Mothers Day. Can I has Pancakes?

No, I can't send 'em back, and return to my little inner-city flat where my non-work hours could be spent reading books (because the internet wasn't invented then).

Now that I've got that out of the way.

When I first decided on this parenting thing, I had NO IDEA. I knew nothing about babies or children. It just seemed like a good idea at the time.

When Dreamer arrived, I just thought "This is hard work". I would read all the parenting advice in books and magazines, and think "I must be doing it wrong. My life is nothing like that. I just can't get a grip on this parenting business".

While I was staggering through the first year, still thinking I'd get the hang of it, I kept hold of the ideal of the perfect family- a pigeon pair. And so, 22 months later, Speedy arrived, and it got worse.

This was ridiculous.

I grew to hate those magazine articles where mothers spoke of the Joys of Motherhood. It was all lies. Or if they were telling the truth... what was wrong with me?

By trial and error, I found a few things that helped make it easier. Bugger the parenting guides - they just didn't work. Bugger the child health nurse's advice - it just made things worse. It was impossibly hard to ignore the 'experts'. After all, what did I know? Doubting myself? Always.

And... I still wanted another child. Was I completely mad? Ah, it was the lure of a daughter. What woman doesn't want a daughter?

It took more than a while to convince he-who-has-no-nickname that we should make our lives even more difficult, so it was three and a half years until Curly joined the family.

Curly brought with him huge changes.

It wasn't ME. I wasn't a bad parent. I had actually developed awesome parenting skills in the three years I'd been doing it.

Curly was EASY to parent. He did all the things that babies are supposed to do, and it was dead easy. I loved it.

The feeding, the sleeping, the discipline - all the parenting advice just worked first time with Curly. Bloody hadn't for the older two.

With Dreamer and Speedy, I'd tried the parenting advice, persisted through failure, thinking it was my failure, then experimented, abandoned, tried everything I could think of and then some, and, in utter exhaustion, invented 'things that worked for us'.

With Curly, I'd fire the first shot in my arsenal - and it'd WORK.

Sheer joy and utter bliss.

So Happy Mother's Day- Especially to those who are doing it tough.

May you find paths that work for you, and remember that Parenting Advice (with Capitals) that doesn't work, can always be used in the Kitty Litter tray.

Me and Centrelink - it's Complicated

I am perhaps not alone in being overcome with a sense of dread when faced with 30 page forms.

Taxation. Centrelink. If yes, go to question 25, if no, go to question 94. Checklists are on the back page. If you answered 'maybe' at quesion 5a (part B) ensure you have attached every document you can dig from the bottom of the filing cabinet covering the last 20 years, duly notarised.

I consider myself reasonably literate, but these forms leave me with a headache, and send me into a procrastinating flurry of, oh, almost anything. I'd rather clean the toilet than deal with Centrelink forms.

It all started last May (see how good I am at procrastinating?), when I received a nice letter from Centrelink, informing me that when Dreamer turned 16, he would become an adult...

You have to be joking. Eeeek. What a terrifying thought.

... And when he became an adult, I would cease to receive my Carer's Payment (child), and he would have to apply for an appropriate payment on his own behalf, and if I wished, I could apply for a Carer's Payment (adult). It was accompanied by a nice 15 page booklet, listing a million possible combinations and permutations of benefits, for which Dreamer and/or I may/may not possibly be eligible.

Right. How hard could that be?

When Dreamer was younger, on a friend's advice, I'd applied for a Carer's Payment. It wasn't hard- Attach a document specifying that he was diagnosed with a condition on their 'automatic qualifying' list (such as ASD), and bingo. That the payment was barely enough to keep Dreamer in Pokemon was irrelevant. Every little bit helped.

So on that fateful day in May, I read the Centrelink book of suggestions and carefully vaguely worded eligibility criteria.
May as well try for the Carer's Payment (adult) for me, and for Dreamer... oh, the most likely looking was a Disability Support Pension.

That sat me down with a thump. That word 'Pension'. It just resounds with failure- can't get a job, useless, good for nothing. Dreamer is not that. I know he is not. He knows that he not. But Dreamer, as a fresh new adult, would have to sign the paperwork, and go through the assessments. Would he do it? I didn't even want to suggest it to him.

Yet, at 16, a teenager needs his own bit of income. Speedy was on track to find a part-time job, and Dreamer, 2 years his senior, was not even coping with part-time school. No way he'd be able to take on anything more.

I put the idea to Dreamer in those terms. It felt like I was slapping my own child in the face.

I told him it would be temporary - just for a couple of years.

Breathing space, to let him focus on getting as much learning done as possible.

I suggested that he didn't have time for a part-time job like other teens, and that the Pension could be like his part-time job.

He liked the idea of a bit of his own income, no matter what label it came attached too.

He agreed, and I phoned Centrelink to ask for the forms.
(to be continued)

Communicating in Cars

Overheard in the car on the way to school this morning:

Speedy: Like, they had to do an essay on How to Kill a Mockingbird.
Dreamer: (deadpan) Wouldn't you just strangle it?

(Note: Speedy has not read To Kill a Mockingbird, and has mis-heard the title. Dreamer was being his usual literal self. He is getting much better at recognising when he is being literal, and turning it into a joke. Speedy has been working on improving his marks in English with a view to moving to the advanced class. He needs to get A's and is almost there-. He was telling me why he has changed his mind about doing advanced English).

I shouldn't really drive Speedy and Dreamer to school. They have legs that work. They could do with the exercise. School is only about 1.5kms away.

Dreamer, though, absolutely insists on carrying everything he might possibly, even conceivably need - a folder with a notebook for each class, previous notebook for each class just in case he needs to refer back to something they studied last term, text book for each class (whopping big Physics, Chemistry, Maths texts), lunch box, drink bottle, at least two novels, and a Nintendo DS.

I've tried. I've tried to the n-th degree, where n = ASD. "Dreamy, do you really need two novels? Wouldn't one be enough?".
"But Mum, I might finish one, and then I'd need a spare"
"You're only half way through the first one. You won't finish that today. Leave one at home. Please?"

And so, his backpack weighs in daily at around 15kgs, and I take pity and make a deal. I drive them to school, and they walk home.

They say that taxi drivers and hairdressers hear more secrets. Mum's taxi drivers do too. I'm delighted to say that my ASD son becomes positively verbose in the back seat of a car.

I can ask leading questions, and actually get thoughtful answers instead of the usual "dunno" or "maybe". If there are two or more kids in the car, I can just keep my mouth shut and eavesdrop. If I want to find out what's really going on in their lives, how they are feeling, or what's upsetting them, all I have to do is offer to drive them somewhere.

Why don't they realise I am there?  Why aren't the usual rules of censoring disclosure in conversation applied? Does it have anything to do with the speaker not facing the listener?

Is it like an ostrich putting it's head in the sand to avoid enemies- if you can't see someone's face, then you aren't talking to them, and they can't hear you?

Once Upon a Meltdown

Once upon a time, when Dreamer was at pre-school, Curly was just a bump, and Speedy was three, we moved house.
We moved into a nice old house, in a nice old suburb, with nice old neighbours.

At the time, we were stumbling through this parenting business. Speedy did meltdowns. Big, loud, long meltdowns.

We were also just discovering that whatever the parenting books said, the opposite worked best for Speedy. If I tried to hug him close to calm him, he'd escalate, and escalate, and escalate until I let him go. Only then would he begin to calm down. We'd joke that he sounded like he was being murdered. There were more than a few days where I would find myself sitting on Speedy's bed, hugging him, while he screamed "Stop, stop, let me go, let me go".

We never thought about what the neighbours were hearing.

One day, DH (he-who-will-get-a-nickname-when-I-think-of-one) was in the garden, watering the plants with the hose, when he got chatting over the fence with the neighbour. Speedy and I came out to chat too. It was all very neighbourly until Speedy asked if he could water the garden. He didn't want help. He wanted to do it all by himself.

Picturing a three-year-old aiming the hose up, down, through the window, and all over the neighbour, and being in the middle of a conversation, DH said the magic word. "No".

And it started.

Speedy stood there and screamed. And cried. And howled like he was being beaten. It was an Oscar winner.

The neighbour watched with a look of horror on his face.

Then he spoke. "Is that all it takes?" he asked, in a stunned kind of way. "To make him scream like that?"
"Yep" I replied, with a tired, watery grin.

It was only afterwards that it dawned on us how close we'd come to having the neighbour report us for child abuse.

Public Face/Private Face

I think I was about fourteen when I realised that my friends didn't think the way that I did.

It probably happened when a group of friends were gushing about their latest band crushes, and I just sat there, listening, and thinking "How absolutely inane, I really don't care who's the cutest boy in the Bay City Rollers. I'd rather be in the library with a good book".

I also knew then, with absolute clarity, that if I actually said what I was thinking, I'd be friendless during the lunch hours for the rest of my school days. At the time, that was a big thing. I did not want to be friendless in high school.

And so I discovered observation and acting.

Oh, I gushed, and bought Sherbet records, and fan magazines, and had long conversations over vegemite sandwiches about what I'd say when I met the popstar of my dreams!

"Oh Eric, he's so cute!"
"Shut up, Eric's mine"
"Oh sorry, I forgot. Umm, Who do I get then?"

Then I had to go home afterwards and have a good lie down, listen to some Doobie Brothers, do maths homework, and read Lord of the Rings.

It was hard work, having school friends.


I watched the ABC Doco  on Compass from last night, and it was Akash (the musical one) that reminded me of all this.

Lately, I've been aware that gradually, imperceptibly, over many years, I've been using the public faces less and less. I just don't want to any more. I still have to keep it up at work, of course, but I forgo the gossip and water-cooler talk.

I don't want to go to parties, or social events, or even for coffee, unless I can wear my private face. It's too much like hard work.

Hey, am I turning into a grumpy old woman? or releasing my inner Aspie?

Alphabet Soup

Yeah, well, I'm home alone, with a new baby blog, and no kids reading over my shoulder asking "What are you doing, Mum", so why not say a few more things?

Like, first off - Valerie, you're responsible for this.  Is this blogging going to chew up my life? Normally on a Sunday afternoon I'd be raiding with my guildies on World of Warcraft.

And then, I was debating whether or not to even mention diagnoses here, or just leave our family as neurologically interesting.

Some of us have labels, and some don't. That's not to say we aren't all peculiar in our own ways, it's just that for some of us, getting along in the NT world has been more difficult.

Being a practical person, I'm not averse to using Alphabet Soup to get what my kids need, if that's the only thing that a school or a government department understands.

But still, there is more to a person than a label, so I'd much rather talk about aspects or traits or tendencies.

Alright, I'll do it. *takes a deep breath*

ADHD/ADD, AS/ASD, CAPD (APD), OCD, major Depression, Anxiety.

They are the official ones, and I don't think I've forgotten any.

Then it starts to get blurry.
The child who is not ADHD is a hyperactive, sensory-seeking, kinaesthetic learner, who the school wanted on Ritalin.
The child who has no labels has oral-defensive issues that have me tearing my hair out.
And I'm still not sure where the line gets drawn between ASD obsessions and anxiety and the seperate labels of OCD and Anxiety.
Executive Functioning, anyone? Where does that fit?
Then start to look at the adults, and surprise, surprise, the apples don't fall far from the tree. 

But there you go. Bit of this, bit of that, whole heap of the other, stir up the family gene pools, and you get what you get - just your average family. ROFLMAO.

The Phone...

Dreamer, at the grand old age of 16 years and 11 months, bought himself a mobile phone yesterday.

So what? Most kids have their own mobile at two these days, don't they?

I'm excited because he asked for a phone.

I mean, a phone is a social status symbol. A way to waste time and money chatting to and messaging friends.
Um.. did I just use the words 'chatting', 'friends' and 'social' in connection with the name of my Aspie son?

I never thought I'd see the day.

He has begun to develop a social life. His very own social life.

Fellow students contact him on MSN, and invite him to a semi-regular study group at the library. Fellow physics nuts, admittedly, and I have my suspicions that not very much studying goes on, and there's a fair bit of going to the mall and buying Maccas and Mother, but to me that's even better.

He attends conventions - Supernova and GenCon - with fellow anime, manga and gaming geeks.

He even appears (ssshhhh!) to have a girlfriend. Well, a girl who phones him and asks would he like to go comic book shopping with her and her Mum. OK, the next step is to work on having him phone her, but it's all good so far.

And so he decided that a mobile phone might be useful.

Since when did a phone overtake a new DS game on his spending priority list?

He's spent the last 24 hours getting it all set up. Yes, it takes that long, and I don't think he's even added any phone numbers yet. There's the time, calendar, ring tones, message tones, wallpaper, copy MP3's from the computer, tune the radio stations, connect the wi-fi to the home network, alarm clock, and OMG I want a new phone too. (sorry, techno-junkie here got carried away)

I'm sure I'll have to provide more than frequent reminders over the next weeks to actually ask people for their numbers, and give them his. That's just small bikkies.

I can't get the grin off my face.