Tag: dad

Asperger’s, parenting and social care

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

The provision of social care for adults at the more functional end of the autism spectrum has always been somewhat spotty. If you’re at the lower end – with classic or Kanner’s autism – there’s plenty of help and support, but those of us with Asperger’s Syndrome face a lottery.

You see, as far as care services are concerned, AS falls between the Mental Health Team and the Learning Disabilities Team. It is not a mental health disorder, but then nor is it really a learning disability – it’s a developmental disorder. Nevertheless, autism tends to be within the Learning Disabilities Team’s remit – but they only get funding to deal with the lower end of the spectrum. In terms of care, then, if you have Asperger’s Syndrome there’s nothing the care services can provide.

You are, however, assigned a social worker – well, sometimes. But herein lies another problem. The team to which you are first assigned is the team you’re stuck with. I was first assigned to the Mental Health Team long before I was diagnosed with Asperger’s; as soon as I was diagnosed, I was discharged by the psychologists, psychiatrists and counsellors, but kept the social worker from the team. And as I said before, Asperger’s isn’t a mental health problem and most social workers I’ve met are gobsmacked when they meet me to find I’m not Rain Man. Different end of the spectrum, guys. Thanks for joining us.

The job of the social worker is to give the service user (i.e. me) access to services pertaining to their condition. Since, as I said, there are no services for adults with Asperger’s, this access takes the form of money that can be used to buy support from private care agencies. I was deemed to require six hours of support each week, so they decided to fund me for three, and I pay for the other three. Thus three times a week, for two hours at a time, I have support workers come in to make sure I’m carrying out my activities of daily living – changing my clothes, cooking, cleaning, etc., and to help me with paperwork, budgeting and the various minutiae of modern life I’m thoroughly incapable of coping with.

This is the way it has been for around seven years now. However, things have changed lately because of the arrival of my little bundle of giggles and poop, otherwise known as Izzie. As regular followers of my blog will know, my partner Lizzie (yes, I know it rhymes and in hindsight it’s quite confusing) has struggled with the demands of motherhood. Like me, she has six hours of support each week, and also has a social worker from Mental Health. Since things were so tough over the first six months, we asked for additional hours just to help us out until we managed to find our feet again. Here is the response we received, paraphrased and dramatized:

‘We’re adult mental health social workers. Neither of you has a mental illness. We’re not even sure why we’ve been assigned to you. Unfortunately, you fall down the cracks between Mental Health and Learning Disabilities.’

But it’s not our fault what we have doesn’t fit into your organisational structure. What we’re asking for is additional funding for more hours for assistance. Because at the rate we’re going, we’ll end up with mental health issues.

‘Well, here’s the problem. We don’t deal with children – we only deal with adults.’

But we are adults. Adults who are asking for help.

‘The thing is, before the baby arrived you were both stable on six hours a week. The disruption in your lives has been caused by the baby. Therefore, if you need extra help because of the baby, the baby will have to fund it.’

I’m not sure I understand.

‘Being a parent is not a mental health problem. If you want any assistance, Izzie will have to get a social worker, and be assigned funding from Child Services.’

I see. So will you refer us?

‘I can give you their number…’

To cut a long story short, we applied to get a social worker for Izzie, to get us extra help as her parents, but as she’s at no risk of abuse or neglect, we were turned down. So, no help there.

Another avenue explored was the Perinatal Mental Health Team. Lizzie was assessed by them, and they concluded her difficulties were caused by her autism, not by postpartum depression, and since autism isn’t a mental health problem, they can’t provide any assistance. So if her autism is causing the problem, who can we go to for help with that? Apparently, nobody.

You can now perhaps understand something of our quandary. We have autism, and despite the joys of the past six months, it’s been a real struggle. We are not the same as every other parent, even though I like to pretend we are, but we’re too high-functioning to get any help from public services, too attentive to Izzie’s needs to get access to child services, and not suffering enough mentally to get extra funding.

To add insult to injury, we have just been summarily dropped by the one piece of free support we were receiving. Since I work Tuesday afternoons in a charity shop, and Lizzie struggles to cope at home on her own with the baby, we had an outreach worker from the local children’s centre who would come out and sit with them for an hour. It was useful and we were grateful for it.

We didn’t hear from the outreach worker after the festive period until she texted on Monday 11th asking to come out either Wednesday afternoon, Thursday morning or Friday morning. Since Wednesday afternoon Lizzie was out with her mother, Thursday morning she takes Izzie to baby group (which is beneficial for mother and baby both), and Friday morning we have swimming classes (which cost £110 a term), we said we were busy. Besides, wasn’t the whole purpose of her visits to sit with Lizzie on Tuesday afternoons?

So she texted us again Tuesday just gone to tell us that they are closing our case because we have ‘disengaged from the process’ and failed to make ourselves available and haven’t kept in touch and if we ever want any help from the children’s centre again we will have to get Izzie a social worker and be referred.

This has left us both feeling perplexed and upset, principally because we have no idea which ‘process’ we are supposed to have disengaged from, but also because we don’t understand why we should have cancelled a Thursday morning Mother and Baby group or Friday morning swimming lesson when the whole reason she was coming was to sit with Lizzie for an hour on Tuesday afternoons? Furthermore, the wonderful invention called the telephone could have resolved whatever issues they had with us – what’s all this text message crap?

They clearly have no idea about autism. We like routines and we cannot abide change, so we make plans and stick to them – disruptions to our timetable make us agitated, anxious and insecure. When plans change you feel small and scared, but you can’t rationalise it away because there’s nothing you’re actually afraid of. It’s simply a general, all-pervading fear that all is not right with the world, a feeling of danger and fright when there’s nothing coming for us – just shadows in the dark. That’s why we don’t change plans at the drop of a hat. If people understood that, it might make things easier.

It reminds me of the time before my breakdown, before my diagnosis, when I was climbing the walls and my thoughts were tearing me apart. I was referred to a psychiatrist under the mental health team. But I wasn’t opening the post – I hadn’t for six months –  so when they sent out the appointment by letter, I didn’t open it and I therefore missed it. So they discharged me with the stipulation that if I was referred again I would go to the back of the queue. I only discovered this months after my breakdown when I finally had the energy to face up to opening the huge box of post my parents had kindly collected from my flat. How different things might have been if someone had actually picked up a phone. And how switched-off to the realities of mental health do you have to be to send someone an appointment by post when it said in the referral that he doesn’t open it?

I honestly think that, going forward, we’ll be better off as a family without the interventions of any of these social workers, care providers or so-called experts. The other day, when Lizzie was feeding Izzie during a support session, Izzie choked. We’ve just started her on food with a coarser texture, and choking is par for the course during weaning. The support worker even said that it was entirely innocent, normal, there wasn’t too much on the spoon or too much in her mouth, it was just one of those things. But she still felt the need to report it to her manager, and have it logged that on this day, at this time, during weaning our baby choked. Everybody is just looking for you to fail, and covering their arses in case you do, and that’s not an environment in which I want to raise my child.

Ending on a positive note, the past couple of weeks Lizzie has been so much better, it’s like she’s a different person. She’s far more attentive to Izzie’s needs, supports me more than she ever has, and is suddenly settling into the role of motherhood. And I have finally made peace with the fact that bedtimes and overnight is my domain, because Lizzie will never be capable of getting up in the night. We have different roles to play and given how Izzie is far ahead of the curve in almost every respect, we’re playing them damn well!

It’s just a shame it’s been such a struggle to get here.

Baby Blues

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

I got the baby blues, woo-oo, the baby blues, oh-oh.

Just imagine that sung by an itinerant black Southerner in the 1920s, Delta-style, and you’ve got how I’m feeling at the moment. Although in this context, my baby is an actual baby, and I’m not really in the mood for singing.

It started Monday when Lizzie’s mum looked after the little one for the day. I’ve been putting off accepting help from babysitters because I was afraid that if I got out of daddyship I’d struggle to get back in. Like when you make a New Year’s Resolution to go to the gym three days a week – you do it for months, and it’s easy because you get into a rhythm, but then you miss one day, through no fault of your own, and one day becomes two, becomes four, and wham! You’ve not set foot in a gym since 2010. That sort of thing.

Anyway, so Granny looked after Izzie all day Monday, then Lizzie took her out most of the day Tuesday, and suddenly every sleepless night, missed meal, repressed emotion and unfulfilled desire have caught up with me. I’m struggling to stay awake, can’t stop eating, bounce between wanting to cry and feeling completely numb, and can’t seem to motivate myself to do anything that I ought to be doing.

Before you know it, I’ll start menstruating.

And infinitely worse is how good it felt on Monday to have a day off. What kind of a dad spends a whole day thinking, ‘Oh my God, it’s sooooooo nice not having the baby here’? I mean, it was great getting to reconnect with Lizzie, just the two of us, even though it was just watching crap TV on the sofa. But it was bliss just to sit without keeping one ear tuned to the baby monitor, to know I wouldn’t have to suddenly jump up, that I wasn’t responsible for once, and I feel very guilty about that. If I enjoy getting away from the baby, then I can’t love her, right?

Realistically, it’s probably normal after the hardest six months of my life, but I’m not being realistic right now. I just feel a little lost, and very, very blue.

Basically, I’m wallowing in self-pity. I’m sure it’ll pass. Izzie’s currently using her dummy-lead and dummy as a pair of nunchucks and smacking the crap out of my head. She keeps it up much longer she’ll have knocked me senseless. But maybe then I’d wake up in a better mood.

Codependent Parenting

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

Izzie’s crawling! Well, not crawling as such – commando crawling, as though she’s in combat fatigues on an army assault course while someone fires a machine gun over her head.

You can’t believe how happy we were the first time we saw her do it. I knew she could get about somehow because every night when I go to check on her, she’s up the top of the cot, head pressed hard against the headboard, neck at an acute angle, and fast asleep – despite it being a position Rip van Winkle would struggle to find comfortable.

The same sense of pride and accomplishment comes from her walking. If you stand behind her and hold her hands, she’s off! Today we toddled ten metres in a single stretch. She giggles while she’s doing it, excited that she’s a big girl now. In a room full of people, I absolutely burn with pride because she’s only six-months old.

But then I started thinking: how insecure am I if I need to show off about how quickly my daughter is developing? And how shallow am I that everyone’s amazement at how ahead-of-the-curve she is feels like a personal compliment to me? Her rapid development is mostly down to genetics and her own personality, so why am I claiming it as my own achievement? And why does it feel so much better than my own accomplishments?

I mean, in the past year I’ve won four short-story writing competitions, got a distinction for my Masters Degree, and a publisher is interested in my book on autism, yet this feels like nothing next to the fact that Izzie can take off her own nappy. Which begs the question: have I become codependent with my own daughter?

The signs are there. My whole sense of purpose at the moment revolves around Izzie and her wellbeing. My emotional security rests on being able to meet her needs. I’m happy because I can keep her safe and secure. And the other day when we picked her up from her grandmother’s and she totally blanked me, I took it as a personal slight. She looked everywhere but at me – please look at daddy, tell me you missed me and you still love me, please, ah!

But then, perhaps it’s normal at this stage – below the age of one – for a parent to feel so connected to his child. It’s meant to be that way, right? We’re programmed by evolution to nurture our children, protect them, because they’re so vulnerable. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t have survived as a species.

And the last few nights when I’ve been putting Izzie to bed, holding her close and rocking her to sleep, she’s taken out her dummy and pressed it into my mouth. How can you not be touched by such an innocent and selfless act of sharing?

That is, unless she’s actually saying, ‘Stop singing, dad, you sound like a jackass.’ Nah, I’m sure she does it because she loves me, right? Right?

Partnership vs. Parenting

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

It has struck me of late how the requirements of being a partner and those of being a parent are often diametrically opposed.

It’s the quintessential conflict at the heart of Jane Austen – do we pick a partner based on practical considerations, like Charlotte Lucas in Pride & Prejudice, or do we marry for love, like Elizabeth Bennet? Actually, since Elizabeth Bennet only really warms up to Mr Darcy after she sees the size of his package (i.e. Pemberley), perhaps Marianne Dashwood from Sense & Sensibility is a better example. Except she decides not to marry the man she loves because she concludes he wouldn’t make her happy, so marries a rich guy old enough to be her father and learns to love him. And while Fanny Price marries for love in Mansfield Park, Edmund is her first cousin. In fact, the only character in Austen free to marry for love is the titular Emma – she’s the only one with an independent fortune who doesn’t need supporting by a man.

But whatever the case, that this is such a preoccupation in Austen’s novels shows that in Georgian times, it was a very real conflict. And so it still is in some areas of the modern world – the upper crust, for example, who seem to marry the person who fits the job description of ‘wife and mother’ while refusing to give up the mistresses they really love (no names mentioned). But for the most part, these days we in the Western world marry for love.

As partners, me and Lizzie are great for each other. While I’m a sensible, reclusive stick-in-the-mud, Lizzie is a childlike, emotionally-liberated basket case. While I fret about rules, money, going out, she ignores all propriety, splashes out on frivolities, and is so restless it’s nigh impossible to pin her down. Throughout our relationship, therefore, she’s encouraged me to let my hair down while I’ve helped her face up to her responsibilities – at least in part. She reminds me that the world is a magical place where fun should be had – I remind her that there are boundaries and we need to stay safe. That’s why we love each other.

Trouble is, the very things that you love in a partner are not necessarily very attractive in the parent of your child. In fact, they’re often the opposite.

Before Izzie was born, we pulled each other towards the middle, but since the birth we seem to have returned to our outer limits – I am the responsible worrier again, Lizzie the frivolous spendthrift.

Unfortunately, these two mutually exclusive positions have been playing havoc in our household of late. The most commonly used phrase in the past six months, since I became primary carer extraordinaire and Lizzie has struggled with her role as mother, has been, ‘Look, you don’t need to make things easier for me, just don’t make them any harder than they already are.’

I hate being the responsible one, the one who has to rein the other in, the one who has to say no more often than he can say yes. But it is the role I’ve had to take. And being a parent spills over into being a partner: those very things I love about Lizzie – her clumsiness, her messiness, her devil-may-care attitude – have lately been driving me insane.

Perhaps it’s because it’s the festive season. Christmas is different as a parent – at least it was for me. Normally I look forward to it, get excited, wake with boundless joy Christmas morn, suffer agonising anti-climax once the presents are opened, recover enough by lunchtime to be contented, and wobble in a confused daze until New Year where I’m filled with hope over the coming months and regret over where I’d considered I’d be by this stage of my life. And Lizzie, well, she lived through every one of those experiences and emotions, and then some.

I didn’t. I lived from day to day, hour to hour. Bottles, milk, solids, steriliser, muslins, bibs, toys, car seat. Have we got enough nappies? The baby wipes? Where’s her extra vest in case she soils this one? Teething gel? Spare dummy? While Lizzie dressed the baby in Christmas jumpers and Santa hats and woke her up to sing Auld Lang Syne, I fed her and changed her and rocked her back to sleep. While Lizzie drank champagne and ripped open presents, I listened to the baby monitor and kept the noise down. I didn’t mind it – Izzie was my stable anchor in the chaos of the silly season – but it hammered home how different we are, as parents, as partners, and as people.

If we were living in Georgian times, choosing our partners based on practical considerations, then, hand on heart, I doubt that many of us would have chosen the people we’re with now. We’d have chosen people who were different, better, smarter, funnier, kinder. I can’t imagine I’m the only person with a young child who’s looked around at other people and thought – if only I’d picked them, how much easier would my life be now?

But such thoughts are nothing more than fantasies. It’s so easy when you’re stressed, tired, overwhelmed, overfed, and surrounded by twinkling lights, to forget the important truth: we’re not living in Georgian times, and we didn’t choose our partners, at least not consciously – our hearts did. Not based on their parenting abilities, but because we loved them and love them still. Because they appealed to some intangible need or desire deep down within ourselves that only they could fulfil.

Lizzie might annoy the hell out of me as the mother of my child, but there’s nobody else I’d rather share my life with. It’s separating out these two conflicting realities that’s the hard part.

Christmas Shenanigans

Gillan Drew1 Comment
Christmas in a photo - the world as a blur!
Christmas in a photo – the world as a blur!

What has Izzie learned to do over the Christmas period? A whole heap, it seems.

Raspberries. She was pretty good before, but she’s perfected it now – perhaps because the funniest thing in the world is when daddy blows them on her belly and on her neck.

But I have created a monster.

It’s okay when she’s chomping on a wooden spoon – she blows on the bowl and uses her fingers along the handle like she’s playing a clarinet. And it’s tolerable when she has the dummy in her mouth – it just sounds like a lot of farts. But when she does it with food in her mouth – porridge, mushed-up carrots, rusks – it’s not pretty at all. Especially as I tend to be sitting right in front of her trying to feed her at the time. And she finds that pretty funny too.

She’s also making weird faces recently, like she’s trying to learn how all the muscles work. Mostly, she does duck impressions, sucking in her bottom lip, sticking out her top lip, and burbling. I guess it’s part of the process of learning to speak – after all the vowel sounds, double-ues and gees, she’s starting to make bee noises and something approximating an em, and the other day she randomly blurted out, ‘Hey you!’ which terrified the heck out of me.

Noise is something she’s fallen in love with over Christmas. The aforementioned wooden spoon that used to keep her quiet is now a drumstick for cracking out a rhythm on the tray of her high chair (always with her left hand). And the dummy is no longer a tool to help her sleep – it’s a passive-aggressive torture device she rattles back and forth along the slats of her cot like a prisoner with a mug along the bars of his cage. When she’s not laughing, that is, because bedtime is now an opportunity to chat to her teddy bears, kick the wooden headboard repeatedly, and generally have an amazing time.

Though she really ought to be tired, considering she barely sleeps at all during the day. She gets tired but she fights it, gets stroppy but resists any attempt to quieten her down, spits out her dummy, rubs her eyes, and cries. In fact, the sound she makes reminds me of that scene in Jaws where Quint is being eaten by the shark. She doesn’t want to miss anything, you see, though what she’s afraid of missing, I have no idea. The opportunity to be a nuisance, perhaps.

Because she’s loving being a nuisance too. She throws the dummy down the back of the cot so I have to pull the drawers out and crawl underneath to retrieve it (never fun at three in the morning). When she’s on her play mat she kicks the uprights over so it rolls up and buries her.

Help!
Help!

She constantly tries to turn the spoon round and jam the handle down her throat, and keep your face away from her if you value your ears – her current speciality is scrunching them up in her hands and digging in her fingernails, which is excruciatingly painful. And if she gets your phone, somewhere between chewing on the corner and drooling into the earphone socket, she sets the alarm for four in the morning.

But woe betide if you try to take it off her, because she knows what she wants.

If you think you're taking my spoon, you've got another think coming, mister!
If you think you’re taking my spoon, you’ve got another think coming, mister!

She’s become fixated with the TV controller and screams if you prise her robot-strong fingers off it. She wants to stand up all the time, not sit, not crawl – stand. So this morning when we put her in her chair for breakfast she slammed her little fists into the arms and stamped her feet  like an eight-year-old throwing a tantrum – she’s six months, for crying out loud. And the ball pit we bought her for Christmas isn’t going to get much use because all she does is press her face to the little holes in the side and strain to get out.

Get me the hell out of here!
Get me the hell out of here!

Which goes to show that the old adage is true: kids would rather play with the box than the toy within it. She got approximately a million toys for Christmas, and her favourite toy from the whole period? The bag container from inside the nappy bin. Typical!

Thanks, dad! It's just what I always wanted!
Thanks, dad! It’s just what I always wanted!

But at least she’s not the dog, who followed the gingerbread house with a bag of popping candy chocolate orange segments…

Future Worries

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

I had an argument with my six-year-old niece today.

‘I know more than you,’ she said.

‘No you don’t.’

‘Yes I do. All you know is how to eat chocolate.’

‘Not true,’ I said. ‘I know how to dispose of a body where nobody will ever find it.’

Her jaw dropped open. When she’d recovered, she said, ‘Well, I know how to kill a dinosaur.’

‘That’s nothing,’ I said. ‘I’m the reason there are no dinosaurs.’

And it got worse from there.

I’ve always been a bit of an easy target for kids. No matter how old I get, they treat me like I’m one of them. In fact, they treat me like I’m beneath them. When I was an eighteen-year-old sixth former – tall, bearded, tattooed and pierced, with a leather jacket, a ponytail and chunky army boots – the eleven-year-old Year 7s used to trip me up, call me names, tease me, even spit on me. And it’s always been this way.

No matter how much I threaten, shout, growl, snarl, swear, they still think I’m just a big teddy bear. Maybe it’s my Asperger’s Syndrome, but I have no idea how to get a child to respect me as an adult. And since Izzie turned six months old yesterday, that’s starting to worry me.

I want Izzie to like me, of course. I want to be best friends with her. But I also want her to respect me. To trust me. Not to see me as a figure of fun to be poked and teased, but as a person with a wealth of knowledge and experience and, stemming from this, a certain amount of authority. If today with my niece and nephew is anything to go by, she’ll laugh at me, snap at me, make fun of me, throw things at me, hit me, talk down to me, roll her eyes when I talk, and generally treat me as just another plaything. As kids have always done.

It’s worse for Lizzie. Instead of people just seeing her as a big kid, she is a big kid. Thanks to her autism, learning disability and dyspraxia, she thinks the wind is caused by trees, spends her time doing paint-by-numbers and playing with gadgets, and can’t walk past a ‘keep off the grass’ sign without cartwheeling on the lawn. She gets on great with kids because she’s on their emotional level – space hoppers and trampolines, Kinder Eggs and Happy Meals – and she’s so clumsy, everything she does looks like it’s been made by a five-year-old. This is not to be mean – she would admit as much herself.

And so, as little Izzie grows, Lizzie is daily becoming more nervous about how she’ll cope with a young, precocious child. She’s terrified of Izzie growing up and making fun of her. She’s terrified of Izzie overtaking her very quickly and coming to look down on her. And she’s terrified of Izzie growing up to be embarrassed of her immature, incapable mother.

I don’t think she has much to worry about. I have no doubt she and Izzie will be best friends. They’ll have an innate understanding of one another and while it is likely true that Izzie will overtake her in knowledge, skill and maturity, I don’t think she’ll make fun of Lizzie – she’s more likely to be fiercely protective of her mother, and help her with her deficiencies.

However, I sincerely doubt Lizzie will be much of an authority figure or a disciplinarian, and so this will fall to me. In our relationship, I’m the one who has to say ‘no’ when Lizzie is getting carried away, climbing over safety barriers, trying to dance in the rain without shoes or a coat, or spending a month’s income on frivolities. Even now, she’s the one who buys cute outfits and toys and bouncy chairs; I’m the one who buys nappies, and nappy creams, and baby wipes.

So the question is: how I can be the lawgiver parent when no child has ever respected me?

I mean, I can’t even get the dog to behave anymore. Lizzie spent six hours making a Christmas Gingerbread House. I then spent three hours correcting the mistakes Lizzie had made with the Christmas Gingerbread House. Since it kept collapsing under its own weight, I froze the pieces overnight then as I rebuilt it, I reinforced it with chocolate fingers so there was an internal frame, then glued it all together with icing sugar. It collapsed again, so I persevered, and finally I had something I was proud of. I put it on a plate on the table this evening, left the room for two minutes to change the baby’s nappy. In case you can’t guess the ending to this story, I’ve attached a photo. Now, if I can’t get an eighteen-month-old Cocker Spaniel to behave, what hope do I have with a spirited toddler?

IMG_0016

After the Cold

Gillan Drew2 Comments

You look around your house, a shell-shocked survivor of the tornado that has swept through. Stained clothing lies scattered over chairs and banisters, dirty muslins screwed up in every corner. Tissues, and pieces of tissues, and the wrappers from cough sweets, litter the floor like patches of melting snow. And over it all lies an icy silence.

The storm has passed.

 

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“I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe…”

I struggled to make dinner this evening. Partly it was because I forgot to take my antidepressants two days running, leaving me horribly light-headed and with pupils like pinpricks; partly because in the endless round of buying vapour rubs, cough syrups, tinctures, ointments and snake oil salesmen’s charms, we’ve run out of food.

It’s a contest from Masterchef. I wandered around the kitchen, doing an inventory in a daze. One egg. A clove of garlic. Some carrots, best before two weeks ago. Strawberries that can walk by themselves. Some unidentifiable white substance lurking at the back of the fridge. And some oats. Make a dish out of that.

In my mind, I’m haunted by the memories of crying, sneezing, coughing, puking, and snot, endless snot. What started clear and runny turned thick and yellow-green – at this stage she blew vast snot bubbles from each nostril that spattered everywhere when they burst. Later, it turned into this sticky jelly-like substance, not dissimilar to the glue they use to fix bank cards to letters or CDs to the covers of magazines. It would get stuck all over her face, and I’d have to peel it off in strings. Now, as the cold fades away, it’s a healthy snotty green, and only visible when she sneezes – that’s when it hangs from each nostril like two little worms. Lovely.

I think the worst thing about the whole experience was little Izzie’s distress. You’re meant to protect her, you’re meant to take away the pain and discomfort, but there’s very little you can do to make a sick baby feel better. You can’t explain what’s going on, get her to blow her nose, give her a decongestant. I tried as many things as I could – held her in a hot, steamy bathroom, used vapour rub, nasal spray, Calpol, cough syrup, cuddles. I even tried to use an aspirator – kind of like a pipette where you squeeze a rubber bulb, put the attached tube up the baby’s nose and release the bulb to suck all the snot out – but frankly, more was dripping out on its own than I managed to get in the pipette, so I abandoned that one. And I didn’t bother putting pillows under her mattress to prop her up – given how much she moves about in her sleep, she’d have ended up upside down at the bottom of the cot with the blood rushing to her head.

And so much for three days coming, three days here, and three days going. I mean, the worst of it is over – her temperature is down, her nose isn’t running, her appetite has returned, and she only sneezes from time to time – but her throat still rattles with phlegm that she’s struggling to bring up, and she still has a nasty cough. Apparently, the average baby has eight colds in its first year, lasting ten to fourteen days. Since she turns six months on Friday, and this is her first proper cold, either she’s way below average or the next few months will be hell!

Now if only I could shake the cold she’s given me…

A total lack of sympathy

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

What’s really been getting my goat lately is that people won’t allow me to moan.

‘I’ve had five hours sleep in the past four days.’

‘Well that’s what happens when you’re a dad,’ they say in this incredibly patronising tone of voice, as if I didn’t know that.

‘All of my clothes are covered in snot and vomit.’

‘That’s called “being a parent”,’ they reply with smug self-satisfaction.

‘I’m completely exhausted and I haven’t eaten a proper meal in days.’

‘We’ve all been there.’

‘But you’re not there now! I’m the one bursting my baby’s snot bubbles and trying to clean it out of her hair at four in the morning! I’m the one sitting up all night listening to the mucous rattling in her throat in case it it develops into something worse! And I’m the one who’s tired, hungry, dirty, smelly, and more than a little volatile, so I’d appreciate a little more sensitivity to my plight from some well-rested, well-fed person standing in clean clothes, thanks!’

I have discovered, since the baby started with her cold, that if you complain about parenting you get no sympathy whatsoever. It’s weird –  I figured that, because other people have struggled just as you have, they’d be more empathetic about your situation, but it’s the opposite. Anyone who has raised a child of their own in the mists of history tries to make you feel like an asshat for saying that, God forbid, you don’t always enjoy the feeling that your brain is about to burst right through your forehead.

Maybe that’s because there’s this notion that not only are parents meant to suffer but they’ve chosen to suffer. And I get that. I knew going in that it would be hard. I knew that I would suffer, and I accepted that in order to get the good bits of having a child, I was going to have to face the bad. But when the baby has a cold and I’ve had so little sleep I’m hallucinating, for God’s sake let me have a little moan about it!

It doesn’t mean I don’t like being a dad, or that I’m such an idiot I hadn’t realised it would be hard, it simply means I’m letting off steam, which is human, and natural, and healthy. I’m pretty sure even the most positive of people come home some days and say, ‘Man, if life is a shit sandwich I’m the filling right now!’

What is not helpful is when, instead of people saying, ‘Hang in there, lad,’ and slapping you on the shoulder, which is really all you want and need to buoy you up, they shut you down, belittle your struggles, and marginalise your pain.

The worst thing is when you say, ‘This is so hard,’ and someone replies, ‘Well, just imagine how much harder it would be if X, Y or Z,’ as though you’re not allowed to complain, as though your difficulties don’t matter and aren’t important because other people have it harder, and that’s just so wrong.

One of the best things I was ever told, and something I firmly believe, is that all suffering is relative.

I was sixteen and on my first date – she was a scary girl with a nose ring, tattoos and leather jacket. We met by a pond in the February cold and huddled together on a bench as the world froze around us. And in the dark we talked about things that really mattered to our sixteen-year-old selves: dreams, poetry, UFOs, alternative history, magic, the Illuminati, emotions, spirituality, The X-Files, parallel dimensions, the faking of the moon landings, Nirvana, and what it means to be a human. Ah, those wonderfully naive days before I discovered her whole identity was based on Alanis Morrisette lyrics and Mia Wallace’s character in Pulp Fiction, and I found that I didn’t actually believe in UFOs, alternative history, magic, the Illuminati, or the faking of the moon landings. The mid-nineties: simpler times.

Anyway, at one point the conversation got round to problems, because we were teenagers, after all. I told her about my chronic loneliness, but qualified it by saying it was very minor compared to the problems other people had.

‘Don’t do that,’ she said. ‘Don’t dismiss your problems. All suffering is relative. A starving African’s need for food is his worst problem; your loneliness is yours. It doesn’t mean your problem doesn’t matter.’

And while she might have turned out to be full of it, she spoke a lot of sense just then.

So yes, in the general scheme of things, a few nights of missed sleep don’t amount to much; yes, other people have it much harder; and yes, I chose to become a dad and therefore any struggles I go through are willingly faced; but telling someone who has had five hours of sleep in four days and is wearing a T-shirt encrusted in dried snot and sick that what he’s going through is trivial and unimportant will get you knocked off his Christmas card list before the next patronising syllable escapes your condescending lips.

So next time you hear me gripe, please, pretty please, instead of marginalising my feelings, just nod sagely and say, ‘You’re doing a good job.’ That’s all I need to hear.

The Plague House

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

Paint a red cross on our door and may the Lord have mercy on our souls!

Yes, the dreaded lurgy has come as an uninvited houseguest, like that uncle who always turns up and hangs around in his underwear and refuses to leave. The kind of houseguest who robs you of sleep, disrupts your steady routine, and gets snot on your clothes, and doesn’t even have the common decency to look embarrassed about the shit he’s causing.

Friday night during the power cut, Izzie developed a bit of a cough and sneezed a few times during the night. She woke Saturday morning with a chesty cough and a sniffle and she didn’t want her formula. By mid-afternoon this had developed into a temperature and a full-blown cold.

I say full-blown because she’s definitely acting like it’s the end of the world. But then, for her, it is. She hasn’t had a cold before and it must be terrifying to have litres of yellow-green snot pouring out of every orifice, slipping ceaselessly down your throat, and choking you every time you so much as move your head an inch. And the cough is awful – it sounds like she’s hacking up razor blades, the poor thing!

And so it has been, every minute, every hour, since Saturday. Unfortunately, Lizzie came down with it Friday morning, so she’s a sneezing, coughing, congested wreck who spends most of the time in the bath, drinking Lemsip or sleeping, leaving yours truly to press on solo. Really, this is a one-parent family right now.

The worst thing about all this is the total lack of sleep. The little ‘un panics and starts to scream and choke the second you put her on her back in the cot. Any position involving lying down provokes coughing and spluttering as she starts to drown in her own snot. She will fall into an exhausted stupor, but only on her front on you, leaking from mouth and nose onto your chest or arms or neck, so if you want her to sleep, you have to stay awake.

Thanks to the power cut, I got three hours sleep Friday night. Saturday night, thanks to Izzie’s cold, I got an hour. Last night, Lizzie decided she should free me of the burden of disturbing her sleep and moved into the spare room, so I dosed myself up on caffeine and set to it and I have no idea how much sleep I got – a few minutes here and there, I think, but I’m not sure as it’s all a bit of a blur. Tonight looks to be the same.

The new routine involves me getting Izzie settled on me for half an hour, then gently easing her into the cot in the exact same position, where she stays anything from a few seconds to fifteen minutes before starting to scream again. I honestly don’t know what’s best – to go back to bed for a couple of minutes, which leaves me feeling rough as hell, or resign myself to staying up all night, which leaves me super tired.

There are other horrors too. She has a temperature and she spits out the Calpol and won’t drink the formula if I try to sneak it in. She chokes on the cough syrup and after a while the vapour rub I put on her chest starts to smell like death. Even that’s preferable to her breath at the moment. And she farts with every cough, meaning it’s a never-ending concerto of trumping, scented with cauliflower, for some reason. And there’s not enough in her belly to poop, so every guff brings out a tiny little liquidy smear, so you keep thinking she’s done a poo, start to change her only to discover there’s nothing but a skid mark in there. But it smells so bad you might as well change it so I’m going through nappies like there’s no tomorrow.

Because she can’t breathe through her nose and has a sore throat, not to mention that she’s swallowing gallons of mucus, I’m struggling to get fluids into her. A lot of what does go in she brings back up with interest anyway. It was very disheartening Saturday afternoon when, despite my trying to stop her, she put her fingers down her throat and brought up everything I’d fed her all day. Worse was when she threw up earlier – an endless outpouring of water, milk and phlegm, mixed together like amniotic fluid. Pretty darned gross.

And I’m gross too. I’m sleeping in my clothes which I’ve worn since Friday – there’s no point changing them because they’re crusty with snot and worse, and whatever else I put on will get dirty just as quick. I haven’t had a chance to bath or shave, so I look like a pink-eyed homeless junkie, and smell the same.

Right now, Lizzie is in the spare room getting another good night’s sleep – hopefully she’ll feel a little better tomorrow and help out a bit. Izzie is lying asleep on my chest. My shirt is a soaking puddle of drool and baby snot. Given my almost total lack of sleep since Friday, my eyes feel gritty and my brain wants to leap out of my forehead. And I have a sore throat, a sure fire sign that whatever has infected Izzie and Lizzie is making its way into my system and trying to take me down from the inside. But for now, I’m hanging in there. Someone needs to look after the baby. If not me, then who?

24 Hours of Fatherhood

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

Here is an unabridged, not untypical day-in-the-life of an Aspie Daddy.

06.00 – get up and feed baby.

07.00 – wake Lizzie to look after baby while I walk dog.

08.00 – feed dog, feed cat, open hen house, have breakfast (porridge oats and coffee).

08.30 – resume looking after baby. She scratches my left eye with her fingernail – very painful.

09.00 – autism support worker arrives. Continue to look after baby and chat about issues until Lizzie is free to take over.

09.45 – tidy hall, clean kitchen, clean bathroom.

11.00 – autism support worker leaves. Feed baby while supervising erection of Christmas lights.

11.30 – prepare and eat lunch (rice and tuna).

11.45 – prepare a bottle.

12.00 – pack car and head off as family to swimming.

12.30 – arrive at swimming, change and get baby ready.

13.00 – father-daughter swimming lesson with baby.

13.30 – dry and dress baby and self, go home.

14.00 – feed baby.

14.30 – put baby down to nap.

14.40 – baby wakes screaming.

15.30 – baby pokes me in right eye.

16.00 – hand baby back to Lizzie and go online to enter short story contest.

16.30 – power cut, world turns black. Phone electricity company who think power will be restored by 19.35.

17.00 – send Lizzie to her dad’s with the baby, bottles, formula and Perfect Prep machine.

17.15 – feed cat and dog by the light of a headtorch.

17.30 – light mango and pomegranate candle and cook bacon and eggs for tea. Boil water on stove for cup of tea.

18.00 – go join Lizzie and baby at her dad’s. Play with baby; cuddle baby; feed baby; watch Lizzie eat lasagne.

21.00 – return to cold house. Power still out. Phone electricity company who think power will be restored by midnight.

21.15 – Start to put baby to bed. She is excited by my headtorch. Thinks it’s a funny game.

22.15 – baby finally settles. Run bath for Lizzie. Shut up hen house.

22.30 – Lizzie goes to bed with runny nose and cough. I wash up baby’s bottles and fill dishwasher.

23.00 – batteries run out in baby monitor. Find one new AAA battery (it takes four). Replace one battery.

23.15 – check on baby. Put extra blanket over her.

23.45 – try to settle horrendously unhappy screaming baby who seems to have developed cough.

00.30 – battery in baby monitor runs out. No spares. Wake Lizzie to listen out for baby while I take steriliser out to electricity engineer’s van and sterilise bottles.

00.45 – dress in onesie and lie on floor of baby’s (freezing) room as no monitor. Lizzie back to sleep.

01.20 – power back on. Make up two bottles of boiled and cooled water, just in case. Turn off Christmas lights, let dog out to toilet, turn up heating, fill and put dishwasher on, eat bowl of cornflakes and drink coffee.

02.15 – go online to finish entering short story contest (see 16.00).

02.35 – check on baby and finally go to bed.

03.00 – baby sneezes and coughs, but still asleep.

05.00 – kick bastard cat out of the bedroom.

06.00 – get up to feed baby. Baby has runny nose and cough.

The moral of this story is to expect the unexpected. And if you’re planning on having kids and think it won’t utterly and irrevocably change your life – hahahahahaha!