Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 67 Comments

Wembley

The Yorkshire version of Wembley Stadium. Can you spot the pet trying to once again sneak into the photo.

Even comes with a discerning crowd.

If Aspergers Parenting was a football game, well today feels like we have had a key player sent off….

I always naively assumed that if and when son got an official diagnosis then a support package would be out in place to help with his life chances. How silly of me. I didn’t count on year after year, having to fight the system. Trying to prize just the hints of support from a system which has been hammered into the ground by a Government which only looks after itself and it’s friends. To summarise

  • A school system repeatedly fails kids who do not fit into the factory production line which is the UK school system. Two options, either fight for a place in one of the few special schools or accept your child being bracketed as ‘low attainment’ and consigned to the bottom set. The school will then forget about the child and then pat itself on the back if the child gets just one certificate.
  • Letter after letter, call after call trying to find a clinician who is prepared to look at your child’s case.
  • Passed from specialist to specialist who don’t have the time or resources to add your child onto their case load.
  • Service after service cut by a Government which believes that only the rich should be able to buy access to essential healthcare. A Government that sees Mental Health as no more than an excuse to avoid work. Let’s not forget they described a child taking time off from school after a bereavement as an extended holiday.
  • When you do finally get access to a service you then join the growing waiting list. Finally when your child is seen it’s virtually always by someone new, with no understanding of the back story.
  • Finally your child starts to get older and the few services he has had access to are withdrawn as he is now above the age threshold. You see the Government likes to think that after 13, services are pointless and far too expensive. Adults have to sort themselves out.

We have had three brilliant exceptions to this.

  • A Clinical Psychologist who worked with out son consistently for three years. She even delayed her retirement to ensure son’s diagnosis was officially approved.
  • An Occupational Therapy service that worked with him every few months to help with things like coordination. A service which was cut when he reached 13.
  • A wonderful Nurse Counsellor who worked with our son for 3 years helping with his anxieties and joining the fight for additional help.

We entered June 2020 with just the Nurse Counsellor left from his entire care package. And now the player is sent off.

The Nurse phoned today to let us know that she had been reassigned. She is great and some other kids are really going to really benefit from her time. We are eternally grateful for everything she has done. She is going to desperately try to find another clinician to take over from her. I know she will really try. We may get a replacement. The Nurse was the only clinician he really has connected with. Those connections are rare for him. Making a new connection is going to be tough and most certainly not guaranteed. As the Nurse said it feels like we have lost the progress made over the last few years.

Today feels like one of those tough parenting days. As a friend wrote recently we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves down and start again. We most certainly do. But it feels like it’s a much depleted team taking on the struggle. Forgive me I’ve not used a Lord of the Rings metaphor for a while. It feels like the heavens have opened. The hordes are massed outside the walls and I’m stood alone on the Battlements of Helms Deep. Just me protecting our son now. Doesn’t feel like Gandalf is riding over the horizon in the morning. I’m going to have to just find a way of doing this myself.

I’m off now to kick the ball into the net a few times. Maybe with a bit more force than usual. Then the fight starts again.

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 101 Comments

Fragmented

Good to see the local motorway is busy…. It’s still too busy for our son. I got special dispensation to step 10 yards out of the front gate to take this photo. Life on the edge.

It really does feel a bit like that at present. On one hand we have what apparently counts as our Government rapidly relaxing restrictions and on the other hand kids like our son….

His social and health phobias are in a pandemic fuelled maelstrom. Every few minutes he feels the need to wash his hands. To repeatedly rinse his mouth out. The fear of germs and hidden dangers becoming a real nightmare for him. He struggles to touch items like taps and handles. Even putting potentially unclean shoes on is a challenge these days. Deliveries have to go into garage quarantine for at least 4 days. Clothes need changing every few hours. And then another spanner in the works. The old house boiler completely failed. So a service call out is required. It’s now way beyond a temporary Dad patch up. That means an additional new threat to sons safe area. A house visitor! After much discussion we agreed a plan. The service engineer would come into the house only via the back door. The engineer must wear a mask at all times. I will keep 2m away from the engineer at all times. When the work is finished we will effectively lock down half of the house. We won’t venture into the areas the engineer visited for three days. Not ideal but it’s a plan. Son’s stress levels will rise but hopefully not too far. The damage to his safe area minimised.

Yet individuals like our son are expected to just re-enter the world by July 4th. The date our part time PM is declaring as the day he defeated the virus. The date he can heroically restart England. It’s perfectly fine to open overcrowded public schools in September. A few more hand sanitisers in the corridors and relaxing the rules further to allow for even larger class sizes to cope with increased teacher sickness is now the best way to deal with a pathogen. We are told ‘everything is now fine’ by the very leaders who have been proven to be wrong on virtually every single major decision they have made over the last 6 months. The very leaders who now widely seen as charlatans and pathological liars. People see this. Our son sees this. This just adds fuel to his anxieties. It’s making a bad situation even worse.

So when England reopens on the 4th July a small bungalow in Yorkshire will not. It stays on lockdown until son is able to face the world again. Who knows how long that will take. Much patience is required. We won’t be the only family facing this prospect. Again my country further fragments. I’m not entirely sure it’s ever really going to come back together again.

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Rain…

Rain, rain, rain.

Chucking it down.

Raining cats and dogs.

Hammering it down.

Siling down.

Bucketing down.

Teeming.

Nice weather for ducks.

I think we are moving from weather for ducks to weather for fish. It’s a good job we are on top of a little hill. Any lower down and we might be considering a life raft.

“Dad what are you doing?”

Listening to the rain.

“Why?”

Because it’s almost hypnotic. It’s kinda nice.

“The only reason I would listen to the rain is to workout when it’s stopped…. Dad I‘ve got a little question….”

He does have a point with listening to the rain. That last line is his favourite saying. He is always asking questions. Dozens and dozens every hour. When he says a little question he really means one question followed quickly by a bombardment of another 30 questions. Random questions to me but completely linked to his way of thinking. Often it seems like the same question but in fact each question is subtly different. Questions followed by a chance to demonstrate his Dads rather sketchy knowledge in these areas. Then a chance for son to instruct his Dad. This happens always in the garden, every day. If it’s raining then on go the coats.

Today it was three hours of football and fantasy world related questions. Looking at player stats, team records, form, tactics and formations. Intertwined with questions about characters, storylines, plot arcs and new worlds. Yesterday it was 4 hours of questions about politics and history.

Over time the daily fact and knowledge bombardment can tire my mind. Lack of sleep doesn’t help. Two parents allowed some time to share the questioning. A time to rest the mind. But it is what it is. Constantly walking about and hot drinks keep me going. But here’s the key thing to remember. It’s an absolute privilege to be granted this time with our son. To be welcomed into his world. A beautiful world which is more pure than ours. It’s what life is all about. So yes it can sometimes feel like it’s wearing me down BUT I wouldn’t swap it for the world.

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 73 Comments

Bouncing

Blue sky… That was a few days back. These roses are about 14 feet high. Yes the hedge needs some attention when the birds finally fledge. So how do I take a photo of high up roses. Being one half inch above average height rather limits my reaching capacity. Can’t use the ladders. They are loaned out to someone for a few days. That was just before a pesky pandemic broke out. So might see them again in 2021. So what to do.

I tried standing on a plastic garden chair. Even on my tippy toes, no where near high enough.

I then tried to rig up a DIY selfie stick. The long pole window washer makes a surprisingly fine temporary solution. And yes it did generate enough height. One Tinnie Winnie technical problem. Once the mobile phone is 14ft high, how do you press the record button. Get another pole! Yes I actually considered this for a few moments. Didn’t really think this one through.

I even dug out Son’s toy drone with its onboard camera. A brilliant solution let down by one thing. We both can’t fly it. I carefully positioned the drone below the rose. All I had to do was gently lift the drone off the ground. Get to the right height, hover it for a second while I pressed the camera button. That was the plan. Unfortunately my gentle liftoff was more akin to a NASA rocket launch. Within seconds the drone had screamed over the roof of the house and was heading towards the road. Thankfully when the drone did come down on the street it had not hit anyone. I bet the landing was as graceful as a Dodo jumping off a cliff.

So time for Plan X.

Thankfully the trampoline is kinda close by. So yes I’m not proud. I bounced and tried to take a photo on the way up. The photo above was the best one out of an understandably out of focus bad bunch. But given the effort, yes it was kinda worth it. Although I particularly liked this effort.

I can hear the cries. You only had one job, take a photo of the roses. Probably best not become a wedding photographer just yet.

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 64 Comments

Conversations

Sorry this is a couple of days late. The new WordPress editor took a dislike to this post and it’s taken two days to fix it.

Well a bit of blue sky and no rain is a start. Even the wind has eased. Feels almost like Autumn now.

Two conversations have rather defined this autumnal feeling day. The first one with the dentist.

I finally managed to speak to my Dentist about my chipped back tooth. In a nutshell this is what the Dentist said.

  • The practice partly reopens tomorrow.
  • They have a huge backlog and waiting list.
  • They are allowed to start looking at emergency cases but won’t be able to do much with them. Basically just temporarily patch them up. No drilling or aerosol inducing treatments allowed.
  • They will get back to me when they can have a look at it. But the repair will be some time. Dependent on getting the go ahead from the Government.
  • The Government is a shambles. Just making things worse.

So basically just got to grin and bear it. Will add temporary dental fixes to my increasing list of almost skills. It’s quite bizarre that the UK’s Health Minister is spending more time and energy on getting Horse Racing going than be is on helping out the NHS and Dental services. It’s amazing what being funded by the Horse Racing Industry does for a persons priorities.

The second conversation involved a muppet but not our Health Minister thankfully.

“Dad remember when we worked out that you are 25% human and 75% muppet.”

75% is probably understating the muppetry.

“Well Dad I’ve been trying to work out which muppet DNA runs through you.”

Well when I used to go and watch Newcastle United play footy. When I say ‘play’ I should say ‘get beat’ at footy. Me and my friend would just sit and slag off our own team. We were definitely the two old muppets in the audience. Waldorf and Statler.

“Ok but now you don’t go anymore then they don’t count. I am seeing three muppets in your DNA. First one is Beaker. That expression and the hair sticking up is just so you..”

“The second muppet I see in you has to be Fozzie Bear and those terrible jokes of yours..”

“The final muppet in my Dad is definitely Animal. You seem to approach everything. Things like cooking, gardening, hairdressing with the same care and attention that Animal approaches life..”

I can’t argue with this assessment, although I am a little disappointed not to have a little bit of Miss Piggy in me. Now do I trust Animal with this emergency dental kit…

*****Photos from Wikipedia******

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 72 Comments

The Dads

The ‘Stay at Home unless you are a pompous cretin called Cummings who thinks he is the UK Government‘ message has been on for months now. Ok the social distancing thing is starting to fall apart but for some of us, it’s still very much in force. One knock on effect of that is that you end of taking photos of the same thing, over and over again. SORRY. More cows. One day maybe we might get a giraffe or a camel.

This post is a tribute to Dads. I don’t need to say sorry about that.

“Dad in Art I have to create some characters for my stop motion cartoon project. I have to think of some designs, sketch them and then cut them out. They will then become the stars of the cartoon. Any ideas?.”

Well you want to make them simple to make. What about superheroes. Make a simple version of Captain America and Ironman. Lots of muscles, great costumes and heroic.

“That gives me a great idea. Let’s go for the complete opposite. No muscles, no dress sense and bad haircuts. Let’s go for Dads…..”

So here goes. Our little tribute to all the Dads out there. I’m trying to work out which one is me…. Maybe it’s the one still to be made which looks just a little like Thor….

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Garden photobomb

Somebody likes to photobomb any picture. This one is quite apt as he spends most of his time here. Digging stuff up, burying things and helping himself to any unfortunate vegetables which decide to grow here.

Yes I know it’s hardly Kew Gardens. I bet Kew doesn’t have as fine a collection of weed samples that we have… Maybe that could be our specialty. Our route to fame and fortune. Time to hug those weeds (all except those pesky nettles). And I bet Kew hasn’t had a banging crop like we have had so far this year. I don’t want to brag but so far we have had 2 radishes, 3 tiny leaves of spinach and one deformed spring onion. Eat your heart our Kew….

“Dad I’ve not a new school project to do. Take some photos of things your mum or dad or family are good at. Mum was good at so many things. Where do we start with you…”

I take that cheeky grin and that knowing look as an indication that either you are so impressed with the range of my talents or in fact you think that I am a complete muppet at everything.

“Ok Miss Piggy any ideas what I could use as examples of your talent?”

The garden

“Really. Our neighbours have perfect gardens and we have lots of weeds.”

What about cooking

“Dad your shortcrust pie last night was stronger and tougher than Captain America’s Shield. “

Hairdressing

“Have you seen my hair…”

Ok my sewing, remember that knee patch I put on your trousers

“At one stage you sewed your finger onto the trousers. When you got the patch finally on you managed to sew through to the back of the leg as well. You suddenly made the trouser leg only one foot long.”

That was a classic. I’m good at DIY. I put your shelf up.

“It fell off the wall two hours later.”

But while it was on the wall it was perfectly level.

“You know what Dad I have thought of a family talent. I’m off to photograph the gerbils shred a cardboard box.”

So with another humiliation to add to my growing repertoire let’s get back to the photo. The pink rose next to the wall is so special to us. It came from a small cutting which came from my partners childhood garden. It’s a precious link with the past. Yes it’s getting on quite a bit now. Aren’t we all. I only wish I was still looking as good as this rose. To look that good after all those years is some talent.

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 99 Comments

Goodbye Mr Sun

The last few hours of the day. Last few hours of blue skies. When we wake tomorrow, the rain will have arrived. Then it’s Yorkshire summer weather…. Cool, windy and generally a bit damp. There is a local expression

The kinda weather that puts hairs on ya back.

I would rather have those hairs on the top of my head thank you very much. Like many places we have our fair share of odd local expressions. Books as long as War and Peace have been written about the art of speaking proper Yorkshire. Most of those books are currently waiting translation into other languages, including English. A few examples of the local dialect include

  • Did I eckers like (of course I did not)
  • Wang eh o’er (please could you pass me that)
  • Ow much (that’s rather expensive)
  • Ay could’ve huffed tha we ma stic’o Rhubard (how did that batsman miss that really easy ball)
  • Ya daf hapeth (that was a bit of a mistake that you have just made)
  • Da’s nowt s’queer as folk (people can be a little odd at times)
  • Topped his clogs (unfortunately someone has just died)
  • Now lad it’s jiggered (excuse me sir that item is broken)
  • Tha’s a reyt Bobby Dazzler (you are looking lovely)
  • Yer brews mashin (the tea is in the teapot and will be strong enough in about a days time)
  • Ya betta count yer goolies (I am very sorry that very hard cricket ball has struck you in that painful spot, are they ok)
  • Ya doin ma eddin (You are confusing me)

I have a soft local accent. An accent I guess my Dad would have called ‘posh Yorkshire‘. But it’s still Yorkshire and that’s just fine with me. Ok it does have some downsides. Like no voice recognition software has ever been designed to cope with Yorkshire. I remember having a hire car which when I asked the satellite navigation to ‘take me home’ it would repeatedly switch on the heater. Or the time in a London restaurant when I ordered a mushroom pizza and the rather bemused waiter served me a children’s serving of paella.

That’s why you will never catch me doing a video blog. Especially as I have a face perfect for radio……

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 68 Comments

Epic walls

It’s not quite the Wall from Game of Throne’s. It’s hardly Hadrians Wall, the stuff of history. But it’s our barrier. Our symbolic wall. Marking the edge of our current world.

Yes it’s got nettles growing against it. Even on our side. Ok it was too cold for the Game of Thrones Wall to have nettles but Hadrians Wall has some stinging beauties lurking next to it these days as well…And that’s a World Heritage Site.

“Dad our world is pretty small but it does seem to have its fair share of weeds and nettles.”

Well not that many.

“Dad it took us three days to find my football when it went into hedge. The language I learnt when you had to retrieve the ball from the bush. Apparently you got stung a quite few times .”

Yes quite a few times. It’s not big or clever to use bad language. But in my defence we back onto farmland. It’s a haven for weeds. Our fence does feel like a not so big wall trying to keep out the marauders.

“That feeling we got when we visited Hadrians Wall last year. I can remember the date. 15th August. When we imagined what it must have been like for those Roman centurions stood on the wall. Hadrian came to Britain and ordered that the Wall was to built in 122AD. It took 6 years to build and stretched from sea to sea. It was 80 miles long.”

Its definitely an epic wall.

“Our farm fence is not 80 miles long. Maybe 20 paces long. It certainly doesn’t keep out the weeds. But at least it keeps the world out. So it does it’s job.”

Yes it really does. It allows a space for an Aspergers mind to flourish. A place to breathe and feel safe. So yes it’s an epic wall. A wall to be so thankful for.

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 102 Comments

Cows

The grass cutters have finally arrived. Always a great watch. Even the cows seem to be practicing a bit of social distancing.

“Dad did I hear that right we have a track and trace policy going now.”

Yes, after abandoning it in March (as it was deemed to be pointless by the Government) they have now decided it’s a good idea. They have apparently employed 25000 people to do the tracing. Unfortunately the software still doesn’t work.

“We don’t believe that number do we.”

No Son we don’t. It’s just lie after lie now.

“Apparently it’s cool to go on the beaches now. Maybe they have decided the virus doesn’t like sand and donkeys.”

Sniggering. Yes that might be the case. Since last weekend many of our beaches have been crammed full with tourists. Basically people started ignoring what the government was wittering on about. If it’s ok for the Governments Top Man then it’s ok for us. They have lost control. Now the so called PM is saying it’s official policy to get the beach towels out as so many were doing it anyway. ”

“The science has stopped being used.”

Yep Son it’s gone out of the window.

“So if someone goes onto a beach with the virus. Extremely likely given the numbers still with it. Then those trackers are supposed to find who is now at risk.”

That’s the plan. Basically the conversation will go something like this.

  • So you have tested positive, we need to trace who you came into contact with?
  • I went to the beach, used the toilet, rode on the donkeys, queued for chips and went into a shop to buy ice cream.
  • Who did you come into contact with?
  • Thousands of strangers. Best of luck tracing them….

“Well Dad at least the donkeys can be traced.”

Don’t forget the seagulls who pinched the chips.

“You know what Dad. Let’s give the beach a miss for 2020.”

Can’t really blame him….