“Elle’s Story”
I had four miscarriages before I had my first healthy baby. He was full on from the get-go, crawling and walking early, although not by much. By the time he was nine months old I was pregnant with my second child, something I was never going to complain about given my history.
He was 17.5 months old when his sister was born, and I did all the things they recommend. I included him in the care and interactions with his sister, and with my husband we created a new family of four. Early on I noticed that his sister was different. Whereas my son had been alert and engaged even as a newborn, she didn’t make eye contact and engage at all. She consistently watched all the milestones go by, and from birth she had a loud cry, in line with that of a much older baby with developed lungs. Her lungs were the only thing that developed early, and she crawled, walked and talked a good six months later than the standard window. In fact she never crawled, eventually developing instead a ‘bum shuffle’ that propelled her around whilst sat upright. She also would not be soothed by anyone other than me, and bedtimes became a many hour marathon of crying, settling and wailing again when she would stir and realise I had the audacity to place her down. This continued until she was four years of age.
In the interim my relationship with my son started to change, with him becoming more active and, on occasion, literally climbing the walls.
I had postnatal depression with both of my children and I blamed myself for what was happening. ‘She knows I’m not connected to her’ I would think. ‘I had them too close together’ was another pointless thing I blamed myself with back then.
By the time my second was one and my oldest was two and a half my then husband’s job took us overseas. It was a remote community without much in the way of medical support, with a basic hospital that could do the job if you broke an arm or had appendicitis, but would not have known the first thing about neurodiversity. I’m talking over 20 years ago. I had raised concerns in the UK before we moved, but had been told ‘they all develop at different rates’ and I had accepted that, putting many of my concerns down to my own inadequacies of being a first time parent, having postnatal depression and coming from my own background of childhood trauma so not having a good model of how to parent.
So when my marriage started to wobble for a variety of reasons, I really didn’t have much capacity for anything. I flew back to the UK without my husband and with my two young children (aged two and a half and four by then) and I became a single parent. My husband withdrew finances immediately and although I continued to live in what had been our family home rent free (he paid the mortgage at that point) I had no money to live on and had to go to work full time. At this stage my focus and attention was purely on survival and supporting my children financially. I had little time or energy to place on their development or any of the behaviours that were starting to show up. As I progressed through the divorce and bought my now ex husband out of the house, my childcare bill was bigger than my mortgage. I had little to no family support, with one aunt who would sometimes help out and the weekend each fortnight that they went to stay with their Dad.
When my son first went to school I cried as a crossed the playground. It was a mixture of acknowledgement of the end of an era and the beginning of another, as well as pure relief. My son only ever had one type of parent’s evening, where the following four statements would be said and the only variation would be the tone of voice it was said in. ‘He’s really clever, he gets distracted, he distracts others,and he’s not meeting his potential.’ I learned to tell by the shape of the shoulders of the teacher which slant would be placed on these statements - whether it was fondness or harshness, essentially with the exception of the tone of voice of the teacher, the parents evenings for my son were the same for the whole of his school career.
When my daughter went to school I had a different experience. The school she attended had a reception class with a large glass window that gave a vantage point for the whole path that led to the school. For two years I got to listen to my daughter scream and cry at the top of her lungs to me walking away from the school, with her face pressed against that window, and the strained wail of ‘Mummy, don’t leave me’ following as I walked and cried my way along the path. Many days I started work with my face a mess, I learned to apply my mascara after school drop off. I felt I had no options, working was mandatory if I wanted to move us forward. I was judged, despite the fact I was working harder than anyone else I knew to keep them fed, clothed and safe. I know many single parents would have claimed benefits, or chosen not to work, but I am proud to say that I knew then if I did that I would never build anything better for us all, and we would always be in survival mode. I wanted more for us.
So again, I blamed myself for being a working single parent when my son’s behaviours started to show up at school. He had moments of acting out, fights in the schoolyard, his impulses even led to him bringing home an item from school that didn’t belong to him - a source of great shame to us both. That really didn’t help the judgement from others. By the time his impulse control was none existent, and his emotional dysregulation off the chart, I had to fight to get considered for assessment. Despite the fact that the school were raising concerns with me, they fought me on my request for him to be assessed, stating both outright and hinting that my parenting was to blame. I made attempts to make connections with other parents and to have playdates with their children. I was snubbed almost relentlessly, my status as single parent and my son’s behaviour not helping my endeavours. When mentioning this to a teacher she replied ‘perhaps it was the incident in the art room.’ What incident? I had never been made aware. When raising this I was told they would usually mention this at school pickup, but because I worked the children went to after school club, and so I had never been told of many of the incidents that had happened, but the other parents had been.
Around this time after being a single parent for two years I met my now husband. We began our relationship in stolen moments, meeting for lunches or at the weekends when my children were away. We proceeded like this for a couple of months before I introduced him to my children.
By the time I raised my concerns again and pushed above the school’s head, ADHD diagnosis in the UK had become a political issue rather than a medical one. My son was assessed and they indicated that he had ‘some autistic tendencies’ and diagnosed him with ‘oppositional defiant disorder.’ I disagreed with the diagnosis but took it nonetheless as I believed it would access some form of support for my son. In the overstretched NHS It did not.
In the meantime my daughter was consistently failing at school, again following the trend of being behind the milestones. This was something I also blamed myself for, despite the fact that we did all the homework set by the school, and I even paid for a specialist tutor to come to the house and teach her to read because she was still struggling to do so two years after her peers.
Eventually I gave up on the school and moved them to a private school. We made immediate progress with some things, and the school finally listened to me and the experiences I was having at home. We worked out a plan for both my children, with transparency about their performance at school and home so that we could work together in order to get the best results from them. The school acknowledged my awareness of my children, and to finally be recognised for all the effort I was putting in made a huge difference to me. It was worth eating beans on toast for months at a time to pay the school fees!
Finally after coming to Australia both my older children have been diagnosed with Audhd (at age 21 and attending university) and ASD level 1 (at age 19). I have two further children, one of whom is diagnosed ADHD and the other is, as we say at home, ‘quirky’. In later years I have been led by my children as to whether to get diagnosis or not. I managed all those years without one, so I had allowed them to indicate when or if they wanted to be assessed.