Now that my last chick has flown the nest I may in fact actually have time to write….?….at least once a week for now. While I contemplate the future I can unload the past and maybe it will be useful for others.
Boom, boom, boom the heart beateth very fast….
I look at my last post and it must have been just before things went ever so slightly crazy.
Turns out the reason I was so tired and falling apart…
My B12 stores were severely depleted…required half a dozen shots and for the first time I felt like a druggie who needed a hit each week…and
my heart was beating way too fast and while I was getting it checked something of concern turned up on my liver.
Ageing truly sucks!!
So now that I have spent some time sorting out my health (heart meds, regular gym training and no liver cancer) while working, I’m about to negotiate some time off each week…for my health and my sanity. The plan is to start writing again.
So the first day I get, I will look back at the start I made and continue on.
Catch up then.
Oh and illustration credit is me using Assemblyapp. So much fun.
Ferusterated…..
Oh dear…my new job has swallowed me whole! Well almost. I’m so tired when I get home, I have no energy left for much at all. The creative part of me is rebelling inside…the practical part is telling creative-me to be patient. Until I’m coasting I have very little time for anything other than work, food acquistion, prep and consumption and sleep…oh and mothering occasionally, as my maturing daughter, struggles with the loss of mum-on-tap.
There is so much bubbling around waiting to hit the page, canvas….I’m wondering whether the mental blocks I’m experiencing at work, have more to do with the loss of my creative self, than age or mental overload.
Anyway, the reality is I just haven’t been able to write the words I’ve been wanting to share and I probably won’t be able to till I at least feel like I’m sailing through it.
I’m even having trouble catching up with my favoured instagram. 😛
In the meantime, needs must…I have to work to pay, pay, pay…that’s as it is.
So here is my apology for not being able to complete the promised articles…I hope to be back very soon.
I hope you will stay with me till then.
Cyclonic blues….
Ha, well that cyclone up north turned into a category 5 and I have had cat5 neck and shoulder strain ever since. I don’t know if anyone else experiences this, but those low pressures impact on me physically and emotionally. It flattened me for 2 days out of 10. I used to suffer migraines and these are very similar. Perhaps the difference is I manage the beginning pain better, but 2 days means 1 and a half recovery days on the other side. So I haven’t been at my best.
Also I have finally scored a job…this one full time! As it will be shift work, I have made a commitment to try to continue writing one article each week.
I’m looking forward to an income and some degree of routine in my life again. There will be inevitable adjustment-hiccoughs at home, but it will be well worth the opportunity to be financially better able to cope.
So for now, I will catch up on where I was and start a new article for this week.
Back soon 🙂
Tick, tock…the clock has wings…
Hi,
How quickly has 2015 moved?
Xmas and dwindling funds have made my unemployed status more difficult to bear. So I have given over my time and energy to applying for work. It’s not the best thing to do in a part of Australia where the unemployment rate is tied for worst, by state. I won’t go into the details, let’s just say it’s not fun.
So now that I have expended significant amounts of energy doing that and clearing up things that are collecting around me, I have determined to focus on writing and sanity crafting again.
Next week, I will continue from where I left off last year. I would like to finish off the past story I was building and move to issues at heart…my heart.
I’m looking forward to doing some research and sharing what I find, what I think and what matters (to me…maybe to you too). Oh and there’s that article for “here and now” on the way. So much to catch up with.
Till then…I’m enjoying the cyclonic blues (there’s a category 2 cyclone bearing down towards the coast a few hours north of us)…good excuse to hibernate and catch up with some more loose ends.
Till next week then…
🙂
Missing in action…
Time to get back to blogging…
I’m afraid I’ve been caught up with parenting, unemployment and other extraneous bits’n’bobs.
Now that Xmas approaches and a New Year is not far away, I will be making adjustments and writing again.
I have a “here and now” article to put together after a visit to the Paediatrician who helped me make sense of the Asperger paradigm.
…and then there’s keeping house and enjoying Xmas….lots to do…oh and feeding my crafting blog.
Busy, busy, busy!!
Back soon.
Out there ahead…
…is the future.
What future?
I was so caught up in the complications of the present, what the future might hold was no longer on my radar.
Yet, we move forward unsure of the destination but…
…within our expectations there’s a destination ready-made.
Huh?
That didn’t make sense?
But it does…
We might not have goals and we might not be sure at all where we are heading….
Without goals, our expectations will take us to places that ultimately we have framed for ourselves.
“Make sense!”…you say?
Well my expectations of Felix framed his world.
So when I spoke to him I expected at some point he would of course speak back…and he did! Beautifully! So beautifully, it was not clear he had language processing difficulties.
When I read to him I expected him at some point to understand. I didn’t expect him to recognise and point out 3 objects on a page at around 18 months….”Three” he said…that was a bit surprising, but I did expect him to engage. And he did.
When he wet his bed, I was kind and commiserated with him…”This toilet thing is not a straight forward thing is it?”. I was patient, and then one night too tired to handle any more nightly interruptions, I got him to strip his bed and get the new sheets and put them on. After 2 or 3 nights of that, he stopped wetting his bed.
When he cried hysterically, repetitively on leaving the homes of friends we visited and after explaining to him that he made everyone else sad and his behaviour ruined the fun that had been had, I made a pact with him. If he learnt to control his sadness at the loss, I would give him a reward. He stopped crying.
When he didn’t clean his room, eventually his toys went to the “tip”. He could write a letter to Santa and ask if he might find them for him at the tip. He cleaned his room.
At that point I wasn’t aware that he was Asperger. He was just a child growing up, like any other child.
Well not exactly like any other child but close enough.
There were tell tales but no-one was specifically looking…unlike today.
And he was a wonderful child…mischievous, funny, inquisitive and a little shy.
At the same time Felix was growing, I was growing. I came from a generation that told you, first you’re a child
and you have all these things to learn. Then you go to school and learn –> grow up.
You finish school and you’re an adult! Presto!
Off you go!
In a way it was probably a reasonable expectation…things were by comparison to today, much simpler then. So a formulaic approach to the world of growth was probably not unreasonable.
I slowly built connections.
When I was pregnant the Counsellor I had visited at the breakdown of our marriage, recommended a Yoga teacher.
Mary was one of the saving graces in my new single parent life…she taught me so much more than Yoga. If someone had told me that I would eventually be chanting and joining in a ritual Saturday morning discussion session, I would have laughed then. (While I don’t do those things at this point in my life, I feel a strong pull to return to them.)
My new life required self understanding, parenting knowledge, exercise and yoga. I changed my routines. I explored my new home and settled into it.
The night Felix was born I finally dropped off to sleep and in that moment between dreaming and waking, dreamt a clear and distinctive image of a door slamming shut in front of me and I called out…”….but wait”….I awoke and there was a deep, disturbing wave of finality within me.
Sydney, my home town, had imprinted heavily on who I was, it was hard to leave behind.
The person I had been, was not the person I needed to be here. It may seem obvious, but moving to another place requires so much more than an open mind. Probably the one thing I had most difficulty with was grappling with holding onto, or conversely letting go of, my ‘career’ self. I had no time beyond mothering and self care. Without supports, everything was completely down to me. Work was not a choice I could easily make, without people around me to help pick up the pieces, if things went wrong.
There were other constraints. The Sunshine Coast was no Sydney. In 1993, there were very few traffic lights,
there was no night time trading, there was no motorway and cars weaved wildly around on the roads for the purpose of killing cane toads. The opportunities were so completely different to what I had been doing, that I wasn’t able to account for the changes I would need to make, to find my working self in a fast growing region. It was a place of opportunity and a place removed in time from where I had been and while it moved in leaps, opportunities were difficult to envision and grasp.
So inevitably my world centred around Felix, while I created a new understanding of home and what I was in it. New friends, new opportunities…new me. And, what a world it was…while it didn’t provide the sophistication and variety Sydney did, it was the perfect environment for bringing up a child, pretty much on my own.
I sometimes wonder how we would have fared, if all the same things had happened in Sydney. Would people have been so kind and helpful? Would there have been more supports? or would we have been lost in the numbers? Would Felix’s Asperger’s have even been noticed?
I won’t ever know…but I do suspect that sun, surf and wide open spaces were a much safer, saner option for bringing up Felix.
So while I stumbled along a once invisible, then unknown and not well understood path, my expectations guided me through.
I might not have actively set up a plan for him or me…5 years, 10 years…but in the end a healthy balance of knowing and not knowing would bring us to a place where he would make his own future. Without them there would be no purpose.
But expectations are a double edged sword, when the mirror you look in does not reflect the real person you are.
Avoiding the rabbit hole…
…Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.
Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to….
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
When presented with a gaping, dark, opening to a tunnel, I’m reasonably sure most of us stop….
if not physically, then mentally….and contemplate a number of possibilities before entering.
The only place we can fall into darkness, without contemplating any potential is in sleep (as did Alice) and even then, some of us have difficulty resigning ourselves to falling into that darkness.
I sometimes imagine myself wading through liquid black velvet, wondering at the endlessness of it. Sometimes, it’s a fearful instant, I can’t go forward….sometimes it’s a sensation of enveloping resignation and sometimes something within me galvanises, to push forward.
Whichever, it’s always a moment of confrontation.
“You’re child’s different.”
“We think your child is….”
Confronting.
This wasn’t the tunnel…this was directing me toward the tunnel.
Shock. Confusion. Denial….
Denial holds us at the ‘doorway’ of the tunnel.
What comes next, really depends on what you have been given before to move forward with.
There are those that say, “Don’t live in the past.”
I have to agree, not much good comes from regret, or fear, based on the past we were given and formed.
But when it’s said, quite often a disjunction occurs.
Disjunction?….nice word, huh?
dis·junc·tion noun \dis-ˈjəŋ(k)-shən\
: a lack of connection between things that are related or should be connected
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disjunction
[I will interject occasionally with little asides, it’s the nature of my mind to do so. I’m a person who appreciates little details. For those who don’t…annoying interruptions.]
In my past, “Don’t live in the past” had an authoritative implication: “Forget about it, move on.”
This effectively denies the meaning of learning, for in every past there are mistakes and learning.
At the time it was suggested Felix might be Asperger, I was a single mum.
My marriage breakdown was a devastating blow. Worse the realisation that my ex-husband had stopped having faith in the marriage, long before he told me it was over. In the breakdown of my marriage, for the first time I sought counselling. It was necessary….I was on my own – no family support (my mother was working overseas, my father lived too far away) and no friends (I had left them all behind when we had moved from Sydney). The friends we had made in the short time we had lived here, understandably, were unable to help. The pain of the loss of my marriage, our planned future and the beginnings of a family I had waited and longed for, was debilitating. Over time I moved from grief stricken shock, to disbelief, to anger and then resignation. In resignation is the possibility for change. Without counselling resignation is your enemy. With good counselling, contemplation can move you out of the resignation that leads to depression.
I used to fear opening that door, because I thought it would take me to places I would not recover from or return to. In some respects that fear was not misplaced, you don’t stay fixed, change is inevitable but the change does not always have to painful.
In order to cope with my everyday, I had to make sense of the why. The answer to why more often than not, is embedded in the past. The answer to why is not always an answer we want. It takes time to find the courage to see the answers that really matter.
In the early stages, the one pain that was always difficult to resolve was the loss of the opportunity to become a mother.
It was a bittersweet thing to find out I was pregnant in the first weeks of our separation. I haven’t looked back. I will give credit to my ex-husband. He told me how he felt about the decision I had to make, he was not happy about it, neither was I. He had the good grace to leave it in my hands. I have been forever thankful for that gift and we have been able to create a reasonably stable shared family arrangement for our son.
So…to be told my son might experience significant difficulty in life….well…
It didn’t seem fair. (It never does, does it?)
The experience I write of now, is in the past. I have been busy doing life, transitioning Asperger children into adolescence and adulthood and supporting a new husband. I have spent time learning, supporting and advocating. At the moment I am writing on the fringes and sharing the process I went through. When I get a bit further on I will move in and out of my personal story because there will be more knowledge to gain…for you and for me.
So back to the beginnings…
Given very little to start with I can’t say I was proactive, in fact a bit more of the opposite.
Denial fed my fight and flight responses. Looking back at the people I’ve met in similar circumstances, I wasn’t unusual.
I contemplated fight (me and him against the world of ignorance and prescriptive response), while passively engaging in flight (getting on with the every day and pretending it didn’t matter). In this instance neither are helpful.
When someone tells you: “Sorry the path you’re on isn’t straight with a few turn offs, it’s likely to be quite windy, you might hit the odd dead-end, you’ll definitely have mountains to climb and descend, the odd pothole or two and we’re not really sure what your destination will be”…well, sometimes it’s much easier to just get in the car, pretend the road is as it was and appreciate the scenery.
And for a while that’s a good way to go forward. Fear of an uncertain future meant for a time, I did just that and stuck my head in the sand. I don’t mean by that, that I ignored IT altogether. I did seek knowledge and understanding, I did look for answers. But for a long while I didn’t connect the dots and contemplate the implications of my son’s diagnosis. I’m sorry to say I unconsciously set him apart. Aspergers resided within him. It was his problem not mine. It’s not hard to do.
Sometimes we can be awake and asleep all at once. Sometimes we think we have everything figured out, when we don’t at all. Sometimes just getting up in the morning is enough.
In 1998/9 it wasn’t really clear what one was supposed to do, when someone told you, your 4-year-old wasn’t functioning like the rest of the 4 year olds around him.
I asked the Kindie staff what I should do. A paediatrician was suggested. I was told that one recommended paediatrician was known to “medicate”. At the mention of this, a number of thoughts began warring in my head.
“I’m battling with acceptance and denial and the complications of ‘abnormality’. Do we really require ‘medication’? “
All manner of experiences inform our decisions, this was one path I wasn’t sure I wanted to tread. We describe instinct or intuition in a magical way, as if its plucked out of the air and provides us with serendipitous answers. Ultimately intuition is based on everything we have ever known and think we have forgotten. My decision to avoid medication was ‘well-informed’, if instinctive.
I wanted my child to have the same opportunities and potentialities any other child has. It was just wrong that he didn’t and he wouldn’t. How in the hell was I going to make sure he did, when no-one seemed to know exactly what I should do next? Maybe they all had it wrong. “He’s just fine, I’m fine, his father’s fine…how could it be possible he’s that different?”
So I took a forward step in the interest of maintaining the status quo. Denial. I decided first to make sure they were right…or more to the point, more than hopefully, wrong! And all the time I’m taking this approach because it takes me a few steps further away from the next logical step. The next logical step may or may not seem so obvious to you now….it definitely wasn’t to me. But more about that later…
Around 1999 not a lot was known about Asperger’s on the Sunshine Coast.
It seemed the only option I had available to me was to visit the medicating paediatrician. Yes, being a single mum meant being financially supported by my ex-husband and welfare. I was no longer able to pursue a new career in Training consulting in Brisbane. The 6 hours of travel had drained me when I was pregnant (admittedly unaware I was, but not a feasible option now).
After a number of conversations with the Kindie staff, I decided I would have to visit the paediatrician and prove everyone wrong. I don’t know why, but Felix seemed to reserve some of his rare but most unusual behaviour for this Doctor. If the Doctor had clinical tricks that manifested wayward, erratic responses they weren’t evident to me. Within minutes Felix had climbed on him and suddenly what ever he did from that point was in the spotlight. The peaceful, shy little boy I knew disappeared. Naturally, it took the paediatrician very little time to concur with the Kindie staff. He did suggest that his reactions were mild and that he could prescribe medication to control his attention deficit responses.
This was too difficult. It may seem ridiculous to suggest that I was shocked again, but I was. The voice of denial is a potent persuader.
I needed to think. He seemed to be in too much of a hurry to prescribe, when it wasn’t clear to me anymore exactly what was at issue. I declined the medication and after receiving a referral to a local District Health Service, left….never to return.
At this point I was chewing a very bitter pill and wanted nothing of it.
Words fail at describing the inner turmoil and conflict that arises when debating the meaning of ‘normality’.
Are there degrees of it?
He talks just fine. Tick the box.
He walks just fine. Tick the box.
He listens just fine. Tick the box.
He sees just fine. Tick the box.
He laughs just fine. Tick the box.
He thinks just fine. Tick the box.
He runs, he jumps, he builds, he counts, he jokes, he paints, he sleeps, he reads, he plays, he eats….
Tick the box
Tick the box
Tick the box…
He’s not perfect! Nobody’s perfect!
but…..
In hindsight (lovely thing it is), the referral was the best thing the paediatrician did for me.
I was provided with the help of a Speech Pathologist and a Psychologist. Kindness in good measure, went a long way to helping me take the smaller details, on board. That was all I was ready for. In testing Felix clearly displayed “pragmatic problems and difficulties with processing information”. These had not been obviously evident because his speech was fluent and he was already exercising strengths that accommodated the weaknesses.
Later it would become evident that he displayed deficits similar to dyslexia (though he was never formally diagnosed – refused) and he appeared to be hyperactive (ADHD – Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). My take on that is that he experiences ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) and as a child, became hyperactive when his attention or capacity for patience was stressed to it’s limit (another topic to consider).
I know that while I am writing this, the approach to labelling children in this way has changed and there is a preference to determine what deficits are evident and to treat accordingly. Please, don’t be offended by my references, they are simply describing past experience. You will find my approach much more considerate, I was simply dealing with what was available.
I will stop for now and continue my story soon.
ha…promises, promises
Ok well next week is here and a new work opportunity has taken the place of writing.
I could do it today, but it’s my birthday.
So I WILL be back next week.
I have an article ready to go….just wanting to do some local research before I put it out.
See you soon
a big? hiatus….
You may be wondering why there are no more entries…is that it?
No…absolutely No!
As you may know, I was recently fired from my part time job and after a small recovery phase…galvanised and started writing. I’m happy to say for once I did not remain unemployed for long and within 2 months scored another job. As with all new opportunities, it took over.
My hours have recently reduced again and I am now able, again, to write. Well, the cold weather is making typing a bit of a chilly process but here I am tapping away.
I have one article in the works (awaiting research completion) and a myriad of thoughts and ideas bubbling around wanting to get out.
So please be patient with me….
I will be back next week.
PS: “recently fired”….sounds like I’ve been dreadfully naughty…I should have said “I was recently replaced in my job”…not because I couldn’t do it, the person who replaced me had been in the industry 17 years against my 2. Just how it goes.
Absolutely Asperger 