LITMIR.BIZ

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by people speaking a foreign language and doing random, inexplicable things.

      It was a shame no one took the time to explain at least some of that to me when I was six. Maybe they did and I’ve just forgotten, although, even at that young age, I tended not to forget important things if they were explained to me in clear, unidiomatic terms I could understand. Especially things that would have made me feel less guilty about all the trouble I was causing.

      Going to school turned out to be the first really distressing experience of my life. To make matters worse, Mum used to threaten me with tales of a place with bars on the doors and windows where children were sent if they were taken away from their parents. ‘Only good children are allowed to stay with their mums,’ she used to tell me. ‘Bad children have to go to the care home.’

      It wasn’t until quite recently that I realised what she was describing might have been a borstal, and maybe that’s where she actually spent time as a young teenager, after she was kicked out by my grandma. What Mum probably didn’t realise when I was six was that although I was afraid for my own sake of being sent to ‘the care home’, I was even more afraid for her, because I didn’t know how she would cope if I wasn’t there.

      During my first couple of years at school, Mum was often called into meetings to discuss my behaviour. We always had terrible fights before those meetings. But as soon as we were in the presence of teachers or social workers, we would sit very close together and Mum would do all the talking, including answering most of the questions that were addressed specifically to me. In some ways, it might have been better if she had primed me beforehand by telling me exactly what to say and then letting me say it, because whenever I was forced to answer a question myself, I was terrified of saying the wrong thing. But although I have got Asperger syndrome and therefore find many aspects of social interaction very difficult to deal with, I am quite quick in other ways. So I soon learned to smile and babble away about the sort of things that might be of interest to an almost normal, reasonably happy, slightly nerdy child with an autism spectrum disorder.

      Mum never actually told them about the fights that preceded those meetings. I think she preferred to communicate the information passively, by not attempting to hide the fresh scratch marks on her arms. I expect they admired her for standing by me and sympathised with her for having to try to cope with my wild behaviour. What they must have seen was a woman on her own struggling to control a physically violent six-year-old. What they didn’t see were the painful red patches on my scalp or the clumps of my hair that had come away in Mum’s hands when she pulled it so hard it brought tears to my eyes.

      It seems that Mum was right about social workers though: as long as I was clean, fed and apparently not afraid to sit close to my mother during those meetings, they believed that everything must be all right. Which must have been a relief for them, because no one seemed to know what to do with us. I don’t think they were used to having to deal with kids like me, although Asperger’s tends to be at the less severe end of the autism spectrum, and I can’t have been the only autistic child in the entire county.

      The main problem I had was that, because I couldn’t tell anyone what I felt or needed, I would fly off the handle whenever I was confused and frightened, which was quite a lot of the time when I was at school. Every time it happened, someone would phone Mum and ask her to come and pick me up, and I would be suspended for a couple of days.

      Paradoxically, in view of the fact that the reason I was in trouble at school was always for displaying the kind of ‘difficult’ behaviour Mum often told me was ruining her life, she always took my side against the teachers. Instead of being angry with me on those occasions, she would smile at me as we walked out of the school, as though we were co-conspirators in some mischievous plot. Then we would run across the road to the park, where she would buy me an ice cream.

      What probably made my continued ‘bad’ behaviour even more perplexing and frustrating for my teachers was the fact that the tablets that had been prescribed for me by the doctor when I was first diagnosed with Asperger’s didn’t seem to be doing any good. Maybe they would have helped calm me down a bit and made it all more manageable – for my teachers and for me – if I had been allowed to take them. But although Mum smoked weed, she didn’t believe in tablets, and as soon as we got home from the doctor’s surgery, she threw them all away. So I didn’t ever get the chance to find out what effect they might have had.

      One of my greatest fears at that time was that if I didn’t learn to cope, I might actually be sent to a special school or, even worse, to one of the care homes Mum used to tell me about. And if that happened, I would be somewhere that sounded worse than school and Mum would be on her own. That was another reason for wanting to show my teachers I was clever, because then they might believe that everything was all right at home. The problem was I couldn’t read. While I was struggling to try to grasp even the basic concept of reading, some of the other kids in my class were moving on from the few words they had already learned at nursery school. In the end, I was so frustrated by not being able to understand the method the teachers used and so determined to catch up with the others that I taught myself.

      I accepted Mum’s insistence that I was perfectly capable of being ‘normal’ if I just tried harder, as any six-year-old would do. But I hated it when she called me ‘a retard’, in a nasty, mocking voice, and when she found ways to make it clear to me that needing extra help at school was something to be ashamed of. Again, I think she hoped that if I was ashamed of my disabilities, I would at least learn to hide them and to present a ‘normal’ front to the world. So she tried – with some success – to make me afraid to be different and to learn to recognise what was ‘normal behaviour’, so that I could copy it.

      What she didn’t realise was that I did know, from an early age, that I wasn’t the same as everyone else. I might not have been able to work out for myself what people meant by the things they said and did, but I knew, very often, that what I said and did wasn’t right. The trouble was, the more I tried to be normal, the more stressed I became; and the more stressed I became, the more difficult it was for me to act normally.

      Sometimes, when Mum and I were having an argument and I lost my temper, she would smirk, as though she had won, and then walk away. When I was older, I learned to dig my nails into the back of my hand and repeat silently in my head, ‘I have got to keep control of this’. But for me it wasn’t winning or losing a fight that really mattered; what I needed was to be able to talk about whatever had happened. Instead, I bottled everything up inside me until all the suppressed frustrations and anger reached a critical point and exploded again. It was how I felt at school too.

      My constant struggle to be normal wasn’t helped by the fact that, for some of the most impressionable early years of my life, I had lived with adults who treated me as an equal and were quite happy for me to argue with them. So whereas a ‘normal’ child confronted by an angry teacher might cry, apologise and move on, I thought the rhetorical questions I was being asked required answers. By ‘talking back’, I quickly gained a reputation for having a serious attitude problem, which, while possibly true, was never intentional.

      After a while, whenever I was ‘naughty’, my teachers started sending me to the teacher who taught the 11-year-olds. He was a big man, tall and heavily built, who would tower above me with his hands behind his back and then bend down so that his face was just a few inches from mine and I could feel the damp heat of his breath as he shouted at me. He was the only teacher who could get through to me – and the only one who could make me cry. I suppose it was because his anger was so obvious and unambiguous that even an autistic six-year-old could recognise and understand it.

      I hated getting into trouble at school, but the fact that it somehow brought Mum and me closer together seemed like a good thing. She had been almost a stranger to me before Dan walked out. Now though, with my stepsiblings gone too, she was the only person I had left and the only person who had any reason to be on my side. Dan still dropped by to see us from time to time, until he had an accident and died when I was eight. His death was upsetting, but not devastating, as it already felt as though Mum and I were on our own. I think Mum must have felt like that too, and that was why she started to become very possessive and controlling.

      I

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