Tag: parenting

Aspie Family Update, Pt 2

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

The continuing update into my nineteen-month old daughter’s past couple of months, in which she has developed from a cute, precocious, intelligent and outgoing little girl into a cute, precocious, intelligent and outgoing little girl who throws a tantrum if she doesn’t get what she wants.

Telephones

Izzie has loved telephones for a long time, but in the past couple of months her proficiency has developed tenfold. Before, she would grab her mummy’s phone and after entering the wrong code several times, lock it for the next five minutes; now she presses the button on the side, thus opening the camera app, and uses that to get to the photographs, bypassing the code altogether. Once there, she swipes through the various pictures, lingering on those of herself (she has developed a considerable amount of vanity too), and if it’s a video, she taps it with her finger to make it play.

It’s true what they say – the younger generations really do find it easier to understand technology. I mean, she’s pre-verbal, can’t read or speak beyond monosyllabic grunts, but she can navigate a mobile phone using the touch screen. Makes me feel really stupid that I can barely check the time on my phone without accidentally sending a text message!

The trouble comes when Izzie gets hold of the house mobile. She loves pushing the buttons, holding it up to her ear, and saying, ‘Ay-oh? Ay-oh?’ She loves snatching it off you when you’re in the middle of a conversation, then chattering away to whoever’s on the other end in Izzie-ese, before saying, ‘Bye-bye,’ and disconnecting. And in particular, she loves playing with it when you’re not about.

The first time I heard it dialling out, I grabbed it off her and hung up. The second time, a few days later, I heard a voice saying, ‘That number has not been recognised.’ We’ve been very careful since then, so I have no idea how she got the phone a few days ago. I heard a voice, quiet, distant, just on the edge of my perception, saying, ‘What is the nature of your emergency?’

I used to be an emergency call operator, and of the ninety calls I took a day, at least two were from toddlers playing with phones (or occasionally people dusting them). When I worked for the police, I used to call back and give the parents a bollocking; now that I’m one of those parents, I’m so glad the 999 call taker accepted my apology and let me simply hang up.

I’m not looking forward to our next phone bill, however.

Imaginative Play

A couple of months ago Izzie would imitate our behaviours without really understanding the why’s and wherefore’s of what she was doing. Now, instead of simply imitating us, she actively plays with things using her imagination. It might not sound like a lot, but it’s a massive leap forward.

Like her dolls, for example. I never thought I’d be the father of a child who plays with dolls. Not because I didn’t want to perpetuate patriarchal gender roles, but because it never really factored into my thinking. Keyboard, teddy bear, colouring book, toy car – that’s my thinking when it comes to entertaining kids, whatever their sex.

My wife Lizzie, on the other hand, is very much into buying Izzie play kitchens, plastic food, shopping trolleys, push chairs and, since November, dolls. Big dolls, little dolls, skinny dolls, fat dolls – we now live in a doll’s house. And other than being freaky and creepy as hell, it’s rather illuminating.

When we first gave her a doll, Izzie stuck her fingers in its eyes, trying to peel off the veneer, and flung it about like any other plaything. But within a couple of weeks, she started caring for it. She gets out the changing mat, finds a nappy and tries to change it; she brushes its (non-existant) hair; she tries to feed it and give it water; and she cuddles it.

The most important thing about this is that she knows the doll isn’t real, but she pretends it is real. Instead of simple imitation, she is playing, experimenting, using her imagination to have fun. I know this because she picks up imaginary food in her fingertips, feeds it to the doll, feeds it to herself, feeds it to her mother and me, and giggles every time we pretend it’s real.

She has recently acquired a number of Barbie dolls and greatly enjoys sitting them on the sofa to watch TV, changing their outfits, kissing them, and then making them kiss each other. Much as I dislike dolls, we may be introducing a Ken to the party…

Organising and Locating

Speaking of kissing, Izzie has become very bossy when it comes to how she wants things. If I kiss her goodbye, she points at me and then at mummy, and nods her head as if to say, ‘Now you kiss mummy.’ Once I’ve kissed mummy, Izzie then puckers her lips at mummy, and as soon as her mother has kissed her, she points at mummy and then at me, and nods her head to say, ‘Now mummy, you kiss daddy.’ I’ll tell you, all this goodbye kissing is exhausting!

But the pointing and demanding is not limited to that, oh no. Every meal time, she likes to stipulate where we all sit. She looks at mummy then points to a chair, and once mummy sits, she looks at me and points to another chair. If we don’t sit in the chair she’s specified or, God forbid, we muck about and I sit in mummy’s chair while she sits in mine, then Izzie lets us know just how cross we make her.

Every morning after I’ve changed her nappy she opens a drawer and picks out the vest and tights she wants to wear, and if I dress her in those she then opens the wardrobe and chooses a dress. After which she heads to the mirror and checks herself out, smoothes her hair (vanity), and generally giggles at how good she looks. To be fair, she does have a keen eye for an outfit, but I do sometimes have to step in at some of the hideous combinations. Peppa Pig leggings don’t go with just anything, you know!

This particularity extends to where she wants things. This book? She wants it here. That teddy bear? Put it there. No, not there: an inch to the left. No, your other left. Oh, give it here, I’ll put it where it’s meant to go. There. Or maybe there. You know what? It looked better where you put it first time.

Books

And lastly, she has fallen in love with books. So much so, in fact, that when she goes to bed,  instead of cuddly toys she picks out a couple of books to sleep with. She can’t actually read them, but she likes the pictures, I guess.

This actually serves a double benefit. It means most nights she goes down without a fuss. I place her on her back in the cot and she opens her book and is happy as you like. I tell her goodnight and she pretty much waves me away as if to say, ‘Yeah, yeah, goodnight, dad, shut up, I’m reading.’ And if she wakes early, then she entertains herself with her books instead of getting us up. It’s a win-win.

Except if I have to read ‘Maisy’s Bus’ one more time, I’m going to feed Maisy Mouse to Charley Crocodile, and then who’ll drive? Cyril Squirrel? Not bloody likely!

Aspie Family Update, Pt 1

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

It has been over a month since my last post. I’d like to say it was a deliberate attempt to track incremental change over a longer timescale, but that would be a misrepresentation of reality. The truth is I could neither find the energy to write nor think of anything to say. It has, however, led to a benefit, in that, all bullshit aside, I have been able to track incremental change over a longer timescale. Which is good for all concerned.

You see, in the first thirteen or so months, Izzie changed dramatically and so did our lives, giving fertile ground for blogging. But by the time you’re over a year into parenthood, the changes become rather less profound. For one thing, by this point you’re used to the whole parenting lark, so dramatic, soul-searching incidents occur with less frequency than at first; for another, the changes in your toddler become developments in extent rather than in kind. What I mean by this is that first steps, first word, first use of a spoon, are milestones that require an entire post, but more steps, more words, and further use of the spoon don’t really warrant much comment. It’s like a person confined to a wheelchair after a horrible mountaineering accident – the first time they get up and walk they’re in all the papers and magazines, but as they continue to walk and gradually get better at it, nobody gives a crap because it’s just a person walking. We have to wait for them to climb Everest before we hear about them again.

All of this is a longwinded way of saying the time away has been a good thing, as I’ve been able to notice and reflect upon things that, had I been writing every couple of days, would surely have slipped by unnoticed.

Here, then, are the developments that have occurred in the past two months to my almost-nineteen-month-old daughter.

Communication

Izzie still can’t talk, but that’s okay, because she communicates just fine. By which I mean she points at things she wants and then grunts, nods emphatically if we pick it up, or shakes her head and screams if we fail to understand.

Which reveals a mistake that we, as first time parents, have made with our daughter – responding to her non-verbal communication. Don’t do this. It is bad.

When she first started her snippets of words and what have you, she seemed to be coming on quite well; then we started understanding her, and she suddenly stopped advancing, because who needs to talk when you can just point and grunt? So now when she asks for things we have to feign ignorance, which makes her incredibly stroppy because we hitherto understood her, but it must be endured if we want a human daughter who communicates in full sentences, and not a pet monkey.

Speaking of which, her monkey impression is great: oo-oo ah-ah. And she’s got a whole other bunch too: baa (sheep), oof oof (dog), guck guck (chicken), gack gack (duck), choo choo (train), oooo (Frankie Howerd or possibly a cow), sssss (snake, though I have no idea where she learnt that from), and ‘Ummm,’ which is her impression of a teenager and the sound she makes every time you ask her a question. At least, I hope it’s an impression and it’s not that she really is that indecisive!

To be fair, though, while she doesn’t have a broad vocabulary, she understands freaking everything. She knows all the who’s, what’s, where’s and why’s of everything you say. Over there, the other one, not on your head, where’s your bellybutton, no that’s my bellybutton, sit down, stand up, if you splash me again there’ll be trouble, get out the way of the telly, shut up and go to sleep, put the knife down, let go of my leg, stop feeding your breakfast to the dog, what happened to my youth, oh God I’m old, and the like.

In fact, what I’ve noticed is that while she understands most things, she doesn’t seem to understand negatives. For example, she understands ‘eat it’ but doesn’t understand ‘don’t eat it,’ and while she seems to grasp ‘sit on the floor’ she doesn’t understands ‘don’t sit on the floor.’ So instead of saying ‘don’t touch the plug socket’, which invariably results in her touching the plug socket, you have to distract her instead by saying something like ‘go get your crayons, we’ll do a drawing’.

And nor does she understand it if you say ‘no’: she just shakes her head and laughs and does it anyway.

At least, I hope these last few examples are because she doesn’t understand it, and not because we’re raising a right little bastard…

 

Mobility

I’ve been taking Izzie to soft play. I was brought up to believe in hell. I have found it.

Over the past two months her mobility has come on leaps and bounds, pun entirely intended. All day she runs and jumps and falls and bounces off every surface imaginable. She has inherited her mother’s total indifference to danger, and it seems that the higher the object, the more determined she is to throw herself off it.

Her favourite pastime at the moment is crawling under the dining table, dragging herself up onto a dining chair, then clambering onto the back of the sofa. Perching there a moment, she checks to make sure you’re watching, then does a forward roll/somersault onto the seat cushions and bounces onto the floor with a thud, whereupon she pulls herself to her feet, gives herself a round of applause, and then repeats the whole terrifying stunt.

The self-congratulation appears to be an important part of the whole process. I think it comes from swimming – she’s been taught to stand on the side of the pool and then, ‘One, two, three, go!’ and jump in, after which we praise her. If I’m helping her down the stairs, every so often she stands, says ‘Doo, doo, doo, oi!’ and then leaps into space. She does the same from the coffee table. She even does it standing on books, all of 5mm from the carpet: ‘doo, doo, doo, oi,’ jump, clap, repeat. Half the time, it’s really cute and entertaining; half the time it scares the bejesus out of me!

A slightly safer pastime is her newfound love of dancing. She always enjoyed gyrating to music, but now she’s turned it into an art form. We discovered this in December while watching a film scarier than any horror. I don’t normally mind kiddie movies, but this one is painful. In TV, the moment a show exceeds the point of ridiculousness, it is called ‘jumping the shark’, after a diabolical scene in Happy Days. Having now seen the abomination that is Nativity 2: Danger in the Manger! I would like to suggest a new term: ‘lowering the donkey’ – the point in a movie at which you realise it truly is an irredeemable piece of crap and you are wasting your life watching it.

Needless to say, Izzie loves it.

For the duration of the songs, she laughs and skips and dances and claps, and points at you to join in, and shouts at you if you don’t. Then, when it’s over, she wants you to rewind it so she can dance all over again. If you dare to turn it off, ouch, you’re in for a tantrum.

Don’t put it on, I hear you cry. Well, every day she points at the TV, points at you, points at the TV, starts to dance, points at you again, and then goes up and starts tapping the TV screen – come on, where the hell is my movie? I have nightmares I’m going to be watching this awful tripe until October, when it’ll be on again.

So we’re channelling all this talent and energy into ballet. One lesson and she’s learnt ‘tippee-toes’, so prances around the lounge all day waving her arms with better balance than I have.

And when bedtime approaches, the craziness increases. You can always tell when five pm arrives because Izzie starts to rotate on the spot, giggling and wobbling, until she cascades into the furniture or face plants into the floor. After twenty minutes of spinning she then charges the sofas, throwing herself face first into one, shaking her head to clear it, then charging at the other, like a turbo-charged, pint-sized pinball. I sometimes wonder if there’s not a little insanity mixed in there somewhere.

Which might explain the intensity of her tantrums…

(Cont’d…)

 

A Christmas Parenting Problem

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

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!

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

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’.

My Psychokinetic Child

Gillan Drew1 Comment

The oddest thing I’ve ever experienced happened this afternoon. I’ve spent my life hoping to encounter something supernatural that I couldn’t dismiss out of hand as the result of some highly improbable yet entirely possible set of circumstances, and I very nearly got it today thanks to my psychokinetic child.

The facts of the matter are these: My mother-in-law treated us to pizza for lunch. Lizzie, my wife, drank a glass of Coke during the meal. While we were waiting for the bill, my daughter leaned over and lightly touched the empty glass with her fingertip. And the glass literally exploded.

This is one of the few occasions in which the word ‘literally’ is used accurately, because we’re not talking a slight cracking here, no; we are talking about an incredibly loud bang that shattered the glass and sent a thousand razor-sharp fragments flying in every direction across a circle with a diameter of six feet, one of which cut open my mother-in-law’s finger, but luckily left the rest of us untouched. Bewildered, confused and a little bit apprehensive, but unharmed nonetheless.

It didn’t sound or behave like a glass on a table top falling over and breaking, and nor did it sound or behave like a glass being knocked off a table to smash on the floor. Instead, it sounded and behaved like a glass being dropped onto a table from the ceiling. Every conversation in the restaurant instantly died as fifty diners turned as one to work out what could have caused such a violent breakage. A waitress who saw it happen was shocked and seemed wary of approaching the table, casting sideways glances at my daughter as she helped us clear up.

My first thought was that somebody had shot the glass, such was the energy of the explosion. My second thought was that my child has psychokinetic powers and released a burst of energy that shattered the glass. As I said, it was the weirdest thing I’ve ever experienced.

Alas, being something of a sceptical rationalist, a saner head started to prevail. The glass had contained ice, which caused it to contract; as the restaurant was on the quayside at Portsmouth, the sun reflecting off the sea and pouring in through the window caused the glass to expand; and the resulting tension between these two opposing thermal forces created a wellspring of potential energy awaiting the tiniest impetus to release. When my daughter touched the glass with her fingertip she exerted just enough physical stress to trigger all the pent-up tension, which caused the glass to explode. Nothing supernatural or special. Unusual, granted, but not beyond the realms of scientific possibility.

Damn it.

So I won’t have to check my daughter’s scalp for a suggestive birthmark when I give her a bath this evening.

Unless it happens again, of course…

How Fatherhood Changes You

Gillan Drew1 Comment

I’ve been putting off writing this post, for reasons that will become clear later. For now, suffice to say, my head has not been in the right place.

They say that parenting changes you, but I’m not so sure that’s the case. I always figured it simply brought to the fore those qualities you already had lying dormant within you – self-sacrifice, responsibility, generosity, and what have you. Being a dad hasn’t made me who I am – it has simply shone a light on some of those hitherto undernourished and unappreciated aspects of my character and allowed them to flourish. For better and for worse.

I’ve mentioned many times before how parenting has brought out my paranoia, so much so, in fact, that it’s not worth repeating it here. I’ve also discussed how fatherhood has turned me into a crap dancer with a penchant for atrocious puns, but I’m pretty sure these things are normal.

Slightly more tragic was my wife’s revelation, a couple of weeks ago, that I have become rather boring.

Boring!? Surely not. I’m still young. I’m still energetic. I’m still…actually, she has a point. I have become a little old of late.

See, when you spend the better part of your day looking after a toddler, especially when you define your role as keeping her safe, you tend to become a little over-serious in your outlook. Couple that with being knackered all the time, and I invariably greet my wife’s ‘let’s go to the pub, let’s go to the park, let’s go to the shops, let’s go to the zoo, let’s go to Spain’ with ‘can we not and just say we did?’ Which, admittedly, isn’t the behaviour of the young, vibrant dad I set out to be.

So I have tried to soften a little. My wife Lizzie said she wanted me to be more juvenile, more playful, more fun – so I pinged her bra strap. Apparently, this wasn’t exactly what she meant. Nor was hiding her breakfast/drink/phone every time she glances away. And shooting her in the back of the head with a Nerf gun was very much a bad idea.

But things seem to be a little better. There are more pillow fights and visits to soft play, less arguing about risk assessments and budgeting. That’s one of the compromises you have to make as a parent.

The other MASSIVE change I have noticed in myself as a result of fatherhood, and something that is affecting my life, is my level of sensitivity towards anything that connects parenting, children and pregnancy with suffering, pain, disappointment and death.

Perhaps because of my autism, I’ve always been more sensitive towards the suffering of animals than people. In fact, I used to get myself so upset over nature shows that I couldn’t watch them as a child and I avoid them as an adult, whereas I loved true crime – it didn’t matter how nasty or gruesome it was, it didn’t really affect me. I’ve read all about James Bulger, JonBenet Ramsay and the Lindbergh Baby. I even did my Masters dissertation on infanticide, researching over four-hundred newborn child murders in Victorian Hampshire without batting an eyelid.

But fatherhood does something to your sensitivities. I first noticed it when my wife was expecting. I decided to reread Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively, which I did for A-Level, and despite knowing for twenty years that there’s a miscarriage scene, despite never having been bothered by the miscarriage scene, I read the miscarriage scene and started to cry. Weird, I thought – it’s the woman who’s meant to get hormonal.

When my Izzie was born and placed in an incubator, and my wife Lizzie was haemorrhaging and having transfusions, I sought out the hospital’s chapel for some rest and reflection, despite not being at all religious. Inside they had a prayer tree, with prayers written on paper leaves and pinned to the branches. One simply had a name, a date two days previously, and two devastating, soul-destroying words: ‘born sleeping’. Let me tell you, it killed me.

Since then, every time I hear about a miscarriage or a still birth, I well up. But it has become worse as time’s gone on. The more I’ve grown into my role as father, the more afraid I’ve become at the prospect of losing my daughter, whether through illness or accident, the more sensitive I’ve become to the suffering of all children. And I don’t know if sad stories about children are in the ascendancy at the moment or if I just never noticed them before, but they seem to be everywhere.

I cried over Ben Needham. I cried over the little boy killed by a dog a few weeks ago. Standing behind the counter of the children’s hospice shop I work in, I cried at the pictures of children with tubes in their noses, despite having seen them hundreds of times before. I cried at photos of children bloodied and shell-shocked in Syria. I’ve cried, and I’ve cried, and I’ve cried.

And then two weeks ago I saw this picture, and all the other tears I’ve cried seemed as nothing [WARNING: DO NOT CLICK LINK IF SENSITIVE]. It is a photo of a little girl called Jessica Whelan who is dying of neuroblastoma, and instead of the usual pictures of cancer kids – visiting Disneyland, playing games, smiling and ‘being brave’ – it captures the reality of a terminally ill child. The pain, the sorrow, the indignity, the goddamned unfairness of it all. And since then, my emotions have been all over the place.

People say, ‘I can’t imagine what that must feel like for the parents,’ but the trouble is, as a father I can imagine it, and just imagining it is more pain than I can bear. But I can’t escape it because it’s in my head now. I lie awake in bed at night, wondering about the letters I’d write to my daughter if I was diagnosed with terminal cancer; I wonder how she’d cope if I wasn’t here; but more, I wonder how I’ll cope if she’s the one with the cancer, and how I’ll explain it to her, and how the world can be so fucking cruel.

The truth is, what we as parents, and what I as a father, have to learn, is that our children do not belong to us – they belong to the Universe. We are only borrowing them for a time. So we have to make the most of every day, build happy memories for however long we are gifted with the opportunity to do so, because it could all come crashing down in a heartbeat.

And in the meantime, I need to learn to stop holding on so tight, find a way to stop crying all the time, and work out how to grow a thicker skin, or else I’ll be an emotional wreck before the year is out.

The Winter Vomiting Bug

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If you want to know about the aetiology of the Winter Vomiting Bug – or stomach bug, norovirus, rotavirus, gastroenteritis, or whatever the hell else you might want to call it – then read on, for I am now an expert.

First, despite the name ‘Winter Vomiting Bug’, you need to be aware that it doesn’t limit itself to just one end of the body – the explosions can come from pretty much anywhere it chooses, and often both places at once. Also, it isn’t restricted to winter – it crept into our house in the spring, and returned to provide some entertainment in time for Halloween, which is really autumn. In fact, since the name ‘Winter Vomiting Bug’ is only a third accurate, it should really be called the ‘Anytime Puking Squits Bug’, because that’s exactly what it is.

What are the symptoms? As you can gather from the (new) name, it causes guts ache, vomiting and diarrhoea. In this current manifestation, the vomit is rather neat and tidy, taking the form of a solid mass wrapped in a transparent sac of phlegm – kind of like boil-in-the-bag fish, only with more carrots. And a real powerful aroma of fermented apples, like the cider bums that sit on park benches.

I know this because when my darling daughter started to vomit at 1am while sitting in the centre of the carpet, there was nothing in range to grab, so I had to catch it in my hands. This is one of the unexpected pleasures of parenthood. But she seemed instantly more comfortable in herself, so that’s a plus.

Meanwhile, the diarrhoea is – well, diarrhoea. There’s not a lot else to say. A slightly sweet, fruity bouquet, but otherwise exactly as you’d expect.

What is the disease progression? Within twelve hours (of catching vomit in your hands), you get a real bad case of stomach cramps, relieved by burps that taste of fermented apples (at which point, you go, ‘Oh crap, I’ve caught it!). Over the next few hours, the cider burps develop an aftertaste of bacon. Gradually, these burps become more frequent and lose the apple taste altogether, now reminding you of those little burnt bits on the bottom of fried eggs. And then, as it starts to feel as though you’ve swallowed a sea urchin shell that’s rolling around in your stomach, you realise you’re going to be sick, and that as soon as you have you’ll feel better, but it’s going to be a while yet.

What’s the incubation period? I have this down – 23 hours, 37 minutes. Because that is precisely how long it took between getting vomit on my hands to experiencing the pleasure for myself. It is a particularly violent form of retching – my wife Lizzie ran around in a panic screaming ‘you’re going to die, you’re going to die!’ – and it feels like someone is smacking you in the gut with a sledgehammer, but as soon as you’re done you feel as though you could run a marathon – albeit, a marathon with regular toilet stops as the other end remains a little unpredictable.

How long does it last? Now the good news: about a day. The vomiting/diarrhoea explosions are fairly concentrated into a period lasting between a few minutes to a few hours. It’s a long time coming, but once it hits and it’s over and done with, you feel much better. Admittedly, you wonder why you can’t remember being kicked in the stomach by an entire rugby team, but it’s much easier after the explosions than before. The fragile belly lingers for a few days after, and you’ll have plenty of loose stools, but eventually it fades.

Is it contagious? Oh God yes. My wife had it first, about two hours before my daughter, so I had to tend to both at the same time. I used anti-bacterial soap and scalding water every couple of minutes, especially after handling vomit and poop and every time when moving from one patient to the other, but I still managed to catch it.

What’s the long-term prognosis? An aversion to cider. Red skin on your hands. An intimate knowledge of the inside of your toilet bowl. And, if you’re anything like my daughter, a chesty cough and cold that leaves you snotty and spluttering and miserable for at least a week.

The other night she woke up screaming 21 times. Sixteen times I dragged myself out of bed, put her dummy back in, placed her on her belly, rubbed her back until she was soothed, and stayed with her until she was snoring again. Which, for the mathematicians among you, means a deficit of five. On those occasions, I lay abed in a soporific daze, battling to claw my way up to reality, unable to rise in the five or so minutes it took her to ‘self-soothe’ a.k.a. cough and scream herself to sleep.

So this, in a nutshell, is the Winter Vomiting Bug/Anytime Puking Squits Bug. If you know anyone who has it, avoid them like the plague, for they are carrying the plague – a plague of disgustingness you don’t want to unleash upon your family. Although, telling people you’re contagious is a great way to keep the neighbours from bothering you…

Alone and Afraid

Gillan Drew1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then she vomited all over me.

And I’ve never been so relieved.

Autism and OCD: the Sacred Half-Banana

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

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

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

And by ‘people around us’, I mean me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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