Tag: family

Fear not, Aspie Daddy fans

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

Regular readers of this blog might have been a little concerned by my absence over the past couple of months, particularly when my last post suggested you stay tuned for Part 2.

The truth is, I have been going through an incredibly trying time in my personal life. Far from being able to see the light at the end of the tunnel, it was too dark to find the bloody tunnel in the first place. I have been groping around blind, and not in the appropriate headspace to write about family life and parenting at a time when both were in question.

Now, we have finally turned a corner. I’ve found the tunnel and I can see enough to locate my surroundings. The light might be way off – might always be beyond my reach – but I once more believe it is there, and that is enough to keep going. These experiences might form the basis of another post one day, but for now I am going to embrace this fragile sense of security and move on.

So rest assured, I will be updating this blog again. And to start with, I’ll share some good news: a few weeks ago, over two nights mostly after midnight, in between nappy changes, bottle feeds and lullabies, I managed to write a short story in time to meet the deadline of the Writers’ Bureau Short Story Competition 2018. Reading it back, there were typos and grammatical errors and bits that make me cringe, but it amazingly won fourth prize and has been published on their website. So here is The Embrace of the Sea, and I will see you again soon.

Babies: it’s a numbers game

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

It’s funny how numbers change depending on your age. When you’re eighteen, getting up three times a night means you’re a superstar. When you’re sixty, getting up three times a night means something completely different.

I’m thirty-eight. For me, getting up three times a night simply means I have a baby to look after.

Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. I have a baby and a toddler to look after. And last night, it wasn’t three times.

It was forty-two.

I can imagine what you’re thinking: how on earth can you get up forty-two times to tend to your baby? Why didn’t you just stay up? To be honest, I’m not entirely sure myself. It’s all a bit of a blur – I was only semi-conscious for most of it. But some part of me was counting each and every time, so I know that, for some reason, I got up more than three dozen times to tend to little Rosie.

The best I can do is liken it to the snooze button on your alarm. She cried; I got up, went into the nursery, stuck her dummy back in her mouth, and settled her; then I crawled back into bed. Three or four minutes later, we repeated this charade, all because I was too knackered to get up, take her downstairs and give her milk, and because I was hoping beyond hope that this time – this time – she’d actually settle and go back to sleep for real.

In my defence, she wasn’t actually awake for most of this – she was in the same soporific stupor that I couldn’t climb out of. She’s taken to sleeping on her side in the cot, which means as she reaches full sleep, her dummy drops out and she starts to cry, without fully waking up. So every time I went in there I rolled her onto her back, put her dummy in, rubbed her nose and stroked her forehead, made cooing sounds, waited until she seemed to be asleep, and left. Four minutes later, when I went back, she’d be on her side again, her eyes still closed, but her whining mouth gasping for her missing dummy. Time after time after time.

After ninety minutes of this, I finally summoned the wherewithal to pick her up, take her downstairs and give her some milk.

Trouble is, she didn’t want it! She only wanted her dummy, and then fell promptly asleep in my arms.

After watching half-an-hour of Lone Survivor at silly o’clock in the morning, I took little Rosie back to bed and crawled back into my own, assuming she was finally gone. And then five minutes later…

This went on till about five, when she finally shut up. Just in time for my toddler to wake up coughing, and then demand I lie in her bed with her to settle her, which, exhausted as I was, I duly did. And after an hour of cuddling a fidgety jackrabbit, I got up to empty the nappy bin, change the cat litter, put the bins out and make breakfast for us all. Just another Monday morning in my household!

So, numbers, and how they change with age: I used to think that a twenty-year-old having a baby was way too young. Even a year ago, I’d look at some spring chicken pushing a baby in a buggy and think, ‘It’s a baby pushing a baby! How can they possibly cope?’ Now when I see them I think: ‘Damn, I wish I’d had kids at that age!’

At twenty I bounced back from things so much better than I do at thirty-eight. I could spend 48 hours locked in an editing suite working on my student film and then go to a lecture on psychoanalysis without any problems. I could run and jump and play without being stiff and sore in the morning. If I’d had a baby at twenty, I’d have had energy to spare.

Of course, if I’d had a child at twenty I know I’d have spent an incredibly frustrating decade feeling bitter about missing out on all the fantastic things life had to offer. As a thirty-eight year old, I can look back and say my twenties were awful, so I might as well have had a baby then, and I wouldn’t have missed out on anything.

On the other hand, I’m far wiser now, and can impart that wisdom to my children far better than I would have at twenty. And if I did have children at twenty, they wouldn’t be the children I have now, and that would be a tragedy as these are the best kids I could ever have hoped for. So there’s no point wishing to alter a life already lived. It happened for a reason – to make you the person you are today.

I just wish I wasn’t so tired all the time. Especially as my toddler said to me this evening, ‘Daddy, me going to cry tonight in bed.’

‘What?’ I said. ‘Why would you do that?’

‘Then Daddy have to sleep in my bed.’

Yikes. If she’s this manipulative at two-and-a-half, what’s she going to be like at seven?

Takers and the Took: Asperger’s and Confrontation

Gillan Drew7 Comments

Every day at the moment, I’m having between sixty and seventy arguments. Some are mild, a witty response to a provocative remark; some are longer, a tussle between players on opposite sides of the game; and some are long drawn-out, bloodthirsty affairs that leave souls destroyed and lives in ruins. Sixty to seventy, every single day.

But it’s not as bad as all that: they only take place in my head.

Like many people with Asperger’s, I have something of a phobia about confrontation, to the point of enduring any amount of abuse in order to avoid it. When it does happen, I avoid eye-contact and retreat into myself, and all the cogent, coherent arguments I could make evaporate. I have a visceral reaction – acid, like liquid copper, spreads from my gut, my chest tightens, my throat constricts, and the back of my neck starts to burn, because even though words can apparently never hurt me, I feel as though I’m being physically attacked. So I wait for it to end, mutter some platitudes that completely undermine my own position, and then slink away in a turmoil of guilt, shame and humiliation like a dog with his tail between his legs.

And afterwards, I dwell on it. For days. I relive the argument, word for word, re-experience the feelings, the fear and helplessness, think of what I could have said or should have said but didn’t because at the time all I wanted was to retreat. Like someone who has taken a beating, it takes me a long time to recover. It’s as though my psyche is bruised, and the world is now altered, everything out of place and dangerous until I manage to rebuild my walls and feel safe around people once again.

I worked in telesales for a time. Last thing on Friday afternoon, a stranger eviscerated me down the phone line. I didn’t sleep that night, couldn’t relax all the next day, had bad dreams on the Saturday, ran over the incident a million times all day Sunday, and on Monday handed in my notice and bought a plane ticket to New Zealand. Growing up, people said I was sensitive – too sensitive to survive in society. I think the truth is that I’m autistic, and my problems with social communication and social interaction, married to anxiety, insecurity and an obsessive nature, make conflict something I’m particularly incapable of dealing with.

So I tend to avoid confrontation, if I can. You might have heard the opposite to this – that people with Asperger’s are themselves argumentative, self-centred egoists who run rough-shod over the feelings of others – and this is also true, no matter how contradictory. So how does that work?

I can only answer for myself. When it comes to facts – or at least what I consider to be facts – my natural pedantry, honesty, commitment to accuracy and inability to let things go mean I often get into arguments over trivial matters. Like when over dinner one time my (ex) sister-in-law was talking about someone overly concerned with their appearance, and concluded with the statement, ‘People are so fickle.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ I asked.

‘You know,’ she said. ‘People are so shallow and superficial.’

‘Oh, I totally agree,’ I replied. ‘But that’s not what fickle means.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘No, it’s not. Fickle means changeable, inconstant, not shallow.’

‘I’m an English teacher.’

‘And I have a dictionary. Shall we look it up?’

‘Well, whatever it means, most normal people would have known what I meant.’

‘Then most normal people are using the word fickle incorrectly too.’

Sure, it’s a little thing and in hindsight it comes across as kind of petty, but that’s the sort of argument I can’t resist having – those to do with facts, where I will back myself to the hilt because I know I’m right.

On the other hand, when it comes to disagreements about less concrete things – emotional things – that’s what I struggle to cope with. I approach life in a rational fashion and expect other people to respond in a rational way, but that’s not what tends to happen. Instead, people are complex and confusing and behave in ways that aren’t rational at all. I just don’t understand it. You try to discuss something in a calm and controlled manner and they flip out, fly off the handle, scream and shout, and in a split second I’ve backed down, lost the argument and dropped into survival mode. Otherwise, if I try to stand up for myself, I get eaten alive.

I link this to my autism, especially since I know many others who experience the same anxiety over arguments. Perhaps having poor Theory of Mind skills – the ability to understand another’s thoughts, feelings, and point of view – means we are incapable of successful conflict-resolution. Or perhaps my aversion to confrontation is something more particular to me.

As a child, I grew up in a household in which confrontation had very real consequences, then at 19 I moved in with my girlfriend’s family, where a violent brother and emotionally unstable mother meant that any confrontation led to holes being kicked in doors and phones smashed against the wall. At 21 I formed a band with a girl who ruled my life for the next three years because I was terrified of her spectacular outbursts and felt powerless to escape her anger, while at 28 I moved into a ‘supported living’ house, where my housemate would break milk bottles on the kitchen floor if I disagreed with him. Over the years, I’ve learnt that confrontation means danger; backing down is the best way of surviving.

But it isn’t, because it’s incredibly damaging to your self-esteem and your long-term happiness. Living like this makes it very easy to be taken advantage of – unless you isolate yourself as a hermit, which, to be honest, is a very attractive option sometimes. I get churned up inside just thinking about the potential for arguments. I walk on eggshells, terrified of upsetting people because of how they’ll react, and I know what that makes me.

There’s that common expression about the world being divided between ‘givers’ and ‘takers’. This assumes that givers and takers are in some form of symbiotic relationship that fulfils one another’s psychological needs. I think the truth is much darker than that.

To paraphrase the 1960 movie The Apartment, there are ‘takers’ and ‘the took’. The worst thing about being the took is that you know you’re being taken, but there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. Because takers don’t take what is freely given – they take whatever they want. It’s a form of abuse, one that people with Asperger’s are very susceptible to because of our difficulties handling confrontation.

So when I know I need to confront someone about something – when I’m being taken advantage of, for example – I obsessively plan out what I’m going to say. And then how they’ll respond. And what I’ll say next. And so on, and so forth.

Of course, in real life, people don’t respond how you want them to, so I try various permutations – if the person responds rationally, irrationally, emotionally, angrily, defensively, offensively, how I’ll react, how I’ll respond. I have the same argument sixty or seventy different ways, every single day, all in my head.

And then the moment comes, and all the preparation goes out of the window. You’re aggressive instead of assertive, you stumble over your words, the other person explodes and you cower, or worse they deny anything’s going on and it’s all in your mind, which confuses you, until at the end of the argument you’re in a worse position than when you started, and all the things you’d meant to say, and all the rights you were going to insist upon, lie unspoken in your heart.

And you realise that there’s really no reasoning with some people, so it’s best to leave those arguments where they belong – spinning around in your head all day, every day, because they’re the taker and you’re the took.

And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

Mondegreens, urology, and bringing sexy back: Autism and Language

Gillan Drew3 Comments

As the father to a nineteen-month old daughter, I’m deep in the throes of teaching her to communicate. For one thing, our nappy-changing conversations have become a little one-sided and repetitive for my tastes, and for another, it would make it a whole lot easier working out what she wants, what she doesn’t want, and what she’s getting stroppy about if she could just say, ‘Dad, I want to eat the cat’s breakfast instead of this slop,’ or, ‘But why can’t I put this screwdriver into that plug socket?’

Unfortunately, as a person with autism, a condition that is pretty much characterised by difficulties with communication, there are a number of potential difficulties ahead. As my wife also has autism, and a different set of communication problems, the job becomes even more fun. Not that we don’t know how to talk or communicate, of course – I wouldn’t be able to write this if that were the case – but there are some oddities in how we use and understand language.

A case in point is onomatopoeia. We are teaching Izzie animal sounds – moo, baa, eeyore, and suchlike. Like a lot of people with autism, my wife Lizzie struggles to alter the tone and pitch of her voice to express emotion or replicate sounds. On the musical scale, she can do doh, re, mi and fa, but that’s her limit, so she has a very narrow vocal range and thus a somewhat monotonous delivery. She also has limited volume control, her voice being either quiet, loud or shouting. This means that no matter what animal she’s doing an impression of, it tends to sound like a drunk guy being kicked in the nuts. Which works when it’s a donkey braying. Not so much the cat’s miaow. She’s very good at simply reading the words.

My problem with onomatopoeia is the opposite. I think my animal impressions are rather good, and my voice ranges from a passable bass right up to a passable falsetto, but I cannot read a ‘sound’ word as a word. When I was five I had to read out in class from Funny Bones. There’s a page where a mouse was saying ‘squeak, squeak, squeak,’ and I read it in a high-pitched, squeaky voice that made everyone including the teacher laugh. The truth was, I couldn’t read it any other way, and I still can’t. For this or with any other onomatopoeia.

It’s embarrassing. I can’t say my chair is squeaking without sounding like a pubescent boy on the final word. I can’t describe a loud BANG! without making everyone jump and I can’t say the word whisper in anything other than a whisper.

It’s wrecking my ability to sing Old MacDonald because I can’t make ‘moo moo here’ or ‘baa baa there’ fit the rhythm, since lowing is moooo and bleating is ba-a-a. And if you’re at a parent-toddler group and you can’t even manage to sing Old MacDonald, you’re definitely not seen as a doyen of the literati.

Another difficulty is mishearing sounds, or rather, hearing them properly but failing to connect them in the right way. For many years at school, I shared a class with a girl called Antal Mage. I thought she had the coolest name ever, like a heroine from a fantasy novel. Then came the disappointing day I was handing out exercise books and discovered her name was Anne Talmage. Not nearly so exciting, and no wonder she used to look at me funny every time I said, ‘Morning Antal.’

I often mishear songs too. For twenty years, I thought the chorus of the Radiohead song ‘Creep’ was, ‘I’m a creep, I’m a widow’. How sad, I thought – people should be nicer to the bereaved. Then I discovered it’s actually ‘weirdo’. Changes it entirely.

For the past fifteen I also thought ‘Can’t Fight the Moonlight’ was about a mum trying to hide her dalliance from her offspring – ‘You can try to resist, got to hide from my kids…’ Although to be fair, I seem to mix up ‘kids’ and ‘kiss’ quite a lot, since I thought Paloma Faith’s ‘Only Love Can Hurt Like This’ contained the line, ‘Must have been my deadbeat kids’ (it’s ‘deadly kiss’, FYI).

Of course, mishearing song lyrics is not exclusive to people with autism. There’s even a word for it – mondegreen. But even when I hear them right, I can still struggle to understand the meaning.

For the past ten years, I thought Justin Timberlake’s ‘SexyBack’, with the chorus ‘I’m bringing sexy back’, was the oddest song I’d ever heard. I mean, backs just aren’t sexy. It’s not like anyone ever said, ‘Put your boobs away, I want to see your back, yo.’ And I always thought it was a bit derogatory talking about people in terms of their physical attributes.

‘Who you bringing to the party, dog?’

‘I’m bringing Hairy Upper Lip, how bout you?’

‘I got a date with Freckly Belly. Hey Justin, you got a date for the party?’

‘Yeah, I’m bringing Sexy Back.’

I get it now.

My misinterpretations aren’t just limited to songs. I went on a coach tour a few years ago, and one stop was the museum of the Berlin Airlift. I looked around this museum for an hour, taking in the stories of the Soviet blockade, the fact they had to fly in supplies around the clock, gazed at the model aircraft, the photographs of airfields, the medals awarded to the pilots, and then I called over the guide and said, ‘I can see all the planes, and stuff, but where’s the Berlin Airlift?’

He looked at me blankly before gesturing outwards with his arms. ‘It is all around us,’ he said. ‘This is the museum of the Berlin Airlift.’

‘Right,’ I said, confused. I’d seen some stairs. No lifts, though. Nothing that would fit the grandiose title of The Berlin Airlift. It wasn’t even a very tall building. Why would you install a pneumatic elevator in such a structure? And why make a museum about it and then fill it with aeroplane models? Made no sense to me whatsoever.

I didn’t get it until after we’d left.

Just like last year when my parents asked me to stay at their place one day because they were having some tablets delivered. Mid-morning, a delivery man turned up with two iPads. I took them and waited, and waited, and waited, and nobody else turned up. My folks eventually called and said, ‘Have our tablets arrived?’ and I said, ‘No, I’ve waited in all day, and all that’s been delivered are a couple of iPads. Just how important is this medicine you’ve ordered?’

Misinterpreting the intended meaning behind single words is often humorous, but given that those of us with autism often take things literally, it can sometimes get serious. Like when I was seven and my grandfather told me to jump out of the bath – I jumped, two feet together, and almost killed the both of us. Or when my dad asked me to chuck him his toolkit, so I literally chucked his toolkit at him (CRASH! WALLOP! Onomatopoeia!). Or that time somebody said, ‘Throw that bottle in the bin,’ so I threw it, and showered us both in broken glass. You have to be careful how you phrase your requests to me!

Normally, if I concentrate, I can overcome this problem and detect the wider nuance or significance of a request – what they have asked me to do versus what they probably want me to do. If I’m tired or distracted, however, like, say, I’m the parent of a toddler perhaps, I can go full Aspie. And when I do that, it can really get me into trouble.

The other week my wife asked me to check in my safe to see if her birth certificate was in there. This I duly did, and it wasn’t, and I told her it wasn’t. An hour later I noticed her pulling out drawers and throwing things out of cupboards in what I shall politely call a highly agitated state.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘I can’t find my birth certificate!’ she cried.

‘Oh, that’s in my filing cabinet,’ I replied.

She looked at me, daggers for eyes.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘You knew where my birth certificate was all this time?’

‘Yes, that’s where I keep them,’ I replied.

‘Well why the hell didn’t you tell me that an hour ago when I asked you to look in your safe for it?!’

‘Because you said to look and see if it was in my safe. And I did, and it wasn’t. You didn’t ask me if I knew where it was.’

I understand why she got so upset (though I’m not sure threatening to divorce me was warranted), and in hindsight, yeah, I was being kind of dumb. On the other hand, I was being kind of autistic.

And she’s not exactly perfect herself. The other day I asked her what she was doing.

‘I’m reading a urology,’ she said.

‘A what?’

‘A urology. You know, when someone says nice things about the dead person at a funeral.’

Aah…when it comes to teaching our daughter to communicate, I think we’ve got our work cut out for us!

The Meaning of Life

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

I never wanted kids. If they were anything like me, they’d be annoying, dissatisfied, egotistical misanthropes, and if they weren’t anything like me, I wouldn’t like them anyway. Kids are fatal to your own future: every generation reinvents the world anew, so by having children I’d be paving the way for my own obsolescence. I was too selfish for kids, I’d be a horrible father, this is an awful life of soul-destroying wretchedness, and it’s irresponsible to bring children onto an already overpopulated, polluted, strife-ridden planet.

Oh, and did I mention I was really, really contrary in an elitist if-everyone-else-is-doing-it-I-don’t-want-to kind of way? Yes, I was a hipster before there was a word for it.

So one day, maybe not too many years from now, my daughter will ask me why I changed my mind, and that is a question that’s very difficult to answer.

The stock response would be that I was getting older and we’re biologically programmed to ensure our genetic legacy. Triops, those ugly puddle-dwellers you can buy your kids instead of sea monkeys, only live for sixty days. They reach adulthood, breed, lay eggs and die. When the puddle dries up, the eggs lie dormant in the earth until the next time they get wet. Life, leapfrogging through time, rainstorm by rainstorm.

I was explaining this lifecycle to my cousin one day when she said, ‘What’s the point?’

I guess the point is existence itself.

So strong is this urge to procreate that last night, the baby wide awake as she had been for five hours, both her parents feeling sick, exhausted and heavy-limbed, the cat scratching at the bedroom door, the nappy bin overflowing, the dog whining for attention, Lizzie declared that she wanted to be pregnant again.

‘Now?’ was my incredulous response. Izzie’s only five weeks old, after all.

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘I loved being pregnant. And I want to experience labour again. It went so quickly last time, I didn’t get the chance to enjoy it.’

Now, I’m no doctor, but I’m pretty sure that crazy talk is down to her hormones whispering in her ear, ‘You’re fertile, breed, breed!’

But biological factors are not the reason I had Izzie. To paraphrase Bill Bryson, my lineage – everyone’s lineage – goes back several billion years, from that first amoeba that found life in the primordial soup and asexually reproduced, through countless aeons, orders and incarnations to culminate in the being that is me. Every single one of my millions of ancestors was born, reached sexual maturity, and managed to successfully reproduce before they died. They survived ice ages, volcanic eruptions, meteorite impacts, earthquakes, floods; they walked with dinosaurs, megafauna, insects as big as your arm and snails the size of Volkswagens; they evolved to meet every crisis, and as humans outlasted the Egyptian Pharoahs, the Roman Empire, Viking raiders, the Crusades, the Black Death, the Plague, the Hundred Years War, the Thirty Years War, Napoleon and two World Wars.

If I didn’t have children I’d be breaking a chain that goes back to when the world was new. That’s a hell of a lot of pressure. It’s like being picked to carry the Olympic torch and letting it go out – nobody wants to be that guy.

But that’s not the answer either. The truth is that as the years went by, the more I felt as though something was missing. Like my cousin and the triops, I looked at my life and wondered what was the point. Without kids you become centred on yourself, on what you have, what you do, what you want, and eventually it begins to feel empty.

I realised over time that there’s no meaning in bricks and mortar or trinkets of tin, certificates on the wall, money in the bank. What matters are the connections you make, the people you touch, the lives on which you have an impact. Taking for yourself bears no comparison to giving of yourself. The meaning of life, I firmly believe, is family.

My daughter may one day ask me why I brought her into a world full of hate and pain and suffering. My answer is that life thrives among the ruins. There is beauty amidst the horror. I have seen coral colonising sunken ships. I have seen flowers growing at Auschwitz. And I have seen families love, and support, and forgive one another, when all around them was falling apart. That is worth more than all the pain the world can serve up.