spooning to take you to the Olympics.

Then at twelve I started to take things more seriously. Like a quintessential Englishman, I started drinking tea to help focus my performances. For five years, seven spoons a day, that’s another 12,775 times.

At seventeen, shortly after taking silver at the National Spooning Championships, I realised I would have to add coffee to my daily regimen if I ever wanted gold. Eight to ten cups a day, plus cereal for breakfast and yoghurt for pudding, say, twelve spoons a day for 23 years, and you’re looking at 100,740.

Total times I’ve used a spoon in my life (give or take a couple of thousand): 123,735.

That is how I became what I am today. All my plaudits and successes in spoon usage have come from 39 years of single-minded pursuit of excellence. I am, without a doubt and by any objective measure, a giant of spoon-wielding brilliance.

But apparently, I’m using my spoon wrong. I’ve been using it wrong all my life. Luckily, my three-year-old was able to put me right over breakfast this morning. How lucky I am to have such an expert in my home who is able to correct years of bad technique.

Her lectures on how to properly use toilet paper, the best way of making coffee, and how I should shave my face have also been greatly appreciated and improved my life no end.

This will take me to the next level, so look out world! If I was unstoppable before, with the help of my three-year-old’s wisdom and expertise, I will soon conquer this puny planet. All hail your new emperor.

Where’d my toddler learn THAT!?!

Gillan Drew1 Comment

The other day I was sitting on the sofa when, out of the blue, my toddler came up to me and said, ‘Daddy, c+nt.’

As you can imagine, I looked at her in shock. ‘What did you just call me?’ I gasped.

‘Daddy, c+nt.’

I got down on her level and looked her in the eye. ‘If you ever say that to me again -‘

‘Daddy c+nt, me hide.’

She wanted to play hide-and-seek. Thank God.

The way kids learn to talk is nothing like the way you learn a language at school. There, it’s hideously formulaic. Nuance? Nah. Emotion? Hell no! But can you ask directions to the train station where you’ll buy a return ticket to an A-ha concert? You bet I can! (This was already a dated reference even when I was at school – we’d moved on to New Kids On the Block by then).

The way to truly learn a language is to do it the way kids do it: by immersing yourself in it, listening to the way it’s spoken, the way it’s used, and experimenting with it to find ways of expressing your thoughts and ideas that are unique to you. Sure, you’re going to make plenty of mistakes along the way, but it’s the only way to become fluent. And it’s damned entertaining for the rest of us.

My two-year-old is at this stage now, and it is a daily dose of fascinating. Except that, as she attends nursery, mother-toddler groups, play dates and the houses of family members, I’m not always in control of the influences she’s exposed to.

Like the other night when I was hurrying her up to bed. ‘Come on, get a move on,’ I said, halfway up the stairs.

She turned to me, slowly took out her dummy, and in the manner of a person around thirteen years older said, ‘What’s the rush?’

It stopped me in my tracks. Where the hell did that come from?

Possibly the same place as her accent. My wife and I were both raised in the south, so we speak Estuary English with just a touch of West Country. I therefore have no idea why my daughter has started to speak as though she’s from the West Midlands.

It’s not a train but a ‘trine’, not a table but a ‘tie-bull’. We get on a ‘boose’ and wave ‘boy-boy’, and when mummy brushes my little one’s hair, she doesn’t ‘loik’ it. It’s like having a miniature Frank Skinner running round the house – every vowel sound is everso slightly off.

She also has no idea about social niceties – that just because you can say something doesn’t mean you should. I asked her to describe someone to test her communication skills. Is he tall or short? ‘Short.’ Is he thin or fat? ‘Fat, like daddy.’

Out the mouths of babes…

And that’s before we mention the profanities. The other day I got cut up at a junction and snapped, ‘Asshole.’ Driving on down the road, I suddenly heard this little voice from the back going, ‘Ash-hole. Ash-hole.’ My wife made the mistake of laughing, and lo, we now have a potty-mouthed toddler whose favourite word is going to get us banned from the church playgroup.

Her storytelling is a bit bizarre at the moment too, focusing on the trivialities and glossing over the important stuff. After a whole day with granny on Monday, she summed it up with, ‘Natasha came to see granny, and Barry came to see my tongue.’

I have no idea what that means.

Still, if you really listen, sometimes she gives you pearls of wisdom. When she noticed the dog had a sore foot, she asked me what was wrong, and I told her to ask the dog. This she did, waited for an answer, then said to me, ‘Dog food needs butter.’ Problem solved.

But for me, the funniest thing was when I was putting her to bed the other night. My wife made a clatter in the kitchen and my daughter said, ‘Mummy noise.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Mummy made a noise.’

‘Mummy upstairs?’

‘No, she’s downstairs in the kitchen. It’s right below us.’

‘Kitchen?’

‘Yes,’ I replied, pointing. ‘It’s below, right here.’

Pushing back her covers, she climbed out of bed, got on her hands and knees and blew on the carpet.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Kitchen,’ she replied.

‘Yes, it’s below here.’

And she bent forward and blew on the carpet again.

‘Why are you -?’ I started, and the penny dropped.

You forget that kids can’t always differentiate your words.

I can’t imagine why she thought daddy was pointing at the floor and saying, ‘Blow here.’

 

My Gorgeous Baby (reach for the sick bags…)

Gillan Drew1 Comment

In my previous post I wrote about how difficult my new baby is. I said she was demanding, noisy, awkward – in short, a bit of an asshole. And while none of that’s changed, one thing I mentioned has to be amended – that’s she’s not obviously beautiful.

She’s suddenly gorgeous.

See, while I always thought her sister could be a baby model, Rosie I considered a little – how shall I put this? – aesthetically unappealing by comparison. Whereas my first daughter Izzie looked like a photo from the side of a nappy pack, Rosie was more likely to feature in a painting hanging in the foyer of the Houses of Parliament. I mean, she had the triple chin, piglet eyes and a face so fat its BMI must have been around 35 – all she needed was a cigar and you’d have thought she led the government through World War Two.

But now that her milk rash and peely skin and swollen cheeks have cleared, and she’s making eye-contact and smiling and giggling like a good ‘un, she is the prettiest baby in the world.

Yes, I know I’m her dad and this is all pretty standard parent stuff – waxing lyrical about how wonderful your child is and how she’s more beautiful than anybody else’s, as though you’re the first people in history ever to procreate – but I have to do justice to the fact that I’m suddenly being stopped in the street everywhere I go by people telling me how pretty she is.

Like yesterday, when someone told me she was a ‘very bonny baby’, which, given somebody said practically the same thing to me last week, makes me wonder just how many Scottish people are living down here on the south coast. Or today, when the health visitor couldn’t get over how precious she is, and said her picture could grace the side of any nappy packet, which you might have realised is almost the greatest compliment a parent can be paid in my book. 

So it’s not just me – she’s objectively gorgeous.

What a difference ten days make!

Still an asshole, though…

Number 2 – uh oh! (Part 2)

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The fact that pregnancy is one month too long might be the most convincing argument for intelligent design. Women seem to spend eight months dreading the labour and birth, and one month going, ‘Oh come on, hurry up and get this thing out of me already!’ If that’s an accident of nature, it’s a damned good one.

And it doesn’t just affect the women – most of my anxieties about the birth have been crushed beneath the elephant seal that’s taken up residence on my sofa, barking at me whenever it wants food or attention or a foot massage. It’s no fun being a heavily pregnant woman, but nor is it fun being a heavily pregnant woman’s spouse. Seriously, she snores so bad at night it’s like sharing a bed with an obese eighty-year-old asthmatic. Give me back my wife, damn it! I’m not sure how much more I can take.

We still have three days till the due date, but we’re aching for the birth. And it’s not just us – my twenty-two month old daughter has been looking forward to meeting her little sister for months now.

‘What’s in mummy’s tummy?’ I ask her.

‘Baby,’ she replies excitedly. ‘Baby girl.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘And how’s she going to get here?’

‘Mummy bigger, bigger, bigger POP! Hello baby girl.’

‘Yes. Well, sort of.’

If only it was that easy…

Of course, she probably has no idea of what’s going to come – a pretty dolly she can play with, I think – but we’ve tried to prepare her as best we can and included her as much as possible along the way. She’s come to scans (nightmare), midwife appointments (nightmare) and to see the consultant (nightmare); she’s seen the baby on the screen, heard her heartbeat, and helped us pick out the layette; and she talks to her in her mummy’s tummy, hugs her, and kisses her goodnight.

But currently, her little sister is nothing more than an abstract concept. When she arrives, when Izzie faces the reality of a crying baby who monopolises mummy and daddy’s time, that’s when we’ll see how she really feels.

And there have been a couple of signs of potential storms to come, both concerning the sleeping arrangements. When the new cot arrived – after I spent several hours wondering why I’m so much better at baby ballet than assembling furniture – she climbed into it and decided it was hers. When I told her it belonged to the baby, her face fell.

‘My bed,’ she said quietly.

‘You’ve got your own bed, sweetheart. This is the baby’s bed.’

‘My bed.’

After half an hour of this, and plenty of hugs and reassurance, she finally admitted it was the baby’s bed, and the crisis was averted.

The second difficulty was when she discovered, a few weeks later, that the baby would be sleeping in our room for the first few months.

‘Me, mine room; mummy daddy, mummy daddy room; baby, baby room.’

‘She has to sleep next to mummy and daddy because she’ll be very small and we need to look after her, like we did when you were small.’

‘Mummy daddy, mummy daddy room; baby, baby room.’

And that’s that.

That one wasn’t quite so easily resolved. It took a long time for her to get her head around the idea, though she eventually seemed to accept it. Clearly, she understands the concept of fairness and isn’t going to like that the new baby is likely to have certain benefits that she no longer enjoys.

This might explain why she has become rather clingy of late; she’s trying to keep her dummy with her during the day when she’s only allowed it at night; and she wants to be carried everywhere. Certainly, she is aware that a change is coming, and she is insecure about just what that might mean.

On the one hand, a second child entering the house is a rival, if we look at the family unit as an economic model. She has to compete for limited resources – namely, her parents’ attention – and she will no longer be the centre of the universe, which are both difficult lessons to learn.

On the other hand, I’m not so sure this either/or allocation of love and attention is entirely accurate. We fully intend to involve Izzie in every aspect of our child-rearing – she can help fetch nappies and wipes, hold the bottle during feeds (with close supervision, of course), and she can sing and dance and entertain the little one. It’s not so much about the new baby coming and stealing her place as it is adding another member to our already happy family. So long as she can feel included around the new baby – and if we all work together, there’s no reason that she shouldn’t – then I don’t think there’ll be much of a problem.

But even if there is, we’ll deal with it. That’s parenting.

I sat her down the other day for a chat. I told her not to feel scared about her sister coming, or how strange things might be. I told her that even though things might be different, it wouldn’t change how much she’s loved or how special she is. I reassured her that we’d still have bath times, I’d still read her a book at bedtime, and that no matter what, I would be there for her when she needed me.

I’m not sure how much of this she took in, being as she’s only two-years-and-two-months old, but I’m continually surprised by what a toddler is capable of understanding. You give your child love and patience, there’s nothing that can’t be overcome.

But I really hope this second baby comes soon – if mummy gets any bigger, she really is going to pop, and I don’t want to be anywhere near when that happens.

The Long Winter

Gillan Drew1 Comment

Every year I look forward to the winter, when the trees turn into skeletons reaching bony branches into a crisp azure sky, the air fills with the reassuring scents of wood smoke and cinnamon, and as the evenings draw in I can snuggle safe in the warmth of my family’s comforting embrace. And as a bonus, I get to break out my rather fine collection of furry hats and oversized jumpers, my gloves and my scarves, and best of all my cowboy boots. Winter, I think, is my favourite time.

And then winter comes and it’s an eternal wasteland of grey days, miserable nights and an ever present sense of despair. The garden turns to mud, the dead leaves swirl about huddled bushes and overturned lawn furniture, and the cold seeps inside and seems to chill your very soul until your outlook becomes as bleak as the view from your dirt-encrusted windows. Good God, I think, I bloody hate the wintertime.

Normally, I start to feel better as soon as the daffodils begin to burst up from the frigid earth, bringing with them the promise of spring and cheerier times to come; this year, the daffodils are in full bloom and this despondency shows no sign of lifting. I’m caught in my own personal Groundhog Day, and there are six more weeks of winter.

The depression goes hand-in-hand with the tiredness. There comes a time when you have to accept that tiredness is no longer a transitory state –  it is now a part of you, a defining characteristic, just another one of your personality traits. Describe Gillan: male, six feet tall, autistic, tired, mostly friendly – provided he’s had his coffee.

I wake up tired, live tired, go to bed tired. In my dreams, I am too tired to do anything – I simply sit and stare at featureless walls in an empty room. I don’t remember the last time I felt well-rested and ready to face the day ahead. This is, of course, a familiar side-effect of being a parent. You count down the hours till the little one goes to bed, because you think you’ll be able to rest, catch up, get at least some of the way towards feeling okay again. But you don’t, because tiredness is who you are now.

Combined with the depression it becomes somewhat debilitating.

I spend hours lying on the sofa just staring at the ceiling. I think I should watch a movie, but after ten minutes I switch it off because I can’t concentrate or care. I think I should walk the dog but I can’t drag myself to my feet. I think I should write but can’t stomach the empty page. I can’t be bothered to cook, so I binge on chocolate and coffee. The other morning I ate four Creme Eggs, one after the other. Yesterday I ate three Crunchie Bars back to back, like chain smoking chocolate. And then I drank five coffees in a row just so I could get through until lunch. I’m not sure which is the most unhealthy.

I know too much, about all the wrong things. I can name dozens of serial killers, only a handful of victims; can name every state in America, but not the boroughs of my local town; know all manner of mental disorders, psychological conditions and mood stabilising medications, but can’t identify the plants that grow in my own back garden. If you need me to name a thousand movies I’ve seen, a thousand books I’ve read, a thousand bands I’ve heard, I can sit down with a pen and paper and list them for you (in fact, I do this a couple of times a year just for fun); but ask me to name a hundred people I have known in my life, I don’t think I’d be able to do it.

And that is the problem with depression – your mood dictates your thoughts, not the other way around. I have a lovely daughter, a lovely wife, a lovely family; I have a book coming out in three weeks, the culmination of a lifelong dream; and I have nothing to be unhappy about. I know this; I appreciate this; yet this awareness does nothing to lift my mood. Instead, the depression makes your brain turn on itself, devour the light and turn everything to the darkness. For darkness is not simply the absence of light – it is a physical entity that spreads and consumes all before it, a shadow fire that chills as much as it burns.

You start to wonder when last you felt happy, excited, or even at peace. You try to remember if there was ever a time you experienced what other humans call ‘joy’. You track back and back, and back even further. You remember a time when you were ten and you were surfing and…no, you weren’t happy even then. So you take it to the extreme – was I happy when I was six? Four? Am I just incapable of happiness?

And then people with no understanding say things to you, like, ‘Think happy thoughts,’ or, ‘Just pick yourself up and snap out of it,’ or, my favourite, ‘What you should do is get up early and go for a nice run, then you’ll feel better.’ If I can’t motivate myself to do those things that once gave me a modicum of pleasure, how on earth am I meant to drag myself out into the cold and the wet to exercise? Whoever recommends that course of action has no idea what it is like to battle every day of your life against simply giving up. And I am tired of fighting.

For depression is not something I have done to myself. I have not thought depressing thoughts. I have not chosen to feel this way. I have not caused it through my own weakness. Depression is something that has happened to me. It is an illness I contracted when I hit puberty, something from which I have never been free. It lies dormant for a time, only to return with a vengeance. Normally in the wintertime, to be fair. A black dog creeping in from the borderlands, uninvited. And no matter how I try to kill it with thought, medication, meditation, diet, I have no doubt it will dog my footsteps the rest of my life to come.

Luckily, for the pile of apathy writing this blog, I am a parent and a husband, and those things are more important to me than my own wellbeing. I cannot indulge my more destructive, neglectful tendencies without irrevocably destroying my self-image, and I am far too egotistical about my prowess as a father and a partner to neglect my duties towards others.

If I lived alone, as I have in the past, I would wake up in my clothes, stay in bed till lunchtime, eat junk, and go back to bed without changing, washing, shaving, opening the post, or doing any of the everyday chores that make a person a functioning member of society. Instead, as a father, I must haul my weary bones out of bed each morning to get my daughter up, dressed and fed. I have to change my clothes to set a good impression, brush my teeth when she brushes hers, eat at the table with her. In the evening I have to cook my wife a delicious and nutritious dinner and I bath when she baths. I might only be going through the motions, an imitation of a living, feeling being, but in so doing I find a way to function, despite the depression. I remain a good father and a good husband even as I cave in upon myself and sink beneath the weight of my own lethargy.

This is my life now, and I can keep it going as long as I must. I have done it before and I have no doubt I will do it again many times over. I just wish this winter would end.

Betrayed by mine own kin!

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You spend twenty months building a bond with your child – changing her nappy, cleaning up her sick, giving her cuddles all through the night, and letting her wipe her runny nose on your shirt – and you expect a certain amount of loyalty in return. You know, the way a dog follows you because you feed it or a cat because you let it sleep on your lap. At the very least, you assume there has developed between you a modicum of trust.

Don’t be fooled. Toddlers cannot be trusted.

Yesterday morning, my daughter wanted a gingerbread biscuit that she could see on the counter in the kitchen. I knew mummy wouldn’t approve, because it was just after breakfast, but little Izzie smiled at me, pointed and said, ‘Bease,’ in her adorably cute childish fashion, so how could I resist?

There was one proviso, however – as I placed it into her outstretched fingers, I whispered to her, ‘Shh, don’t tell mummy, it’s our secret. You’ll get daddy in trouble. Okay?’

She nodded emphatically. Yes. Our secret.

I have no doubt she understood.

The moment my fingers released the biscuit, she ran into the lounge waving it in the air and shouting, ‘Mummy, mummy!’ Look what I’ve got, mummy.

‘How did you get that?’ mummy asked.

Beaming from ear to ear, my daughter pointed right at me. ‘Daddy,’ she said, sat down and ate it.

Disloyal little bastard.

This morning her mummy gave her a piece of iced doughnut to eat. ‘Ooh,’ I said, kneeling before my daughter. ‘Can daddy have some?’

She shook her  head violently. ‘No.’

‘Please?’

‘No.’ And she crammed the entire piece into her mouth, so much she couldn’t even close her lips, just so I couldn’t have it.

Disloyal little bastard.

In fact, ‘no’ has become her favourite word, particularly when she knows how much hurt it can cause.

‘Can daddy have a kiss?’

‘No.’

‘Do you love daddy?’

‘No.’

Those times she does deign to allow me to kiss her, she turns her head and points to her cheek as if to say, ‘Oh, go on then, kiss my cheek if you must, peasant, then go refill my water bottle.’

Actually, it’s her second favourite word, the favourite being, ‘mummy.’ When she gets her own way, you see, it tends to involve mummy, so she figures that if she calls everyone mummy, she’s far more likely to get what she wants.

I’d develop a complex if I wasn’t so sure of my sex. Today, for example, my wife is out, but that hasn’t prevented the name ‘mummy’ being mentioned around a thousand times, mostly screamed at me because I won’t give the little one a biscuit. All day, ‘mummy, mummy, mummy, mummy.’ Not one ‘daddy’, no matter how many episodes of the pig I let her watch, no matter how much I colour with her, read to her, build towers with her, walk her round the block – ‘mummy, mummy, mummy.’ That’s loyalty for you.

And she’s using her mother’s tendency to be more indulgent than me to play her parents off against one another. If I say no, she starts to cry and toddles over to mummy to see if she can get what she wants, and lays it on really thick by pointing at me in the midst of her despair and sobbing, as if saying, ‘Daddy was mean to me, mummy, sort him out!’ Bloody tattle-tale. It’s amazing how quickly she’s learned that skill.

And to add insult to injury, when mummy asks, ‘What’s wrong? Why are you so upset?’ my darling, cherished daughter says the word she never says under any other circumstance: ‘daddy.’

Disloyal little bastard.

 

A Christmas Parenting Problem

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My daughter is a very boisterous child. She’s happiest when she’s falling off things and engaging in rough and tumble. She climbs up shelving units, jumps off the arms of sofas, spins in circles until she loses balance and crashes into the nest tables, runs until she trips and crashes down on grass, carpet, wood or concrete, and very rarely cries as a result of these semi-deliberate ‘accidents’. I’m sure she’s in training to be a stuntwoman. Her legs are a patchwork quilt of bruises and grazes and cuts, which she pokes and fusses over like they’re curiosities or badges of honour.

She’s a double-hard bastard, is what I’m trying to say. Despite being 17-months-old, her preferred playmates are kids aged 4-7 with whom she can wrestle, dance, and generally get up to mischief. She’s pretty much fearless. I get very concerned when she plays with kids her own age because she’s so excitable, energetic and rough that someone always seem to get hurt – and by ‘someone’, I mean whomever else happens to be playing with her. She’s a happy, confident and very contented child.

Which is why it’s all the more unexpected that she’s terrified of Santa.

She saw him a fortnight ago and screamed herself hoarse. She saw him last week and screamed herself hoarse. She saw a cut out of him on the wall of her soft play and pointed at it, shook her head and said, ‘Bad man’ (or she thinks Batman has really let himself go). She won’t go near the Christmas tree because it’s got a four-inch knitted Santa on it. She saw him on Peppa Pig and backed up ten feet until she was up against the wall, never once taking her eyes from the screen. She even went through a stack of CDs, came upon a picture of an elderly Brahms, and burst into tears. Clearly, overweight men with white beards are some kind of trigger to her – I’d better try not to let myself go (any further than I already have).

All of this would be a minor problem were I not married to a person who thinks that rather than peace, love and goodwill to all men, Christmas is actually all about trees, tinsel, markets, carol concerts, and a rather rotund gentleman with a penchant for dishing out presents from his sack. Indeed, my wife clung to a belief in Santa Claus far longer than would be considered rational, and I often have arguments with her over the existence or otherwise of Hogwarts and the Ministry of Magic (statements such as, ‘But how do you know they’re not real?’ and ‘What evidence is there that they don’t exist?’ show exactly where she believes the burden of proof should lie!).

Unfortunately we have two upcoming appointments with St Nick – prebooked, prepaid and non-refundable – and my wife’s love of Yuletide being what it is, there is no way in hell I can persuade her to cancel. The first is innocuous enough: a garden centre. We walk down a tunnel filled with twinkly lights, fake snow and geographically mismatched wildlife (I can accept flying reindeer, but polar bears mixing with penguins? Forget about it!), and we meet Santa in a little room at the end. If she screams, vomits or has any kind of adverse reaction, we can simply head for the nearest exit. Simple.

The other encounter I’m less optimistic about: it’s on a train.

The thought of sitting next to a screaming toddler while Santa enters the front of the carriage and slowly makes his way from the front to the back, stopping to greet and cuddle and provide gifts to every child along the way, fills me with dread. Not to mention the fact that I really don’t take any pleasure from exposing the little one to a situation that upsets, terrifies and traumatises her.

So, the past two weeks I’ve been trying everything I can to convince her that Santa is actually a very affable, non-threatening, child-friendly individual – albeit one who sneaks into your room at night while you’re asleep, hoping you won’t wake up, so he can steal your milk and cookies. Alas, it doesn’t seem to be working.

Still, it could be worse, I suppose. If she develops a phobia of thirty-something men with neatly-trimmed ginger beards tinged with an increasing amount of grey – well, then we’d really have problems!

The Pain, the Pain!

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When you’re a father, pain becomes a fairly common part of your life. Receiving pain is a given – Izzie stabbed me in the eye with a plastic knife yesterday, and has taken to ramming the corners of her hardback books into my throat, temples and ears. She also bites down on my fingers whenever I try to get something out of her mouth that shouldn’t be there, pulls my beard, grabs my bottom lip and twists it, jams her fingers up my nostrils, headbutts my nose, kicks me in the nuts (repeatedly), yanks on my ears, and occasionally jumps up and down on my stomach. Thank God I don’t have hair. This is before we mention the aches and strains of picking her up, carrying her, leaning down to hold her hand while we walk, and the million-and-one other repetitive actions of parenting.

But as I said, that’s a given – I’m a dad. Until she learns self-control, cause and effect, and appropriate social behaviour, these things are going to happen.

What I wasn’t quite so prepared for was the necessity to inflict pain upon my daughter – for her own good, of course. Not for discipline, I must point out, but for healthcare/first aid reasons. Unfortunately, when it comes to doing something like that, the job falls to me, and that’s something I baulk at.

Many years ago I started training as a nurse. I didn’t last very long because I just couldn’t get comfortable inflicting pain on others, even if it was to help them. ‘Cruel to be kind’ is a difficult concept in reality when the cruelty is self-evident while the kindness is measured at some indeterminate point in the future – giving injections might eventually make someone feel better somewhere down the line, but when you’re giving them, all you see is the grimace, the wince, the tears, or the blood. And ditto with inserting nasogastric tubes, performing enemas (although the benefits of this intervention were far quicker in coming, if I’m frank), or cleaning infected wounds.

The day I quit nursing was the day I was looking after an old chap with terminal cancer. He was in such pain that he couldn’t even have a bedsheet over him as the pressure on his skin was agonising. When he pooped himself – thick, sticky poop all over his bits – I was tasked with cleaning him up.

Imagine you’re a student nurse trying to wipe tar off the private parts of somebody who is screaming in pain. Imagine trying to do it delicately, knowing you are inflicting horrendous pain, and all the while your mentor is standing over your shoulder telling you to push harder, you need to press harder (and thus inflict more pain) to get him clean. And then she takes over and does it herself, matter-of-factly, calmly, quickly. Cruel to be kind.

He died later that day, and I left, because if my dithering and squeamishness prolongs someone’s pain then I’m in the wrong job. I understand the benefits of ‘cruel to be kind’, that we have to do it or he’ll get sore or infected and suffer even worse, but knowing that doesn’t make it any easier for me to inflict pain upon others. If I’d stayed I’d probably have become hardened to it, or else had a breakdown, but it wasn’t to be; and I have never had to inflict pain ever since.

So you can imagine my horror when I was putting my daughter to bed last night and noticed she had a splinter deep under her thumbprint, and another on the side of her palm. Neither of them protruding. Neither accessible with tweezers. And both of them my responsibility to remove.

When I was a child and my dad had to extract a splinter, he would grab a trusty needle, heat it over a flame to sterilise it, and then dig out the splinter with speed and precision. To the crescendo of my screams. Indeed, before he even got near me I’d be screaming – I’m surprised the neighbours never called the police. Given the fact my dad’s a very practical, down-to-earth, matter-of-fact kind of guy, I doubt he ever had any qualms or concerns about it. It needed doing so he did it. That’s what it is to be a guy.

But I am not my dad.

My chest tight, I prepared the needle over the hob and took it up to her room. The little one knew exactly what I was up to. She wouldn’t even let me look at her thumb, let alone hold it or touch it. At least when I was a kid, I sat still, kept my arm still, and screamed. No such luck with Izzie. It’s phenomenal just how much a toddler can squirm, and how strong they can be when they want, particularly when their cold-hearted father is burying the point of a needle in the soft, delicate, tender skin of their fingertip.

For anyone looking for advice, the technique is fairly simple: you scratch the skin along the line of the splinter to open it up, gently insert the point to carefully lift one side of the splinter up out of the wound, and then grab the end with tweezers and pull it out. Much easier if the victim, er, patient is held still and secure. Be prepared for screaming, tears, a red face, eyes that ask you ‘why, dad, why, I’m your daughter, why don’t you love me’, and the feeling that you’re the devil.

On the plus side, she got over it far more quickly than I did.

Post-extraction I searched the internet for easier methods and discovered that most said to soak the affected area for thirty minutes to soften the skin – but not with a wood splinter as that causes it to swell. Given that 99% of the splinters I’ve had in my life have been wood, and I don’t tend to let my daughter near jagged metal, it’s not exactly the most useful advice I’ve come across. Apparently applying magnesium sulphate will eventually draw the splinter to the surface, but when it’s bedtime and she’s already cranky and the splinters are hurting her, again it’s not the most helpful of techniques. Needle it is, then.

So let this be a lesson to all doting dads. I thought I could get away with being a caring, gentle, nurturing father, catering for my daughter’s emotional, intellectual and spiritual needs, but that’s not enough. There are times when you have to be practical, pragmatic and hard-hearted, and do what needs to be done in spite of the tears, the screams, and your own tender sensibilities. But that’s what being a parent is about sometimes, and if you can bring yourself to do it, you’ll be a better parent and be justly proud that you achieved something you never thought you’d be able to.

Autism and Empathy

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

I consider myself a reasonably intelligent fellow. I have a Diploma of Higher Education, two Bachelor’s Degrees and a Master’s, and got a distinction for each. And they cover some pretty dry subjects, too: the history of science and technology, history of medicine, the psychology of violence, English language, linguistic and representational philosophy, psychoanalysis, criminology, imperialism, archaeology, urban development, and the history of warfare, with a smattering of classics, film history and creative writing thrown in for good measure. I find it pretty easy to switch between arts, humanities and social sciences and by the measure of society, it is not a stretch to describe me as academically gifted.

The thing with academic intelligence, however, is that it doesn’t necessarily translate well into the ‘real world’ of feelings, relationships and social interaction, particularly when you have autism. The other day, for example, I was trying to explain to someone how, if a person talks in a loud voice and uses expressive hand gestures, I interpret this to mean that they’re angry (this was a subtle way of asking her to lower her voice and keep her hands inside the vehicle at all times, but it fell on deaf ears).

‘But you’re intelligent enough to know they’re not really angry,’ she said.

Well, yes, I know on an intellectual level that they’re not angry, just loud, but this actually changes nothing because my instinctive understanding is that they are, indeed, angry, and my physiological reaction is the same as if they were: my fight or flight mechanism kicks in, I get flooded with adrenalin, my hackles rise, and everything in my body acts as though I’m about to be attacked. That’s not something I can intellectualise away.

It is this difficulty interpreting or understanding another’s emotional state which makes people tell me that, as a person with autism, I am unable to empathise. And despite my broad education and academic intelligence, I have to admit that I’m really struggling to work out what this concept called ’empathy’ actually is.

The reason I’m wondering is because I have, of late, been incredibly emotionally fragile, which I have detailed in another post. I spent the most awful few weeks of my life crying over a little girl I’d never met called Jessica Whelan, who was dying of neuroblastoma. Something about the story touched me very deeply, and I internalised so much pain and sorrow that it was as if my own child were dying. I cried all day, every day. I could barely function, every day waiting for the news that she and her family had been released from their suffering.

When she finally passed, I had one last almighty cry and started to feel better. Instantly, the past few weeks started to feel weird, as if I had been in a fugue state. They have a funny colour in my mind (I associate things with colours in my head) – those weeks were yellow ochre, everything yellow ochre, when my world is normally pale blue. It was as though someone or something else had taken over me. I was an emotional wreck for weeks, just wasn’t myself at all. It was as if there was a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, and the inbetween was something else.

Describing this to people, they’ve said things like, ‘That’s because you’ve never felt empathy before’, or ‘you’ve never been able to empathise’, or ‘I thought people with autism couldn’t empathise’, or ‘as someone with autism, you’ve never had to learn how to deal with emotions when you empathise with people’. In fact, every single person I’ve spoken to has used the word ’empathy’, or a derivative of it, and this is what has me flummoxed: just what the hell is empathy?

As I have always understood it, sympathy is when you feel for someone, without internalising their pain, while empathy is when you feel with someone, taking on their viewpoint and experiencing their emotions for yourself. As an illustration of the distinction, one of our chickens died the other night. I thought it was a shame, but that was about it. When I told my wife, however, she cried for half an hour. I sympathised with her, in that I recognised she was in distress and tried to help by making her a cup of tea (that very British panacea), but I didn’t empathise with her because I didn’t feel the same emotions (i.e. I did not get upset and cry with her). Seems pretty straightforward.

But really, it’s not. When that little girl was dying, why did I feel such pain, and for whom, and in what way? I couldn’t bear that she was suffering and dying, so does that mean I was feeling for her (sympathising) or feeling with her (empathising)? Or was I doing both simultaneously? Or, in fact, neither? Because much of my pain was the result of imagining it was my child suffering and dying, does this mean I was actually empathising with her parents, by adopting their viewpoint and experiencing their pain? (Which seems a little arrogant, because how could I possibly experience the pain of losing a child without having done so?) Or was I simply imagining my own pain at the possibility of losing my own child, which means I wasn’t actually empathising at all but was indulging in a selfish, masochistic grief-fantasy?

This is what is confusing me. Being autistic, I tend to approach my emotions from an intellectual viewpoint in an attempt to understand them and regulate them, and maybe I’m thinking too much into it, but I can’t understand how a person could ever be said to empathise with another. How can a person experience the feelings of another, or understand their viewpoint? We are all different, and we think and feel differently, and it would be presumptuous in the extreme for someone to think they know, understand and echo how I am thinking and feeling. Surely when we ’empathise’, what we really mean is that we are using our imaginations to think how we would feel in a given situation, so instead of feeling someone else’s pain, we’re feeling our own (imagined) pain?

If this is the case, then it is wrong to say that people with autism cannot empathise, because we can certainly imagine how we would feel in a given situation and project that feeling onto the situations of others. Indeed, if we could not do that at all, we would fit the criteria for psychopathy, and people with autism are clearly not all psychopaths. I think the belief that people with autism cannot empathise stems from our inability to accurately interpret the emotional cues of others in interpersonal communication – if we cannot work out another’s emotional state, such as thinking they’re angry because they’re loud, how can we match emotions (empathise) with them? It is therefore a problem with social communication, and not an emotional disability.

On the other hand, if we bring in the idea of personal distress, which is seen as a subset of emotional empathy, this could answer what is going on in the autistic mind. Personal distress is a notion in psychology where witnessing the suffering or distress of others triggers anxiety, pain and distress in yourself, so rather than truly empathising with the sufferer you have a self-centred emotional reaction to their suffering. Essentially, it makes you uncomfortable because you don’t understand it or know how to deal with it. Arguably, this is what happened to me over the past few weeks – I saw someone in distress and it made me distressed, saw someone suffering and accordingly suffered. Indeed, people with autism apparently have much higher levels of personal distress than neurotypicals, since it’s a self-centred, immature version of empathy (and it’s questionable whether it’s a form of empathy at all). And given that one response to being oversensitive to the suffering of others is to withdraw from the source of this discomfort, this is another reason we are seen as unempathetic.

I think the truth of the matter is somewhere in between all this theorising. Yes, Jessica Whelan’s distress, and that of her parents, caused me great personal distress, making mine a self-centred, unempathic response. At the same time, however, I put myself in the place of her parents and, using my own daughter as a frame of reference, empathised with their pain. In addition, I sympathised with their predicament. And I pitied them. And I felt compassion for them. And for a few weeks cried all day, every day.

I think that is the important thing, the thing to remember. Regardless of what words we use to describe or define it, the thing to take away from this experience is that, for whatever reason, Jessica Whelan pierced me to my very core, exposed something I’d never felt before, and reminded me how important it is to make the most of each day that we get to spend on this earth with the people we love. I may struggle to understand empathy, but the pain I felt was real and profound.

And if I need a word to describe it? Let’s just say I’m ‘sensitive’.

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.