Testing, testing….

I hate going to assessments with Jonah, and so does he with me. He resisted so much last night anyone would have thought I was taking him into an extermination camp shower block, but to be honest it would have been the same if I’d tried to make him go and pick his sister up for dance class. He just doesn’t like being disturbed.

Or anything new, for that matter. As a ‘special treat’ we decided to go for ‘chav curry’ at the one Indian restaurant that has resisted the general gentrification and tarting up of the Hackney suburb where we live, and he put on an Oscar-worthy performance about ‘hating curry’ and ‘hating me’ as we waited for the bus back to Victoria Park from the drear NHS Children’s Services centre in the rather less salubrious environs of Homerton Hospital.

He doesn’t hate me, in fact. He loves me, with the fiercest passion and blindly dogmatic loyalty which I suspect will only lead to disappointment a few years down the line.

From being an unaffectionate toddler, he entered his Oedipal stage later than most boys and is yet to leave it, requiring a romantic cuddle before he goes to bed, where he makes me massage his neck, whilst plying me with ‘best mama’ sweet nothings. It’s five minutes a day that make everything else worth it. And long may it last.

In the meantime, I was required at the assessment to do what I loathe, and speak about my son while he is in the room, as if he isn’t there. It’s a horrible process and I’m not sure why there can’t be a better arrangement, because, although I tried to couch my references to him in technical language to obfuscate my meaning, he’s a clever stick, and, whilst building the tallest tower of dolls house furniture he possibly icould, he was soaking it all up: my references to him ‘being difficult’, or having ‘meltdowns’ ‘being malcoordinated’ and ‘socially awkward’ – it’s hard to dress it up so it sounds nice.

It’s also difficult to say exactly how much he does notice. He certainly didn’t notice his assessor who stalked him at school on Tuesday without him being aware of her presence. But then, Jonah’s not so great at faces. He often calls me Tom (as he insists on calling his dad), but then when I object, he’ll always giggle at his mistake and call me Mum.

Curiosity gets the better of me at these things – it’s often a useful sounding board for me to discuss Jonah’s behaviour, and the only time I can indulge in my maternal urge to discuss his quirks to the nth degree. So as we wrapped up[, I asked his assessor what she really thought. Are we going to get a diagnosis or what.

“We don’t diagnose easily”, she said, keeping her face as neutral as possible, “but I have to say after all I’ve seen, there are definite traits”.

To have confirmed what I’ve long known seems a little self-defeating, when it means removing Jonah’s innocence about his own way of being. When I described Aspergers to him later, in gentle, layman’s terms, over curry, which he described as being quite nice, actually, he said, “yup, that sounds like me.”

That night, he had a nightmare about falling off a cliff, and I wonder, just wonder if it had something to do with something I said with him in the room. The disloyalty of discussing him with a stranger violating the safety shield I provide day in day out, and for which he loves me unquestioningly.