Odd Girl Out

by Laura James

  ‘Are you angry with me?’ I’ll ask. ‘Have I done something?’

  Just as I cannot recognize my own emotions, his are utterly foreign to me too. He seems to have so many. They can come on quickly, seemingly without warning. One minute everything is fine, but the next he can be angry or bored or ecstatic. I find it disconcerting, destabilizing.

  Often I question if he’d be happier with someone else. Someone who could see wonder in a meteor shower or a dragonfly dancing on the breeze at the edge of a crystal clear river. Someone who would get up at 3 a.m. to swim in phosphorescence in the moonlight. Someone who would enjoy the onslaught of light and sound at a gig. Someone who feels, rather than thinks.

  He says not. That he is happy with the way things are, but I am uncertain. We are a team, that’s for sure. I produce his photo shoots and he edits my copy. It’s part of the glue that holds us together. If we ever split up, he’d need to find someone who could obsessively work out what the light was going to do at any given time on any given day, remember the contributor release forms, charm people into giving their all and make sure lunch had been thought about.

  In return I would need someone who could cope with my need to control my environment, who could give me the kind of space I need to operate within, could cope with my shutdowns and my need to logic my way through the world. He’d also need to know exactly how to handle a red pen and give up any pretence at politeness. I prefer criticism to be delivered honestly, quickly and brutally. In that respect, Tim never fails to deliver.

  Do I give Tim enough? Probably not. Being with someone who lives almost exclusively in her head must be hard. Always playing second fiddle to my latest obsession cannot be easy either. The truth is that I don’t know and I’m not sure I want to ask him. In the early stages of love it’s easy to ask someone how they are feeling, to take the temperature of a relationship. Later, there’s much more at stake.

  A newspaper editor once asked me to include a line about how Tim felt about our relationship for a piece I had written about my autism. I asked him and he summarized it well.

  He said: ‘It’s as if I’ve been on the same first date for twenty years.’

  He craves the easy intimacy other people seem to have. Sometimes I watch long-established couples in restaurants and notice the easy silences – how do they cope without words? – or the way they seem to dismiss the things the other says. I can’t get how they can be so impolite to each other and seemingly not care. Occasionally they row and this sends my adrenaline spiking.

  I refuse to argue with Tim. I’m sure a psychologist would say this is unhealthy, that arguments are good, that they clear the air. But I just can’t do it. We are all, of course, the product of our genes and our environment but the idea of confrontation makes me feel as if my very existence is under threat. I have no idea whether my autism is to blame for this, or whether it’s down to the fact that my parents argued frequently, but the result is the same. I have left jobs because people were difficult. I will apologize for things that are simply not my fault. I will leave the room. I will go to bed. Anything not to have to witness or be part of emotions running riot.

  Sarah Wild believes the issue is one of anxiety about possible outcomes. She says: ‘It’s really common for Aspie girls to refuse to argue and not be able to deal with any difficulties in relationships or friendships. It can be that things are not going very well, but they can’t address them as they can’t control the outcome. They don’t know how the situation will play out because they don’t know if that friendship or relationship will still be there after an argument.

  ‘Sometimes it needs a third party to mediate that conversation. There is a real emphasis here on building friendships and relationships and maintaining, repairing and closing them. They are going to need to know how to do all these things.’

  Tim has described previous relationships as being more passionate, with screaming rows and blissful periods of making up. More of a rollercoaster than the smooth, easy ride I offer. I just don’t get how couples can scream awful things at each other and then be passionately kissing only hours later. How do they do that? Surely the bad feelings take much longer to process?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  September 2016

  I didn’t plan to have a big family, but can now see that having four children worked well for me in terms of dealing with my autism. We are a team. The children foisted a degree of sociability on me and naturally enforced routine into my life. There are bedtimes, mealtimes, waking times. Everything is done to a schedule. Having people depend on me has kept me on track. I genuinely believe it is what has stopped me from going over the edge, from falling. As if I hung on with gritted teeth and could endure anything the world threw at me. For the sake of the children. As they have grown older, and their needs fewer, I have lost my routines and have become more chaotic.

  In those hazy days when they were small, or the heady days of a houseful of teens, it seemed impossible to imagine a time when it would end. When they would no longer be there. When the phone would stop ringing at ungodly hours with someone on the other end begging to be picked up. When I would no longer hear the sound of their footsteps on the floorboards above my head.

  Today, the house is full of noise and havoc, the kitchen worktops a tangled mass of sweatshirts, headphones, open cereal boxes, books and skateboard trucks. In the sitting room, cushions from the sofas have been left on the carpet, next to discarded socks and pizza boxes from last night’s takeaway. Upstairs, toothpaste oozes from tubes without tops and loo seats are left in the up position. In the boys’ bedrooms, half-eaten packets of crisps provide nourishment for the mice and Edward Scissortongue’s brand of hip-hop provides a bassy backdrop to the beautiful, idyllic chaos we call home.

  Soon it will not be like this. A quiet will descend. An awkward, uneasy, unwelcome hush that is suffused with absence.

  The boys are leaving for university and that will be it. My child-rearing days will be over. That they are going together feels like a body blow. What will my role be? I became a mother when I was just twenty. I have never had an adult life without a house full of children. I do not know how I will cope with them gone. The sadness reaches my bones. It penetrates parts of me I didn’t know could hurt. The pain is visceral. M’s feelings wheel doesn’t have words for this.

  I have been lucky. I have experienced few losses in my life. Application of logic tells me I am not losing the boys – that they are simply moving on to the next phase of their lives. It is a good thing. Of course it is. But it hurts like nothing I’ve experienced before. I feel the pain everywhere from my heart to my limbs. It’s there when I go to sleep and, apart from those blissful feeling-free moments of waking, it is there in the background all day.

  Nostalgia comes from the Greek nostos, meaning to return home, and algia, meaning pain. It literally means homesickness, but we use it for some reason to mean looking back. That’s how I feel: homesick for a past I can never find again.

  I know I’m being ridiculous. My sense of logic tells me so. Toby will be in London and I am there a couple of times at least, pretty much every week. He’ll want me to buy him suppers at Pizza Express, probably more than he ever did when he was at home. Jack will be in Brighton, a city I visit often. We have Facebook, Messenger, Twitter, FaceTime, Skype, iMessage and – the boys’ last resort – the phone. It’s not like the days when you dropped them off at halls and didn’t hear from them for weeks.

  I know many non-autistic mothers struggle with this time, but autism seems to add another layer. The loss of control over my environment and my emotions unnerves me. My obsessions aren’t helping me in the way they normally do. None is sticking. Like the rest of the country, I have given up trying to second-guess what will happen over Brexit. Work is hectic and I am confined to my desk or kitchen table. But my job is a constant, not an obsession that takes me away from my feelings.

  I can accept change when it happens incrementally. In baby steps. I can accommodat
e new situations if they change bit by bit. The children leaving is brutal. One day they are here, filling the house with music, laughter, dirty laundry and the chemical warfare that is Lynx Africa. The next they will be gone.

  Sitting at my desk, writing, and looking at where their boxes have piled up and mingled with each other, I wonder if loss is cumulative. If each new loss layers onto the last, making it somehow more painful. I have only experienced real loss once in my life before. The kind that hits you like a juggernaut. I had a close friend I met through work. We gelled, laughed at the same things, railed against the corporate environment and just connected. We were friends for around nine years. He was tricky, emotional and difficult, but somehow it worked.

  Toby was around ten at the time and I was about to take him to the dentist. Finishing work half an hour before we were due to leave, I idly scrolled through Facebook while making a cup of tea. My friend had died. A plane crash.

  I remember each second of the next few minutes as if it is happening now. I can still feel the warm mug in my hands, still taste the scalding tea on my tongue. Staring at the screen on my computer, I saw my friend’s face on Facebook. In post after post. Then, slowly coming into focus, the letters RIP.

  As if sleepwalking, I got Toby into the car. I was in shock and all I could do was concentrate on driving the few miles to the dentist. In the back of the car, Toby was chattering away about how brave he was being, how he was off to the dentist to have ‘the worst thing done’.

  I switched on Radio 4. My friend’s death had made the news. When I had only seen it on Facebook I was able to believe it might be a mistake, that somehow wires had got crossed. Now, in the car with an overly excited ten-year-old, I had to face the fact this was really happening. I scrolled through my brain, trying to remember any time the BBC had got something like this spectacularly wrong. I couldn’t think of one.

  It simply hadn’t occurred to me how final death is. How instant a change it brings to life. I couldn’t cope with the speed with which it had happened. Looking back on this time, I can see how my autism played a big role in my being unable to accept what had happened. I can’t anticipate how I will react to a situation. I never imagined a loss would cause me to feel these painful and confusing emotions. I realize it sounds ridiculous, but I just thought I would carry on.

  Seeing the very obvious signs that the boys are moving out feels so similar to how I felt when my friend died. Shock – even though we have been moving towards this moment since the children were born. Fear – I am unable to contemplate what life will be like without them here. Grief – they are being wrenched from me by the future.

  Empty nest syndrome is real; many mothers experience it. The difference is that I don’t have people to lean on in the way other mothers do. I rarely see my extended family. I find family gatherings difficult and overwhelming. I don’t have a close circle of friends. Tim and I are in different places. He is optimistic. Happy, for them, that they will be embarking on a new adventure. And excited, for us, that we will gain some freedom and the space to find our new level.

  I find this difficult to understand. We have always been free to do whatever we want. Sure, it will take less planning now we won’t have to be arranging lifts for the children, but other than that, nothing has changed.

  I can’t understand what the point of me will be once the children leave home. It’s a thought that creeps up, takes hold and won’t leave me. If the hands-on daily mothering is taken from me, what, in evolutionary terms, is left? I have fulfilled my biological role. I have successfully raised the children to adulthood. I am done.

  Where did the years go and how was I not able to control their passing? When you are knee-deep in small children it feels as if it will never end, that you will never be able to dash to the loo alone, that there will always be warm, sticky fingers clutching on to your calves, so your walk becomes a bizarre straight-legged limp.

  Time has done this to me, the cruellest of things. It has taken the children who sat on my hip and touched my face with their pudgy fingers and has turned them into something between a boy and a man. Time has taken them from me and my heart is breaking.

  When I feel bad about something, I mainly shut down. I need to be alone, somewhere cool and preferably dark. Ideally I will go to sleep. I can’t process an event if I am talking about it or if someone is trying to help. Generally, if there is something that will make the situation OK, I will think of it myself.

  On the eve of Jack leaving, I feel so overwhelmed. I go upstairs to my bedroom with my laptop to write. I can’t take the feeling of being hemmed in by the office chatter. I need space and peace.

  I’ve been upstairs for half an hour or so when Tim comes in and sits on my bed. He tries so hard to say the right thing.

  ‘It’s not long until the Christmas holidays,’ he says. ‘So it’s really just a matter of weeks before the boys will be home again.’

  I say nothing.

  ‘It’s such an exciting time for both of them. Can’t you try to focus on that?’

  Again, I don’t reply. Of course I have focused on that. I did everything humanly possible to get them on to their courses, which wasn’t easy, as they didn’t quite have the grades they needed. I don’t know what I’m feeling. All I know is I can’t cope.

  He looks at me in the way one would at a malfunctioning washing machine. I understand this. I am rarely emotional so he has no blueprint for dealing with it.

  Feeling bad for both of us I say, ‘Let’s stop this now before it becomes a futile game of you trying to make me feel better and me pretending you have.’

  As he walks out the door, I realize this probably wasn’t a very nice thing to say.

  Control of my environment is incredibly important to me, but I am careful not to try to control those around me, to let them do what they want to do and be what they want to be. I fear nothing more than someone taking control of my life and would hate to do it to someone else.

  Sarah Wild believes Aspie girls are at risk of being taken advantage of, but also that there is the potential for them, in turn, to take advantage of others. She told me: ‘Not willingly or knowingly, but quite often girls I come across need a high level of control over their lives and that can come into their interactions with their friends, family and boyfriends. Everyone ends up doing it the way they need it to be done. They can end up with a relationship where they are really directing the agenda and taking a high level of control over the other person. That’s OK as long as everyone is happy with it. It can be difficult if the partner is thinking, If I don’t do it this way she’s going to have a really adverse reaction. That can put a lot of pressure on the relationship.’

  I do this by living quite separately from everyone else in my life and I can see this wouldn’t be an ideal situation for others. I need my own bedroom and my own bathroom, something many people find strange and wrong.

  I just don’t think it’s natural for two humans to sleep together. Surely we need space and calm to be able to recuperate and get the proper restful sleep we need? I’m sure there are people who can sleep curled romantically around each other, but it seems to me everyone else is making a pretty big compromise.

  Just as is the case with neurotypical people, many autistic people want to marry and have a family and lots of us do this entirely successfully. Relationships are hard work, regardless of our neurological make-up, but autism brings both benefits and challenges into a partnership. Autistic people won’t play games. They’ll tell it how it is and can be fiercely loyal to a fault.

  The day we take Jack to Brighton is a sunny Tuesday morning. It is early September. Tim and Jack argued about how to pack the car. A predictable clash of wills.

  ‘I don’t think we should put my vinyl in the boot,’ Jack says.

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ Tim replies through gritted teeth, anticipating the possibility of having to unpack the entire boot, which has been filled with Tetris-like accuracy.

  Despite getting off
to a tetchy start, the journey goes smoothly. ‘We’ve made good time,’ Tim says. It is a dad remark he feels compelled to make every time we leave Norfolk.

  I’ve seen photographs of Jack’s house online, but the reality is better. A tall Regency building a short walk from the seafront, it has the look of a wedding cake. His room is the smallest in the house and we want to make it nice for him. We’ve known all his housemates since they were small. They grew up together. In many ways they are creating in Brighton their lives as they were in Norfolk. By moving together en masse, they have taken their childhoods with them.

  We go to Tesco and buy new bed linen, towels, cups, plates. Everything Jack will need to survive on his own. Later, Mary arrives with her parents. Even though she and Jack have been dating for more than a year, we have met only to have quick chats when we dropped the children off at each other’s houses. Now here we are, watching our babies move in together.

  We take Jack to a sprawling second-hand furniture shop to find a table to put his record player on. Inside the cavernous, higgledy-piggledy warehouse Jack and I see the most beautiful bookshelf. It’s painted in my favourite colour, a deep grey. Jack and I have always shared a love of books. We often pass books on to each other. He has taken too many to Brighton and stacks of them are piled by his bed.

  ‘Let me buy it for you,’ I say. I want to make his house as much like home as possible.

  He agrees and we have to fit it into the car. It turns out three people and a large bookcase won’t fit into a VW Golf, so I offer to stay while they drop it off back at the house. The warehouse is next to a park with a small children’s paddling pool. I sit on a bench in glorious September sunshine and watch young mothers looking over their toddlers as they run and splash, sending balls of liquid light into the air.