Taking stock

We’ve had our annual week off while the kids go and stay at Grandma Kat’s to save us on summer holiday childcare, and I’m just about missing them just as they’re due to return tonight. It’s as it should be. We’ve made the most of it, Tom and me, without going cray cray. We’ve had the kitchen out of action while a new one is installed, so we’ve eaten out, gone to the cinema and had a couple of people round for drinks in the garden. It’s been pleasant. Normal. Nothing much to report.

Except that it’s given me a chance to take stock. On how lucky I am, really. I feel relaxed for the first time in years, and it’s nice, but it’s not particularly inspiring – given that I’m normally at my most inspired on a raging hangover after a night doing things a married mother of two really probably oughtn’t.

One thing that caught my attention this week, between eating, drinking beer and working, was an article I read on oppositional defiant disorder. It stuck me because it sounds like what we are dealing with with Jonah at the moment: it’s described as a pattern of openly hostile and defiant behaviour towards authority figures. It typically begins around 8 but can start earlier.

When you’re living with constant meltdowns, refusal to leave the house, put your shoes on, stay at the table or eat the food placed on it, it’s hard to take stock about the why and the wherefore. You just have to try and deal with it.

Tom and I aren’t overly strict parents, or demanding of our kids. We just want life to be simple and our kids to be at least relatively polite most of the time. With a kid on the spectrum, that’s easier said than done a lot of the time, but I’ve learned to deal with it by letting Jonah alone to set his own boundaries and in many ways, it has taught me that kids are not suicidal and when allowed to binge on TV or chocolate, pretty soon get sick of it.

But ODD (oppositional defining disorder) describes something more profound, and while I don’t agree that labelling behaviours that are at least normal some of the time in kids of this age is particularly helpful, when you’re experiencing something that isn’t normal, it’s useful to get a diagnosis.

Jonah ticks all the boxes for this condition – at least at the moment. Worryingly, the first line of therapy starts with the parents. This is most often described in households that you could sum up as chaotic – frequent parental arguments, drug abuse or conversely, overly strict.

We’re not perfect, and Tom and I have bad patches, moods and the odd evening that we get a bit out of it, but so much, so normal.

It’s true though, I don’t like authority. I hate it. And I react really badly to criticism. So much so, I’ve just had a big old chat about it at work.

So, maybe there is something about my own defiance that either Jonah has picked up, or has inherited. I don’t think it’s possible to say which.

Tom is much more people pleasing, so much so, that sometimes, even I think he should get up off  the floor and stop being a doormat, and take the poker out from up his bum. But with Jonah, he can lay down the law. Not often, but when Tom goes, he can really go. But Jonah will push him to it.

My remedy for this is to not argue back. When Jonah looks like he’s in the mood to throw one, to simply ignore it. Even when he starts throwing my neatly folded basket of laundry around. Eventually he realises he’s got nothing to fight against and gives up. It’s not easy, but it sure saves a lot of shouting. Although, I tend to shout at Tom to get him to do the same.

I need to work on that.

Anyway, Grandma Kat was given strict instructions to follow process with Jonah this week, and he certainly tested her patience. They survived the week, and despite a LOT of moaning when I rang up to see how things were yesterday, with me making the point that at least it was only a week, we shall thank her with a slap up meal before she scuttles back off to Florida for the remainder of the year.

Dropping them off last Sunday was a reminder that being difficult runs in the family. My sister Katie was bloody minded as a child and as a teenager so argumentative she drove us all to distraction; I was prone to pinching and other subversive slyness; Mum, well, she’s defied fifties female expectations with her techie left handedness and refusal to conform to norms of mothering, and my father, who hasn’t spoken to me for the best part of 20 years – yup, he stopped pretty much when I was 15 – is an inventor, who doesn’t speak to a lot of people for weird reasons of his own. We’re all weird. Add to that Tom’s dad, who, god rest his soul, was known to be tricky, and I find his mum to be ‘passive aggressive’, and it’s no wonder Jonah can be a difficult little sod. Thank fuck Ava’s pliable, right now, or god knows where we’d be.

I fear for her teens, that’s for sure!