Sunday 21 December 2014

The Lie of Father Christmas

There’s a rash at this time of year of people lamenting the terrible lie we tell to children. You know, the one about the fat man who comes down your chimney on Christmas Eve and leaves presents for good girls and boys. How can we keep perpetuating this terrible fantasy? they ask. Wouldn’t it be better to instruct our children in science than have them believe in some kind of overgrown fairy?

Floodllama, Santa Claus is coming to town, on Flickr.
Not hugely relevant but an awesome picture.
I have to say that of all the lies parents tell their children, this one is a long way from being the worst. ‘Honest, it won’t hurt.’ ‘You’ll enjoy it when you get there.’ ‘You look so beautiful.’ ‘Of course you’ll get a boyfriend/girlfriend.’ ‘Wow, you did that so well.’ These are the kind of lies that seem kind at the time but can leave you let down, betrayed, feeling misunderstood.

Father Christmas is the best of lies, and I’m not so sure that it really is a lie. (I’ll come to that.) Father Christmas is a lie that lets you get so excited on Christmas Eve that you can’t sleep. It’s a lie that makes magic sparkle in children’s eyes. It’s a lie that allows you to drop off at night and then wake up in the morning with that curious weight on your feet, to open one eye and see something lumpy and indistinct lying across the bottom of the bed, to sit up and open presents without any preamble, any manners or holding back.

Bill McChesney 5176 Guess Whooo's coming to town, on Flickr.
This is not Father Christmas. This is a man in a suit.
As you get older you think, ‘I’m sure I saw that in mum’s shopping,’ or ‘Isn’t it odd that Father Christmas shops in Tesco too?’ But it’s not like the moment after you’ve had the immunisation and realise, eyes wide with shock, that it did hurt and mummy didn’t tell the truth. It’s not like the moment when you objectively look at the outfit you put together and realise you looked an idiot. It’s a moment when you realise that for all these years your parents have loved you enough to help you believe in something wonderful.

And that’s where we come to the other thing, the fact that Father Christmas isn’t a lie. Father Christmas is someone who loves you, who brings light and kindness into your life. Father Christmas is the person you never see. Never mind men who dress up in synthetic red suits and plastic beards and call themselves ‘Santa’ and sit in grottos in garden centres and shopping centres. They’re not Father Christmas. Everyone knows that he comes when your eyes are closed, and that you must, must, never be awake when he’s there. He’s invisible, incorporeal. He is a manifestation of love.

I have always remembered how Laura Ingalls Wilder summed it up in On The Banks of Plum Creek. I couldn’t do it better.

Ma!” Laura cried. “There IS a Santa Claus, isn’t there?”

Of course there’s a Santa Claus,” said Ma. She set the iron on the stove to heat again.

The older you are, the more you know about Santa Claus,” she said. “You are so big now, you know he can’t be just one man, don’t you? You know he is everywhere on Christmas Eve. He is in the Big Woods, and in Indian Territory, and far away in York State, and here. He comes down all the chimneys at the same time. You know that, don’t you?”

Yes, Ma,” said Mary and Laura.

Well,” said Ma. “Then you see–“

I guess he is like angels,” Mary said, slowly. And Laura could see that, just as well as Mary could.

Then Ma told them something else about Santa Claus. He was everywhere, and besides that, he was all the time.

Whenever anyone was unselfish, that was Santa Claus.

Christmas Eve was the one time when everybody was unselfish. On that one night, Santa Claus was everywhere, because everybody, all together, stopped being selfish and wanted other people to be happy. And in the morning you saw what that had done.

If everybody wanted everybody else to be happy, all the time, then would it be Christmas all the time?” Laura asked, and Ma said, “Yes, Laura.”


- Laura Ingalls Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek


Saturday 20 September 2014

The Bowling Party

Today George (almost 7) went to a friend’s birthday party. It was bowling, which he was excited about, because he’d never been before. But of course because he’d never been before it was also a troublesome thing for him, in a typically aspie way. He behaved with perfect Georgeness, but with gentleness and understanding we avoided a meltdown.
'Bowling Shoes' by John Walker, on Flickr.

On coming in through the door he was excited of course, but when his friend’s mum said hello to him he instantly collapsed onto the floor and rolled under the pool table and out the other side. In his cat-like way he acted as if that was the perfectly proper way to get across the room.

The first real problem came with the bowling shoes. I tried to take it in a gentle way, warning him he would have to change his shoes and taking him to show him what the shoes would be like. We’ve had plenty of experience with the trouble of shoe changes with him when taking him to buy new shoes. It’s a change, and worse still, a change under pressure. While all the other boys were excitedly taking their shoes off and handing them over the counter, George was crouching in the corner hiding his feet under his body. He didn’t want to do it, he didn’t see the need for different shoes, he didn’t want shoes with laces.

I noticed some of the shoes had velcro straps, and luckily they had some in his size. But this still meant getting his shoes off him. We managed this after a little time, but he didn’t want to put the bowling shoes on. He tried, but they felt wrong, and the two velcro straps were joined together instead of separate. He kept asking me sporadically through the party why the straps had to be joined together. Because I explained to the lady behind the counter that he had autism she was patient and although she shouldn’t let him in without shoes she was flexible enough to let him go in carrying them.

'The Eyes Have It' by Vagawl on Flickr (cropped to a square.)
The bowling alleys were a difficult place too. It was noisy, bright, overwhelming. The balls smashing into the floor, the sound of the pins being knocked down and picked up again, talking and music and excited children bouncing about like electrons in an atom. It was a lot to take in. So he hid behind the seat back and then sat in a corner for a while and someone else took his first turn. His friend’s mum was patient and understanding and tried gently to bring him out of his shell, explaining to her son when he asked why George was hiding that he was just a bit shy.

Then he began to engage. ‘Mummy, maybe when I’m not shy I can have a go,’ he said. When he decided it was time to have a go, he did really well. He engrossed himself in lining up the balls in order as they came out of the machine, putting one on each side. (I was more bothered by the odd blue ball than he was. All the rest were light orange or dark orange and could be lined up nicely.) The holes went on top and presented him with a shocked face.

'Bowling Ball' by Jonathan Keelty, on Flickr.
After a few goes he even decided that he wanted his shoes on. They stayed on for about two minutes, and then suddenly it all became overwhelming again. He didn’t like the taste of his drink. He lay under the bench. The shoes came off. He was ‘bored’ of bowling and wanted to go now. He had to walk away and watch through a glass screen for a while. Then after his self-imposed break he slowly sidled back, and finished the game.

Later he managed the chaos of McDonald’s with grace, and as we walked back into town he had fun trying to spot lines of three cars of the same colour in a row, a game of his own devising.


I was proud of him today. Together we managed things so that he didn’t find things too overwhelming and he didn’t have a meltdown. He was eased gently in and when he needed time he went off and took it. Instead of breaking down and spoiling things for everyone, we got through and he had a good time. What really gladdened me though was that everyone around him was also patient and understanding. No one decided he was rude or disruptive (or if they did they kept it to themselves.) They accepted that he does things in his own way. That’s just the way George is.


Wednesday 9 July 2014

Art, and Artists' Morals

I have to say, I liked Rolf Harris’s portrait of the Queen. Was it great art? No, I don't think so. But it showed a side to her that is sometimes hard to see in official depictions. A friendly side, a humorous side. Watching the documentary that accompanied the painting I was struck by how Rolf drew her out, how he seemed to reach the human in her, the real elderly lady with a family and loves and hates and ordinary everyday troubles. No, it wasn't Michaelangelo or Picasso or Hockney, but it was a good painting.

But of course, all that has changed.  One wonders if the Queen was just another woman to be sexualised. One wonders at a man who could present such a friendly and kind persona to the world while using his position to abuse and traumatise the women and girls that he came into contact with. Apparently both the BBC and the Royal Collection disavow any knowledge of the painting’s whereabouts. It has been dropped like a hot potato. The last thing either great institution want is to be associated with a scandal of the magnitude of the Rolf Harris scandal.

But if we put aside the horror of what Mr Harris was doing over all of these years, it leaves the question of how we view art in relation to the artist. What if Picasso were revealed to have been a serial rapist? What if Leonardo da Vinci were a paedophile? What if Frida Kahlo tortured animals? What if Constable beat his wife?

Allen Ginsberg (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
It seems to be established in various places that the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was a paedophile. I haven’t read any Ginsberg, but I would quite like to. But I feel awkward about this. Can I read and enjoy a man’s writing knowing that he has abused children in the most horrific way? Reading Lolita gave me a lot of conflicts (Should I enjoy the book? Should I attempt to understand the protagonist? Does it make it different now that I have my own children?), although it seems that Nabokov did not share the feelings of his protagonist in that novel. I know, as a writer, that it is quite possible to explore darker issues in writing without supporting the actions that you’re writing about. Often writing about them is an attempt to understand and process the fact that such things occur.

It is, I think, a far easier moral undergoing to read or view art about disturbing subjects than it is to view art streets away from such things but with the knowledge that the artist was a damaged and, more crucially, a damaging human being.

Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
What would we do if Leonardo da Vinci were a paedophile? Would we destroy his works and denounce the biographies? Would we attempt to explain and understand merely so that we could go on enjoying his work? I suspect the latter. In the case of a mediocre artist like Rolf Harris it’s easier to push his work under the carpet because it has so much less value to his audience.

I’m still split on where we separate art and artist. I’m still convinced that a majority of people are willing to forgive sins if the time and distance from the artist and the value of the work is great. I’m still convinced that people are happier to denounce an artist’s work if the work never had that much value in the first place.

But is a painting an artist? Is a book an author? It’s something to think about over your morning coffee. Rolf Harris presented us with a human, smiling Queen, perhaps his one, small but positive, contribution to art. Art is in the eye of the beholder, of course, and that’s what it meant to me, even if others may not share this view. Should we now throw that away?



Friday 23 May 2014

A Little Life of George

It’s hard work being George. It really is. Currently he’s not diagnosed with anything and he’s waiting on assessment, so I won’t make any assumptions here. But this is what it’s like being George. (I feel the need to remind you again that these aren’t my children’s real names.)

From Chaos to Order, by Sebastien Wiertz on Flickr. Kind
of the wrong way round, but do you know how hard
it is finding photos for things like this?
Life is endlessly frustrating for him. People talk to him and make demands of him and don’t know his reactions unless he verbalises them, which I feel irritates him a lot. People annoy him by distracting him or breaking into his routine. They ask him to do things he has no interest in, like dressing himself or tidying up. If he’s asked to do homework he usually collapses into a heap, or turns himself upside down, or shouts or screams. He’s asked to go to school and mix with crowds of people when really he’s best one or two on one. Apparently small and insignificant things can throw him right off the rails. These issues don’t bother him every time, but they do more often than not.

Yesterday was a doozy. George was playing with a toy car in the school playground. When the time came to go home he realised he’d lost it. He wanted me to look for it, but since Ben (three) had already walked out through the gate with Oscar I needed to follow him. I told George he could quickly have a run around to look for it himself, and catch me up, but he wouldn’t. I understand the paralysing fear of doing something like that, but I still had to catch up with Ben, who’s too young to be out of the school playground without me.

Toddler in the Middle of a Tantrum, by Stephanie
Chapman, on Flickr. This is an 18 month old. It doesn't
get easier when they're six years old.
This precipitated a tantrum of epic proportions. Everything became a scream. He screamed at me for calling the playground a playground. (He wouldn’t tell me what it was called.) I told him I wasn’t arguing about taxonomy because I had to go after Ben. A lot of hanging on to my arm and collapsing onto the ground ensued. It’s hard to describe the horror of trying to deal with this kind of thing when you’re Aspie yourself and get completely overwhelmed by the chaos of someone else’s meltdown. The screaming and shouting and screaming from a six year old who is consumed with rage at not being able to control his own circumstances. Trying to walk carrying multiple bags, coats, and a guitar, with a tantruming child hanging off one hand and a three year old trying to hold the other. The world condenses down to a place where the only thing that exists is your child, screaming and kicking and slapping and collapsing on the ground and shouting at you and becoming enraged at anything he can get a hold of. ‘Stop walking like that, mummy.’ ‘You’re making me do x, mummy.’ ‘You’re making me bored, mummy.’ It is impossible to adequately describe how enveloping and affecting this behaviour is. By the time we had got across the field I was at the point of beating my head into the conveniently place electrical substation. I needed to have my own meltdown. Instead I managed to hold off until we were in the house where I went into shutdown mode, where I could barely speak or move for the next few hours.


These kind of meltdowns don’t happen every day, but there is always something. Here are a couple of examples of what it’s like to be George.

Sometimes he wants a drink of water and I can’t find the water bottle that I carry with me most of the time. He relies on drinking from this bottle. He can’t go to the tap and get a drink in a cup because – well, because it’s not what he does. He has to drink from my water bottle. He either shouts or screams or collapses.

Cucumbers En Route to Pickledom, by Stacy Spensley on Flickr.
George would love this. He is made very happy by cucumbers.
One day he was given two slices of cucumber at dinner (one of them was very thick). He almost always has three slices of cucumber. His response to something like this is a burst of fury and outrage. I got out my penknife and tentatively cut the thicker slice in two. Calm and happiness was restored. He’s not being awkward or picky or over dramatic. He is genuinely thrown off track by having the wrong amount of slices, and things won’t be right until the normal routine is restored.


Recently he’s been wearing black school trousers every day. One morning his black ones were dirty and I had to give him grey. His tantrum lasted through getting dressed (which I had to do by holding him down and forcing the clothes onto him) and through most of the walk to school. He had to be carried at times (and he’s quite a solid 6 year old). It wasn’t until I thought the time was right and I crouched down and hugged him very tightly that he could grow calm.

Sometimes we ask him stupid questions, like, ‘Do you want shoes or boots?’ ‘Do you want to wear socks?’ ‘Do you want sauce with your dinner?’ Often the answer is a very indignant, high-pitched scream of ‘yes!’ or ‘no!’ depending on his preference. He’s not just being stroppy. He’s genuinely indignant because I believe he expects us to know.

If he can do things as he wants to things go on pretty well. He needs to stand in the right place to brush his teeth, use the right toothbrush, always with the right toothpaste. I don’t argue with this, so things are fine. But if I told him he couldn’t stand on the left side of the sink leaning on the bath or if I suggest it’s late and he just go to bed without worrying about his teeth, he would get very upset.

It gets harder when we go out of the house. He can be very talkative but he doesn’t like speaking to strangers. A lot of interactions are made non-verbally. He’ll hide his face or stare at the floor. He makes a thumbs up sign for thank you. He whispers things to me to tell other people. He points or nudges or obliquely indicates things.
Waiting Room, by Robert Couse-Baker on Flickr. George would
be under the chairs by now, with his face against the floor
or the wall.

Even worse are medical appointments. I can’t get him to open his mouth to the dentist and I’ve never dared making him an official appointment. He spends most appointments hiding under chairs or screaming. At a recent speech therapy appointment he spent the waiting period mostly under chairs. He had to be manhandled into the room, where he stood in the corner with his face to the wall shouting, ‘Stop talking, mummy,’ until he switched to hiding behind some chairs.

He left that appointment by rolling on his side out of the room, down the corridor, and across the reception area.

There are a lot of things to be grateful for about George. He is the most sweet and loving child. He is creative and kind. He’s doesn’t seem physically sensitive like Oscar, and he’s not particularly picky over his food like Oscar is either (the list of things that Oscar won’t eat because of taste or texture is very, very long, whereas George will eat olives and couscous and houmous and drink concentrated lemon juice, neat.) He is wonderful and imaginative and generous. His smiles are like the sun coming out. He gives spontaneous hugs and gifts of food or flowers. He is the kind of child who can roll out of an appointment with complete aplomb, and I think that’s the kind of thing to which we should all aspire.


Monday 28 April 2014

A Lack of Imagination

The Insular Cortex (Soure: wikipedia) where consciousness happens.


I have been thinking about imagination, and about how some doors of imagination are closed to me. I’m a writer. Imagination is my thing. Metaphors, similes, creating new worlds and people to go in them. But other people’s imagination is another ball game (look, there’s a metaphor, and not even one I really like.) I like this item of food, so why don’t you like it? I believe in this political viewpoint, so why, even if I explain as clearly as I can, won’t you agree with me? Why won’t you believe what I know is the truth? Why doesn’t your mind think like mine? I can try to see it as I would see it if I were you, but not as you would see it without my involvement.

I am a literature graduate and I love well written fiction with a passion. But I find it very hard to imagine other writer’s worlds in my head. This is a hard thing for a writer to admit to. When I read a book I almost never see the faces of the characters. Even when I write I can’t see the faces of my characters. People are harder to visualise than surroundings, but with some writers surroundings are almost impossible too. Jane Austen, I have found, is almost impossible to visualise. When I read Emma many years ago I couldn’t visualise Emma’s world. She was forever walking up and down a street that was something like a film set with nothing behind the fronts of the houses. Austen describes minds, not places.

'The Reader Wreathed with Flowers,' Camille Corot (Soure: Wikimedia)
I can get lost in a well described environment. I remember reading The Long Winter once and looking up astonished to find that there was bright summer sunshine outside, not a blizzard. But still the characters’ appearances are a mystery, no matter how well described. Characters have hair and dresses and physical actions, but they don’t have faces. A good film adaptation is a blessing, because then I have something to fit in my mind to characters which would otherwise be an amorphous grouping of described features, something like a late Picasso painting. I might hear a description of a nose, of eye colour, of high cheekbones, but these things are a jumble in my mind.

Extend this, and I find it very hard to keep a number of characters in my head. All these names that don’t really have faces are jumbled around in my mind as I read each page. I find it hard to remember names and fit them to faces in the real world, so in a book where I have never been presented with an actual physical image of that face is nigh on impossible. Imagine the time when I was walking to the school with my husband. He waved and greeted someone. I asked him in a low voice who it was and he told me in a bemused voice that it was the man who lived across the road from us. I recognise him in the street outside his home, but I’ve never seen him on that path before and so he was a stranger. I couldn’t tell you his name if I tried. I’m having trouble recalling his wife’s name right now, someone I speak to often on the school run. It’s something Welsh and I know it isn’t Gwen. That’s it. The further people are away from me in lifestyle, tastes, habits, the harder I find it to remember their details. (Don’t get me started on remembering their contact details. I still can’t even remember my own home phone number.) So give me, say, sixteen people in a novel whose faces I cannot see and names I struggle to remember, and I’m lost.

Members of the group "Anonymous" (Source: Wikipedia)
Of course this lack of social imagination has an impact on my interactions with the real world. Other people seem to be part of a web of communication from which I am excluded. This has gone on all my life and I feel it as soon as I’m in an arena where I need to pick up those vital bits of information that people share with each other. ‘Oh, you know Betty?’ someone says. I shake my head. ‘You know, Sarah’s mother. Sarah’s in George’s class.’ I shake my head again. I have no idea. These people mill around and if they have particularly pleasant or unpleasant personalities their faces might start to stand out. (I have to admit, I remember the faces of those people I see as threats far better than those I see as friends.) If they talk to me a lot I might start to remember their name and I know the names of my children’s friends, but no further. There’s a network of gossip, discussion, information sharing, whatever you want to call it, but I always seem to be on the outside.

What does all this mean? I don’t take people away with me in my head. When I leave my children at school I am aware of their existence, of course. I love them, and if there’s something specific that has them upset I might worry about them, but essentially once I turn away from the door I could be childless. I don’t look ahead to the moment of picking them up. In that moment I could be childless for the rest of my life. I don’t have a good memory for what happened last week or a good concept of what might happen next week. Things happen a day at a time. So I don’t live with the thought of other people in my mind, not unless they’re making noise, poking me, in some way invading the bubble of my mind. That, perhaps, is a lack of social imagination. I have six or more novels under my belt, but I can’t see the faces of any of my characters. I have read hundreds of books, and the characters are a cannibal’s assortment of noses, eyes, legs, and hair. This is how my mind works.


Wednesday 16 April 2014

On Asperger's and Sensitivity

The last time I posted I spoke very briefly about being an HSP mother. I promised to save that for next time. I've known that I was an HSP for a good many years, but recently my self assessment has changed. HSP stands for Highly Sensitive Person, and if you want to find out more about that then Dr Elaine Aron's site is the best place to go. 

If the phrase 'Highly Sensitive Person' sounds like it should be surrounded by daisy chains and auras perhaps it's because it often is. If I have to hear the words 'are you an indigo child?' one more time I may scream. I'm not saying all HSPs are like that, but you get an awful lot of it.

The perfect retreat - as long as they don't know I'm in there.
I am HSP. I have all of the problems of being HSP. The overly sensitive skin, hearing, sight. The intolerance for chaos and noise. The sensitivity to chemicals and insect bites. Ant bites turn into huge red weals. The last time I was stung by a bee I went into anaphylaxis. Then there's the social sensitivity. The need to frequently withdraw from other people and be totally alone. That's why I'm currently lying in a tent with a blanket over my head. The screaming and bickering of three small children is enough, but it's not just that that fills me up. It's the constant little nudges. The questions, the touches, the inability to go anywhere alone. The constant kisses that make nausea rise in me. The constant sensory stimulation is just too much. I start to feel as if my mind is spinning and coming apart. I want to scream and hit them away. Of course I don't. At least, I try to control it, although I can't promise not to snap.

But recently I have grown to realise that it was more than that. It's not just being an HSP. It's actually Asperger's Syndrome.

My problems in fitting in with other people go way back. I've always had few friends or no real friends. I can't say 'I love you' to anyone but children and animals - not without a great deep down questioning of what love is and if I really feel it. I can't sit in a room and talk to a person, even a close friend, without intense anxiety and self-reflection and analysing every sentence. I can barely talk on the phone. I constantly feel as if I'm missing social cues, misreading people's reactions, coming in at the wrong point or failing to come in at all. I go away from these interactions feeling drained and full of self-hatred for my inability to connect, to just do what other people do, and sit down and talk. I want to connect with people. I really do. It just doesn't work out. It's especially hard when every new place and situation sends me into a kind of shutdown, when visiting a place that I haven't been to before leaves me with intense anxiety and moving house makes me need to hide in bed for a week with physical weakness, diarrhoea, and an inability to think straight.

Often I don't know who I am.
I think I've heard every stock response since my self-diagnosis. 'You can't have Asperger's, you're too empathic.' 'I knew someone with Asperger's and you're not a bit like her.' 'You're just trying to explain your reaction to a difficult childhood.' Conversely I've had a couple of supportive friends - one with Asperger's herself who had suspected that I had it, another who is a learning disabilities nurse who suspected the same, another who read through the symptoms after her initial doubts and agreed, yes, that was me summed up on paper. These friends are like a balm and make me feel less like I'm losing my mind or being a hypochondriac. One of the problems with Asperger's is a lack of a sense of identity. If I watch a film or read a book or am exposed to a certain strong identity I take it on, chameleon-like, and so I am left constantly questioning my motives and from where my feelings have come. I worry that I am too empathic to have Asperger's, but empathy in Asperger's is a hot potato all of its own. There is a current line of thought, which seems upheld by most of the aspies I have met, that people with Asperger's actually feel too strongly, and so shut down and have difficulty in processing their emotions. We grow attached to inanimate objects even more so than bewildering human beings. This explains why I grieved for almost eight years about moving home, sobbed when we got rid of our broken television and settee, and still dearly miss the car we had when I was growing up. It explains why when someone comes at me with a hug or a kiss I feel as if I'm in the path of an oncoming train, and why I can't say, 'I love you' without deeply analysing what it means to love. Love is too important a thing to miscommunicate to someone who means the world to you.

It's extremely difficult to pursue a diagnosis of Asperger's if you're female and on the NHS (at least in this part of the country, where they just don't seem to have the resources.) Females with Asperger's syndrome are exceptionally good at coping mechanisms, it seems, at papering over the cracks and fitting in to a neuro-typical society. My case has been summed up as 'everyone finds life hard,' and dismissed because I'm a writer, capable, it seems, of empathising with my characters and using metaphor. Language is my 'thing.' It's what I do well - written down, at least. Spoken, it's a different matter. But all of the online tests agree. All of my contact with other people with Asperger's agrees. My resonance with their experience agrees. All the little seemingly unconnected things in my life agree with the traits set out for females with Asperger's. Reading Tania Marshall's highly detailed list of female Asperger's symptoms is like reading a biography.
Part of a series of earthenware figures I made as a teenager,
exploring loneliness, empathy, and family relations.

But what does all this mean for me? It means that things that aren't symmetrical make my brain itch and most of the time I wear no more than a t-shirt because clothes drive me crazy. It means that messages in my inbox go unanswered because the more important they are the more anxious I am to get the reply exactly right. It means that I don't see good friends for years because the thought of meeting up with them and opening up social interaction is terrifying. It means that I barely talk on the phone except to my family. It also means that often I am shut off and unaware of other people's problems. It means that when I am aware of them I am desperate to help them 'fix' it and get back to the status quo. It means that sometimes I say things that are too blunt or too focussed on solving the problem rather than simple reassurance. (If I give you simple reassurance it's likely that it's a learned habit. Coming from a family with deep mental problems I've had a lot of practice at that.) It means that I suffer from depression and anxiety and the urge to self-harm in order to get some control over my life. It means that I love my children dearly, but that I get touched out, overwhelmed, in desperate need of alone-time.

Not my most organised shelves. I mostly just love
the aesthetics of this.
It also means good things. Obsessions with television programmes and characters that have immeasurably improved my life and brought me many online friends. True it means that I spent a good portion of my teenage years having meltdowns at equipment failure when watching Star Trek, and that I have spent a lot of the past few years sobbing over the death of Peter Graves and the fact that my favourite character left the tv show Route 66, way back in the early sixties. But these obsessions bring me a huge amount of joy. Writing fanfiction taught me to write novels. Needing all of my dvds and cds to be ordered by alphabet and genre means that I can find what I want when I want it. I don't lack things to keep my mind occupied because I have to watch every episode of my current obsession in order, or I have to read every single book on the latest 'have you read this?' list regardless of personal taste. I like to answer questions and find out as much as I can about the world. I see things at a different angle, and I feel that I see them better for that.


Having some kind of diagnosis, albeit a non-professional one, has helped me to make sense of my life. It's made me feel like less of a broken human being. When my sympathy span is short if my children have hurt themselves I know it's not just because I'm a despicable human being. When I need to get away from the touching and kissing it's not because I'm cold. And when one of my sons has his own meltdowns over the wrong trousers or being misunderstood or a hundred seemingly insignificant things I can understand that it's probably because this runs through the family (I can see it in various family members) and he's not just being precious. He has real, valid fears and concerns. For the first time in my life I have a connection with people who think and feel like me and understand the issues that I face in life. The hardest thing is being 'out' to people who don't believe that I'm right about myself. The best thing is being 'out' to those who do.

Saturday 15 February 2014

Playdough Saturday!

Things are always different when we're at my parents' place. They live on a four acre permaculture smallholding and for an HSP (that's a whole other blog post waiting to happen) it's so much easier for me there. This morning I felt capable of making playdough. It's been a long time. I'm not sure if I've ever made it with my children, but I have great memories of it as a child, the smell of it, the salty taste on my hands, making all sorts of shapes and things with it. Since three-year-old Ben's teacher had just recommended him playing with playdough to strengthen his hands for writing it seemed like the perfect time.

I wanted to find a recipe that didn't include cream of tartar, because I was sure we wouldn't have that in the house, and I don't remember it being in the recipe as a child. Luckily I found one on the Cbeebies site that was perfect. A bit awkward that it was in cups (and surprising for a British site) but we had some measuring cups in the drawer, so it was all good. Once we'd mixed the salt, flour, and cornflour I split the mixture in half and coloured half of it red and half blue.

The children had plenty of fun helping me make the dough, and the fun continued once it was kneaded into balls and out on the table. With the help of the cutters I used as a child and various other kitchen bits and bobs they have spent the morning making shapes, mountains, babies in cradles, graves for their Lego men (that was George. He has an interesting mind), pancakes and ice cream.

For an added bonus, while I had the cornflour out, I decided to introduce them again to non-Newtonian fluids, which flow when they're not under pressure but go hard when force is applied. We've shown Oscar and George this before, but I don't think they remembered. I mixed a bowl of cornflour with a little water and put it on the table to show them how it worked. Ben was a little freaked out at first, but Oscar and George were fascinated and George spent at least three quarters of an hour deeply engrossed in this single bowl of cornflour. Now Ben is pretending it's Mount Doom from Lord of the Rings and is digging it out onto the table.

We got a little science in with this, discovering that these fluids work as they do because on the microscopic level you have little grains of solid in a suspension in a liquid. When the fluid moves slowly the particles can move past one another, but under impact there's no time for the particles to move aside and make way, and so they behave like a solid.

Of course as an HSP parent I'm exhausted now and they're still going strong four or five hours later. There's playdough everywhere. But they're having fun, and that's what counts.




Saturday 8 February 2014

What's Under Your Sink?

A plunger? Cleaning cloths? Bleach? Antibacterial spray? Febreeze?
'Poison' by Cavin on Flickr (license)

'Every week around 500 children under five [in the UK] are rushed to hospital because it's thought they have swallowed something poisonous.' (Source: nidirect.gov.uk)

I remember this kind of incident in my own childhood (due to berries on a blackberrying trip not household substances.) Being taken off to hospital by worried parents. Orange juice with an emetic concealed inside. Staying in hospital overnight. The high bars of the hospital cot. Even if no ill effects unfold, the repercussions of possibly ingesting something poisonous are unpleasant for both parent and child.

I want to address a fundamental strangeness in the way we organise our kitchens. To be clear, it's the way I organise my kitchen too. We have cleaning products under the sink. Pretty much everyone does. My parents do and always have, as far as my memory goes. Almost every house I've been in, when I've had cause to look under the sink, shows the same arrangement. Bleach? Under the sink. Window cleaner? Under the sink. Dettol? Under the sink.

We don't keep a lot of chemicals at home (and when I say chemicals I mean cleaning fluids and the like. Of course everything is composed of chemicals, from the H2O in the taps to the O and CO2 in the air we breathe.) Most things come clean with water or water and a little washing up liquid (Ecover if the supermarket has it.) It's best for the environment and your personal health not to rely on too many nasty chemicals. But still, I don't want my boys indulging in their own form of speakeasy on the kitchen floor.


'Chemistry Bottles With Liquid Inside,' zhouxuan12345678, cropped. (License)
Do most children show an interest in swigging bleach from the bottle or rummaging in the medicine cabinet? None of mine ever have. They're very clear on 'that's medicine' (it's all under lock and key anyway), or 'that's a nasty chemical.' They know not to touch. But Ben, in particular, loves cleaning. It's one of those things I pray he won't grow out of. He's forever rummaging under the sink and coming out with cleaning spray so he can 'help' clean up.

So why do we keep our cleaning fluids under the sink? What's the point? Why spend time fitting child locks and desperately trying to barricade the cupboard? (In our previous residence we used a stick to 'lock' the doors.) I understand that you don't want to put certain things under the sink, but there are plenty of things that could be stored there. Tinned food. Food in plastic and glass containers. That could fill a whole cupboard, and meanwhile all your horrible bleaches and sprays could be up at adult eye level, well out of the reach of little hands and mouths.

So isn't it time for a fundamental reorganisation of our kitchens, and of our mindset regarding where things 'should' be kept? Do we have to keep our bleach under the sink because Mrs Jones next door does, and so does Mr Hughes the next door down, and so do your parents, and so do your friends? Educate your children about what's safe and what's not, but if you can, keep dangerous substances out of reach.


[A little post-script. It's not only cleaning products and medicines that can be harmful. When George was younger I invited him to smell some powered ginger. Instead of sniffing he blew, and the powder billowed up right into his eyes. On that occasion we rushed him straight to A&E where the doctor confirmed that ginger was one of the most painful things you could have in your eyes. He had to have anaesthetic eye drops for three or four days afterwards. And it's not just ginger. The more obvious one is nutmeg. The ingestion of 'five or more grams of nutmeg causes acute nutmeg poisoning.' (Source: toxnet.nlm.nih.gov) Be careful with spices as well as the more conventionally 'dangerous' kitchen items! ]