Tag Archives: children

Christmas, 2018

30 Sunday Dec 2018

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It was wonderful.

I was so, so ill, both on the day and for about 10 days before. (I’m still coughing fire, sometimes hard enough to wet myself… gotta love stress incontinence, amiright?)

New Husband Jake sorted everything out. I did a 2-hour shift on Christmas morning at the suicide prevention hotline, and then, I basically slept until an hour before the kids came back from their dad’s. (We alternate; it was his year to have them Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, and mine to have them Christmas afternoon and overnight.)

While I slept on the couch, Jake finished wrapping their presents, cleaning their rooms, rearranging furniture (including building new beds and hooking up new electronics) and he brought me coffee and cold & flu tablets when I finally woke up.

The kids–sometimes overwhelmed by Christmas–utterly loved their gifts, especially the lay-outs of their “new” rooms, and for the first time in my life (including my own childhood) I witnessed a Christmas with no child meltdowns.

I am so, so blessed. I have never been this happy before, and yet, I feel like overall, I am becoming happier.

I love you, Jake. I love you, Sweet Babies. Thank you for making this life worthwhile.

Recent Memories, September 2018, 1

24 Monday Sep 2018

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She called herself, “Spin”–one of her alter egos, one of the media through which she accesses the verbal communication the rest of the world seems to take for granted–and she spent an hour with me, playing on my phone and laughing at our shared jokes. I can tickle her again, it seems (and I *promised* her there would always be tickles, 6 and 7 and 8 and more years ago, and I KNOW SHE REMEMBERS, so I’m glad there are tickles now, just like I promised) and she laughs again, not every day, but at least she’s not crying every day anymore, and this may not last forever (what does?) but it’s good right now.

He plays Uno with us, almost every day. We’re about equally good at applying the rules, he and I, and perpetually appeal to the other adults for further instruction (I should be an adult, but I understand why I sometimes don’t seem like one–I catch on so slowly, at team games, at rules with variations, at anything with social give-and-take, so of course my own children are sometimes tempted to see me as one of them, just a strange older child who sometimes tells them what they can and cannot do, and makes their food, and sends them to their rooms to calm down when they get agitated). I digress.

We spend so much time laughing, the 2 of us more than anyone else in the room, and I help him, I suppose I “make” him cheat, to be quite frank: “If you do x, y will happen to me/Jake/Douglas…” and I chortle in my joy (yes, that’s from “Jabberwocky,” and yes, I had to look that one up, and no, it’s not a perfect quote even though I did look it up) and I don’t even care if he knows he’s my pick to win every game we play, even at (especially at?) my own expense, because what *is* a mother, if not the person you can count on to always be on your side, to tell you right from wrong and then turn around and declare that, ultimately, she would still love you and your sibling(s) best no matter what evil you committed?

And besides: he really *doesn’t* understand the rules, yet. When he’s a little older, we’ll stop reminding him to say, “Uno!” every time he’s down to one card. Or we won’t, and he will hardly be the only autistic teen/adult in the world, who gets some special dispensation so he can join in with everyone else, now will he? And if you don’t like it: FIGHT ME, BRO. It is right and just and good, for the more vulnerable to be given more help. I doubt my stance on that will ever change.

Stop digressing! Okay, I will.

She watches us, sometimes. She’s not yet confident enough to play, but I wonder if she would try if it were just the 3 of us? I’ll ask, in time; but only once I remember the rules better myself… that’s not a bad idea, generally speaking. How could it be bad? It’s a chance for me to properly be the adult, in the only situation where I’m convinced I can really be fair: arbitrating between the 2 of them, each the only entity I love in the same way, and with the same ferocity, that I love the other.

Mental Health Update, August 2018, 5

27 Monday Aug 2018

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Better again, today, overall. The shadow of How I Felt Yesterday And The Day Before and the Day Before That, etc, is humming a sly, mocking tune under its breath, and I will have to stop and listen at some point (I know by now that it will trip me up, if I go too long without acknowledging what it has to say) but for now, I am safe. For now, I can breathe a little, and just take a day or two to feel like “myself”–the myself that is, for the most part, relatively content.

One good thing, I will write One Good Thing: Naomi and Gabriel, the play-acted scene where Spin was arrested. I imagine that makes no sense to anyone who wasn’t there; but I *was* there, and it’s worth a lot of misery and heartache and even some terror, just to hear them playing together.

You see, Amanda? You see. I am willing you to see.

Things always get worse, again–you won’t feel this peaceful forever–but then, they always get better, again.

Did you think, when she was 4 and had lost all her words, and he was 2 and had never so much as babbled “da” or “ma” that they would act out a scene, using full sentences and different voices and laughing with joy at each other’s antics? You didn’t dare hope, and yet, here it is.

It is objectively good, that your children enjoy each other’s company. Even when *you* don’t feel it, even when you’re too lost in your own despairing ruminations and unrelenting terrors to feel anything but pain, their relationship is A Good Thing.

And today, you lucky girl, you *could* feel it.

Posting More; My Son, 1

15 Tuesday May 2018

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It looks as if I’m posting a bit more, these days; I can live with that. The day will come when I actually finish one of my half-completed/barely-started novels, and I’ll want to have an audience standing by *wink, but I’m semi-serious*

I thought I’d talk about my son, today; I can hear him in the other room, shouting excitedly and unreservedly about what’s happening on the Wii, rarely making the clearest, most linear sense, but always manufacturing joy as if it’s a thing that can be bottled; and he’s so loud and so animated that, if he keeps it up too long, the neighbours will likely bang on the wall.

I don’t care, to be honest…. the kids have lived in this house their entire lives, not counting weekends at their dad’s, and none of my neighbours has once asked me if I needed help raising 2 autistic kids (including during the period after I asked their dad to leave, and I was juggling a 10-month-old and almost-3-year-old with severe autism by myself, 5-6 days a week, on 3-4 hours of sleep a night…) bang on the walls, you small-minded, compassionless wretches.

Despite living next door and sharing a wall with us (terraced housing) you weren’t there, when my babies were actual babies, were you? You don’t remember a thing from when my 2 were tiny, and it was all I could do to keep them happy and healthy and safe. But *I* still remember that my Gabriel didn’t make a single purposeful sound (no babbling, no nothing, other than laughing or crying) until he was 3-years-old, and that his first “word” was, “1, 2, 3.” In a week, Gabriel could count to 10 and read the numbers. A week after that, he said, “Issa a dack. Wah wah wah.”

When he spoke for the first time, we thought it was a genuine miracle, befitting a child with an angel’s name… after all, by then, his sister (aged 5, at the time) had stopped speaking altogether; to this day, I believe it was only his determination to interact with her, that got her to begin trying to speak, again. (Nearly 12 now, she’s still functionally non-verbal, and far, far behind even her peers with complex needs, when it comes to spoken language–without my son’s encouragement, I very much doubt if she would speak at all. She didn’t, for the best part of 2 years, age 3 to age 5.)

That’s Gabriel, though. Whatever my feelings about the almost ludicrously fundamentalist way I was raised, the idea that I was right to name him after an angel persists. Even now, almost 10 years old, he is made of weather that’s mostly sunshine, full of bounce and energy and enthusiasm, and even when his skies are stormy, all he wants is to feel better, to be helped, to be better himself.

For my daughter, he can get her to smile and play when no one else can. I didn’t mean to have him be her caretaker; but it’s a role he seems happy to fulfil, and she reciprocates in the ways that she can. *She* might get cross with him, but woe betide anyone who tries to hurt her little brother… she finds her voice then, if the words still elude her.

For me, he’s everything that made parenting a little lighter. She was every profound and worthy and solemn feeling I’d ever had, rolled into one; he was no less deeply loved, but those same feelings were lit from within, by the light he generates simply by being himself. Between the pair of them, my light and my shade, my extrovert and my introvert, my morning sun and my evening star, they have taught me how to be a mother.

Why I’m Grateful for My Husband, 1

05 Saturday May 2018

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I started my period, today.

I wasn’t really expecting to; I was rather expecting *not* to start it, for another 9 months or so, if you catch my drift.

As I have 2 children from my previous marriage, and my husband only has my kids, there was temptation to spread some blame around… the temptation was made worse, not better, by the fact that I know fine well I’m nearly 10 years older than my husband; if one of us has faulty plumbing, it could well be me. My Poly-Cystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) got diagnosed more than 12 years ago, when I was struggling to get pregnant in my early 20s, and they said I had suspected endometriosis at the time, as well as ovaries covered with tiny cysts. But lo, I became pregnant before I could be checked for endo, and had 2 kids, and to be honest, I thought I was done with the whole birthing children thing, so I let them take me off their waiting lists and such-like… no further tests needed.

And then all the things happened that sometimes do, and I got divorced and re-partnered, and had a stint of polyamory (I’ll never know whether that would’ve worked out, if I hadn’t gotten too attached to someone who treated me like shit once he realised I wasn’t going to break my original partner’s heart just to please him)… and eventually, I wound up being left, falling in love with my best friend, and (in a sad turn of events) leaving my original partner in the end anyway.

That’s my first reason to be grateful: someone who knew me a little through mutual friends, acquaintances, and some pretty hardcore frenemies, had one half hour conversation with me, followed by one all-night conversation with me (yes, a literal conversation: don’t be like “treated me like shit” guy and accuse me of the other) and chucked out all the rubbish he’d maybe assumed, and got to know me as I am.

Then, while I was at my very lowest (weeks after my stepdad’s suicide, in the middle of my university dissertation, and during the portion of my relationship with “treats-like-shit” where he’d escalated it to physical abuse and was actually kind of scary to be around) my best friend started coming over and sleeping on the couch opposite me (we each had a couch, we slept not touching, except for sometimes holding hands). I felt safe for the first time in months; I felt understood and genuinely liked for the first time in years, or maybe ever.

And ditto for him, on that last part of the above sentence.

My second reason to be grateful is that he believed me, when I said I wanted to be with him forever, even if it was platonically… I didn’t care if we never slept together, aside from the literal sense of it–I wanted him nearby, where I could hug him and talk to him every day, and he wanted the same thing. When it evolved into my helping him overcome some sexual hang-ups, I was thrilled. When–some months thereafter–it became a genuine, reciprocal, sexual and romantic relationship (after he’d moved in with me) it ruined all my other romances and potential romances… we hurt one person, and I’m sorry, but he actively wanted to share me, and I wanted to stop being shared. It is possible to be spread too thin… and I am grateful my now-husband understood that.

The third reason I have to be grateful (and all I’ve got time for; it’s canny early/late, depending how you look at it) is that, after several months of being absurdly in love (including a whirlwind engagement and wedding) we felt secure enough to stop using my family planning app to avoid pregnancy, and start using it to increase my chances of pregnancy. I’m still taking my temperature (almost) daily, with a super-sensitive thermometer, and I still know within 24-48 hours of when I’ll be ovulating, menstruating, when my PMS might start, etc… and every time I start my period, after thinking maybe this month I won’t–when I’m irritable and bitchy and then dissolve into pointless tears–my husband listens to me, holds me if I need it and gives me space if I need that, and just generally puts up with my shit (and remember, I’m not THAT far out of an abusive relationship… I’ve still got quite some emotional baggage, to be dealing with) every time all that happens, I’m more grateful than ever, for my husband.

I just wouldn’t mind a reason to be grateful that looked like (a smaller, plumper, arguably cuter version of) my husband, is all… and I sure wouldn’t mind giving him another tangible reason to be grateful for me.

Pregnancy…?

07 Tuesday Nov 2017

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So.

I’m now married, and just like that (not remotely “just like that”) I’m kinda sorta okay basically planning to have a 3rd child.

You may be able to ascertain from this statement, that I have 2 children already. Or, if you’ve ever read my blog before, you might know this fact already. You may also be aware that both of my children–one girl, one boy–are autistic, that my girl is the more severely affected, and since my kids’ diagnoses, I’ve more or less accepted the fact that I’m probably on the spectrum as well.

I’m also married to the son of an engineer; I almost never do this, but there’s some interesting reading on that subject:

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1362361397011010

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/autism-experiment-reveals-people-in-technical-professions-are-more-likely-to-have-autistic-traits-a6719956.html

Click to access f49917d08fc12d8f8b85a8708017a11046a1.pdf

So. So, so, so.

Do I just *want* another autistic child? You must be asking yourself that question; I know I would be, in your place. The answer (answers, even) could be explained in many different ways, with a lot more background detail, but here’s the summation:

I want more kids–I want to have a child with the love of my life–and if said child happens to be autistic, well, it’s not like I’m ill-equipped to deal with that eventuality. Experts by experience, that’s the en vogue term, I believe… I’ve been doing this for over 11 years now (34 years, if we’re counting my obvious-in-hindsight experiences of social ostracization and issues with Theory of Mind, growing up and as a young adult). If experience can make you an expert, I am one.

And my kids go to a great school; they’re offering parents a chance to come take some workshops in sensory skills, basic Makaton, Numicon, etc etc etc, over the next couple of months, so in a few weeks, I could be even more skilled at parenting autistic kids… and. Even if I weren’t, I mean, I’m autistic myself. I’m seeing this in a pretty black/white way, and I’ve come down on the side of, “better another autistic kid, than no kid with the love of my life/no mini-husband/no one last chance to do it better, now that I understand the likely challenges we’ll face”.

I think I’ve made up my mind. If you know many autistic folk, or just one autistic person reasonably well, you’ll know what that means.

I’ll post as soon as I know I’m pregnant, alright?

And for my next post, I’ll talk about coming off my meds in preparation for gestation (look at that, it’s an approximate rhyme). Sounds fun, right?

Y’all wish me luck.