Odd Girl Out

by Laura James

  I take out M’s feelings wheel and try to identify my emotions. My eyes settle on hopeless. I think I feel this. At least I feel no hope. Something is coming to an end and endings hurt. Hurt is also there. This does hurt in the most visceral of ways. I don’t feel betrayed or hostile or irritated. I do feel devastated.

  I believed nothing could hurt more than Jack leaving home, but then we dropped off Toby at his university halls. The building and his room were better than I had expected and his flatmates looked like ordinary teenagers, not the hostile strangers I had imagined on the long drive down to London. One was sitting on a step loudly explaining to anyone passing how he had consumed an entire bottle of Jack Daniel’s and wasn’t sure he was feeling very well at all. A couple of girls sat either side of him offering sympathy, advice and a large take-out coffee.

  The move revealed quite how unlike other families we are. The others seemed to arrive with a couple of suitcases and a sunny disposition. The dads made dad jokes and the mothers carried boxes of kitchen essentials. We arrived with enough computer equipment to fit out NASA mission control. With Lucie, who had decided to join in with the move, we made a dozen trips from the car to Toby’s new room before we had fully unloaded.

  We passed other families on our trips. We watched as two guitars and an amp went in. One student, who had clearly arrived earlier in the day, had a collection of plants that wouldn’t have been out of place in Kew Gardens. They are in boxes outside her room. They look beautiful and fragile in this somewhat brutalist building. I wonder if they will survive the term. I feel sad for them and for me.

  The children (for that is how they look to me) are buzzing with energy and uncertainty. Parents are making practical suggestions, their charges rolling their eyes and wishing their mothers spoke a little more quietly or their fathers didn’t laugh quite so heartily.

  We shared rueful smiles with other families as Lucie, Tim, Toby and I politely fought to be the one in control of operations. No one won. The entire move was carried out with gritted teeth and forced politeness.

  Once everything is in, we go to Pizza Express in Greenwich for an early supper. Toby orders the same menu items he has since he was three years old. Garlic bread with cheese and a plain margherita pizza with no dried herbs. I feel a pain rising in my throat. The one that signals tears might come.

  I go outside for a cigarette and look at a female Aspie group on Facebook. I joined a while ago, but have rarely posted. I once heard Bryony Gordon speak about her book Mad Girl. She talked about the importance of finding our we. Here on Facebook, I have my we – a group of women from all over the UK who think and feel as I do. We are of different ages and backgrounds and have a world of different experiences, but we inherently understand each other. It feels as if it could be a safe place. Perhaps here there is nothing I can say that won’t be understood. I don’t post anything, but resolve to get more involved once I am home.

  After supper, standing outside Toby’s halls, he hugs me awkwardly. He hates hugging. I don’t love it, but after years of working in the media where you can be ambushed by a hug from someone you met only an hour ago, I can cope. This hug, though, is different. Neither of us tenses up. Feeling him warm against me and sensing how nervous he is, I feel as if I am hugging his three-year-old self. I’m not sure I love like other people. I guess none of us really knows how anyone else actually experiences emotion, but right now I am sure I feel like every other mother dropping off a first-year student. It is strangely reassuring.

  He says goodbye to Lucie and Tim and I watch from the car as he tries and fails to open the door with his brand-new electronic key fob. I resist the urge to go and help. I watch his back until he walks through the door and I can no longer see him. Lucie leaves to catch the Tube back to her flat and Tim and I begin the long and largely silent journey back to Norfolk.

  I cry on the way home. Tim isn’t used to this. In our twenty or so years together he has seen me cry only a handful of times.

  ‘Can’t you be excited for the boys?’ he asks as we join the M25. I don’t tell him that I can’t understand how to be excited for someone else. I think it makes me sound weird and uncaring. I love them. Of course I do, and I want them to be happy. Actually, that’s not quite right. I want unhappiness to be absent from their lives. I don’t want them to feel disappointed by anything. It is as if because I brought them into the world I need to ensure they’re comfortable within it. As when you have guests to stay, I want to make the experience as nice as possible for them. I have invited my children into the world and now I need to make it as welcoming and unjarring as possible.

  I ask how he feels and he says he is ‘excited for the boys, but sad’.

  It seems amazing to me that he can distil his feelings into these two simple words. Excited and sad. Mine feel like the sort of equation you see written on a huge blackboard by Stephen Hawking. I cannot begin to unpick or unravel the complex and myriad feelings darting through me. I know one of the feelings stings like a paper cut and another feels like a dull ache. I am sure one feels like panic and another like a heavy loss. I can’t tell Tim this. I find it almost impossible to talk about my feelings, even though each day I work at identifying them. They belong to me and talking about them would somehow leave them open to being misunderstood.

  We make it home by ten-thirty, which is the time I have my bath. The familiarity of my routine soothes me slightly. I cry a little in the bath, but it feels alien to me and I feel a little self-conscious even though I am alone.

  In bed I look at Twitter and my phone flashes up a message from Toby. I’ve met some nice people and we’re playing drinking games.

  I realize that if they are playing the game called I Have Never he’s going to get pretty drunk. His life has been a sheltered one. In the hall’s kitchen he was confronted for the first time with a microwave and an induction hob. Having only ever cooked on a battered old Aga, I feel I haven’t adequately prepared him for life in the real world. I hope he finds someone nice to show him how to use these new appliances.

  I fall into bed exhausted. I realized a while ago that I use logic to try to conquer emotion. Right now, in bed, cosseted by familiarity, I am trying to hold back the tide of emotion until I feel strong enough to logic my way through. I fall asleep by eleven-thirty. I wake with a start at 4 a.m., my face wet with tears. I didn’t know it was possible to cry in one’s sleep.

  The next morning the pain is visceral and immediate. The tears come and I can’t stop them. I feel panicky and out of control. I go to get coffee and my order is slightly wrong. The coffee is too strong. Tears track down my face below my dark glasses.

  I go home and it feels so silent. There’s an absence of the low thump of bass that signals a teenager is home. I cry as I load my bed linen into the washing machine. Nothing can interrupt my Sunday routine. Later I will paint my toenails. I will have to decide whether to move to the autumn colour this weekend or wait until next. Another change is probably too much to bear, so I will stick to the summer colour even though the lawn is peppered with the orange leaves that signal a change in the seasons.

  In the office, Tim has his headphones on. He is editing music. I stalk Toby on Twitter and see that he has posted that he likes his halls. I am happy for him and hopeful it will all work out well there. Feeling two sets of conflicting emotions – relief that Toby seems happy at beginning his new life and the icy claw of grief I feel for myself – is almost impossible to bear. It is overwhelming and confusing.

  Lucie texts and tells me her friend’s sister, who has just gone into her second year at university, has had her student house burgled. No one living there had insurance. Suddenly I feel I have left my two children out there alone in a dangerous world where anything could happen. I offer Lucie advice to pass on. I tell her it’s likely the girls in the house will be insured on their parents’ home policies and they should check. I explain exactly what they should say when they complain to the letting agent who had been tardy in giving them
the code to the burglar alarm. I feel more in control. I like the practical nature of the conversation. I am once again dealing in fact. I don’t know this girl, but I know her sister and want to try to help make things OK again. All I ever want is for everything in the world to feel safe and normal and usual.

  Life, though, is messy, painful, complicated and full of ups and downs. How can I cope in a world that is so disorderly? Things are changing too quickly. It’s not just the boys going. Post-referendum, the country seems different somehow. People on social media are angrier, less tolerant.

  The boys’ departure has left me with a sense of being adrift in a changing world. I run into a girl who used to babysit for them. She is now a mother of three. Hers are still small. She has twins at prep school and another at nursery. I can see in her eyes that she cannot fully comprehend what it is like to be left behind when the children move on. Her days are still full of frantic hunts for gym kit, meaningless squabbles over whether Superman would beat a dinosaur in a fight and an endless chorus of what’s for supper? Is this envy?

  Overhead, bruise-black clouds are loitering with intent. I want to tell the person in charge up there that there has been a mistake, that I am not able or ready for this. To lose two children to the world in a fortnight is too much. Surely there is someone who can make this different?

  I don’t let the boys know I am sad. They have an idea, of course, but I shield them from how bad I am really feeling. My messages are light and breezy. They know I miss them, but they don’t know I feel as if I am spiralling fast into a pit of nothingness. They don’t know that I cannot find anything good to hang on to anymore. That there is nothing to look forward to.

  I think neurotypical women insulate themselves against this all-consuming pain through strong female friendships. They will have at least one or two people they know will be there for them whatever happens. I have only one female friend with whom I could talk about how I am feeling, but I see her rarely. Maybe once every eighteen months or so. She has just moved to Brighton, the town that has taken Jack from me. It feels like enemy territory.

  I work hard to remember the advice I have been given in therapy over the years. Lean into the pain. I try. I really do. But firstly, what does it mean? And secondly, when I try to stop fighting the pain it washes over me in waves. I would do anything to make it stop.

  My usual strategy is to distract myself, to find an obsession and work it hard. Today there are none. I flick through Twitter, looking for something to spark my interest. Nothing does. Maybe this is a different kind of pain, one which won’t respond to usual strategies.

  My friend Will messages and asks how I’m coping. I reply: I’m OK.

  Why do I find it impossible to tell the truth? Why can’t I say I am in agony, that the pain is real and physical and I want to call an ambulance? Why can’t I just tell someone how utterly bleak the world looks to me now? I wish I could explain that I feel I have no purpose anymore. The rest of my life is stretching out before me like an open road and I feel utterly lost. I have no map for this. I entered my adult life with a child on my hip and I don’t know how to function without their proximity. The smell of the boys is already fading in the house. I consider going to the supermarket and buying Lynx Africa and spraying it in the hallways, like air freshener. I miss its cloying scent catching in my throat.

  I can’t bring myself to go into their rooms. I want the doors closed. Tim wants them open. We compromise and they are ajar. I avert my gaze as I walk past. With the doors closed I could imagine them in there, living amongst a jumble of pizza boxes and knotted cables.

  I try reading about empty nest syndrome strategies. They seem trite and unhelpful. They suggest getting to know your spouse again. Are they seriously suggesting that two people can live together for twenty years and somehow forget to know each other? They also suggest taking up writing or pottery or even reinvigorating your career. This advice feels rooted in the 1950s, when mothers had no life outside the home. I have a life. It is full. The space the children have left cannot be filled by learning to basket weave.

  A small quiet voice in my head says it could be filled with friends. I ignore it. I read instead about grief. We think of grief only in terms of bereavement and it would be an insult to parents who have lost a child to suggest my pain is anything like theirs. However, I do think I am grieving the loss of a part of my life I am never going to get back. I miss a fat little hand in mine, pulling me away from what I am doing to take a look at froglets at the base of the cherry trees. I miss the wonder in a small child’s eyes.

  I have taken no time to process anything that has happened over the past few years. My illness, my autism diagnosis, the changing shape of my work life – many of those I have worked with for almost two decades have recently moved on and I miss my daily contact with them. I am struck by the Colin Murray Parkes quote we are all familiar with the Queen having used. Grief is the price we pay for love. I look it up and the full quote reads: The pain of grief is just as much a part of life as the joy of love; it is, perhaps, the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment.

  I guess this is the point. The only people I have fully committed to are my children. They have everything of me. My love for them is unconditional and pure. I try to remind myself that pain is the flipside of the good bits. It doesn’t help.

  I read C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. He writes: No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. Everything I feel lives within this one line. It explains everything. Once again I am experiencing my main autistic emotion: fear.

  My boys leaving has reawakened other losses, but worse than this it has allowed me to imagine losses I am yet to face. It is terrifying. I don’t know how to look after myself through this. I cope badly when I cannot see every answer to every question clearly laid out in front of me.

  This desire to quash pain at any cost can lead to addiction. It’s one of the reasons I barely drink. Years ago, I was worried I was drinking to stop myself feeling. It wasn’t a lot – maybe a couple of glasses of wine each evening with supper. But it made me uncomfortable. Most people would, I’m sure, simply cut down or have a few dry days or weeks. That is not my way. Instead, I took control and signed up with Alcoholics Anonymous and worked through a number of the twelve steps.

  I realized early on that I wasn’t an alcoholic and told some of those I met at AA. They said that I should keep going to meetings as long as I was getting something out of them. I quit drinking and certainly felt a lot better. That was early in 2012 and I can count on one hand the number of drinks I’ve had since then. In my handbag I still have the AA coin, celebrating that, at least once, I had actually joined something.

  In Waitrose car park, I receive a text from a friend, someone I used to work with. She reminds me that on this date last year I was interviewing celebrities live on stage in front of a huge audience. How on earth is it possible I can do that without a second thought, but find it impossible to tell anyone how I am actually feeling?

  Right now, more than anything, I wish I weren’t autistic. I wish I were like everyone else. My otherness feels like an enormous burden. I walk around the house going from room to room for no reason at all. I don’t know what I am hoping to find, maybe something to take away the void that seems to have opened up in my chest.

  I want someone to talk to so badly. I tweet in the darkness about how my nest feels empty. A woman I don’t know sends me a message. Her name is Nina. Her words are soothing, comforting. I feel myself relax into the pain. I do feel for you. I’ve been there.

  Finding My Answers – Summer 2015

  The sun is streaming through the window, causing dust to dance on the air. It sparkles. I want to reach out and grab some, in the way I caught dandelion seedpods as a child. Someone told me that if I caught one I could make a wish. I long to wish myself out of this room.

  I don’t reach out into the glistening air. I don’t waste a wish. Instead, I sit still and concentrate hard on what the woman opposite
me is saying. I struggle to take in her words. I can hear my heart beating in my ears. I feel dizzy, unanchored.

  I believed I was ready for this moment, but her words – muffled by the roaring in my ears – still have the power to shock. She is a consultant psychiatrist. She is telling me why I am the way I am. You are not broken, she says. You are not defective. You are different.

  Relief, elation and sadness overwhelm me. More often than not the mercurial nature of emotions stops me from being able to identify them. Today, though, there is an unusual clarity. For perhaps the first time, I understand how I am feeling.

  Dr Somayya Kajee, my psychiatrist, is trying hard to catch my gaze. I turn to look at her but can’t read her expression. I think it is one of concern.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asks. Her voice is quiet. A soft, pale pink sound.

  ‘How do you feel about this?’

  ‘Fine,’ is all I can manage.

  Somayya is the kind of woman I have always longed to be. She is graceful, intelligent and compassionate. She is wearing a pencil skirt, crisp, starched shirt and heels; the kind of outfit that would bring with it a level of discomfort that would make it impossible for me to think straight. I’m wearing jeans, a soft cotton T-shirt and trainers – my uniform. In winter I add a soft grey jersey.

  Winter is a million miles away. The world outside is bathed in sunshine. It’s the kind of day when one seeks out water. Swimming in the sea, lazing on the banks of a river, or sitting by a lake watching dragonflies dance. It’s an outdoors day. One filled with the kind of hopeful anticipation that a first date brings. It is not a day to be sitting inside a psychiatrist’s office.

  I look around the room. It is yellow. I feel small within the space. I am processing the news and I feel a mixture of relief, elation and overwhelming sadness. Usually I am not good at putting names to my emotions, but today I feel a strange clarity around them.

  I am relieved because – after decades of uncertainty, confusion and questions – I have the answer as to why I am the way I am. It feels good to have finally told someone the truth about why I think and feel the way I do. I have spent the past five hours honestly answering questions, rather than adopting my default defence of trying to say what I believe the person opposite me wants to hear because it makes me sound normal.