In the next few blog entries I
will be talking about life on Planet N – starting with his early years and
moving towards the present day.
When N was born he
was the perfect baby. He fed
straight away, unlike No 1 son, AJ who refused point blank! N was soon sleeping through the night and he
was happy and content – he would chuckle away to himself in his seat.
However, at a year old my mother noticed
that he didn’t respond to his name. She
asked if he was deaf, but as I knew that he responded to sounds behind him
there was nothing wrong with his hearing.
It soon became apparent that he had autism.
My eldest was a nightmare. He didn’t sleep through until he was three. He
was into everything and would touch anything he could. There was just 18 months between the two and
N idolised him and copied everything he did. When we went out, one would run one way and the other would go in the
opposite direction. Who should I chase?
It got to the point that we were
chucked out of every toddler group in Bracknell, apart from one – which was at
our local church.
I tried getting help from the
local health visitor, but because both boys were very intelligent, she snapped
that there was nothing wrong with them and I was just a crap mother. I heard that a lot. One day, I went to the health centre in floods of tears. I hadn't slept for weeks because of AJ and I needed help. My health visitor's exact words were: "Pull yourself together woman, you're making a fool of yourself" Not what I wanted to hear!
At around 2 years old, N developed
obsessions. Thomas The Tank Engine and
the colour blue were the main ones. Even
now, 20 years on, he favours blue.
However, he hated the Thomas videos. He loved the books with stills from
the video series, he loved the audio tapes narrated by Ringo Starr – but he
would run from the room when AJ watched the videos.
One day he refused to
come downstairs for his lunch if the telly was on. This went on for weeks. We just couldn’t understand it. After a long process of elimination, we
discovered that he had once come down when an advert for a new Thomas video was
on, and so he didn’t want to risk seeing it again. Well, although it’s often the easy route to
give into an autistic child, it is important to me that they learn to fit in
around the family, and not for the family to fit in around them. So we managed to persuade him that we would
only watch the BBC when he was downstairs, and there are no ads on that. Phew!!
That worked!
Getting him to wear anything
other than blue or to eat off plates which were not blue or Thomas ones was
another matter! But it was a compromise which we could make. You have to have give and take with an autie
and know which battles are worth fighting.
