Odd Girl Out

by Laura James

  Tim goes to collect Jack a week or so later. He slips back into life here as if he has never left, splitting his time between home and Mary’s house, demanding lifts at random times and emptying the fridge in record time. Tatti is away travelling.

  Lucie is the last to arrive. It is always only when Lucie arrives that it really feels like Christmas. Tim and the boys decked the tree while I supervised from the sofa, doing my best to dissuade Jack and Toby from anything too garish. I fail. This year the tree is topped with the head of a toy monkey, the poor specimen decapitated with a kitchen knife. With the lights switched on, the sitting room is filled with festive spirit. But Lucie brings an ingredient missing in the rest of us – childlike excitement and boundless enthusiasm, together with a determination not to allow our traditional Christmas routines to deviate in any way.

  ‘What time are we getting up tomorrow?’ she asks. It is a question she has asked every year since she was first able to form the words. It’s late on Christmas Eve and she, the boys and I are sitting around the kitchen table. Toby’s feet are up and he is rocking on his chair.

  My children look alike. They have the same mousey hair, although Lucie dyes hers blonde. They all have big blue eyes, pale skin and cheeks pink from the warmth of the kitchen. They are mine. Being adopted means growing up resembling no one, so even now I revel in the novelty of these people who are undeniably of me.

  We’ve just finished supper, which is the same as it is every year. Bang Bang chicken, tempura prawns, various salads and pizza for Toby. It is one of our immutable traditions. I love that for three days – from today until Boxing Day – I know exactly what will happen and when. I know what we will eat, the order the presents will be opened in (by age, youngest first), what we will watch on TV and exactly how everyone will behave. It’s perfect, but I do see the irony in the fact that the day of the year on which most people want to be surprised is the day I can count on encountering nothing I don’t expect.

  ‘Ten-thirty?’ Jack ventures, wandering into the pantry to get a beer.

  ‘No!’ Lucie says, mockingly admonishing his ridiculous suggestion. ‘I can’t wait that long.’

  ‘Nine-thirty – and that’s my final offer,’ Toby insists, toying with a leftover slice of pizza.

  Lucie grumbles a bit, but eventually agrees.

  Tim comes into the kitchen. ‘We’re getting up at nine-thirty,’ I tell him. ‘We’ve had the traditional debate, but it’s been agreed.’ I give him what I hope is a look that tells him he should now leave it there.

  ‘Can’t we make it ten? Far more civilized,’ he says. The children groan, knowing he is playing a game he plays every year. He ruffles Lucie’s hair and says, ‘OK, Goosey,’ to reassure her that he is on board with the plan. Huxley gets jealous and stretches up until his paws are on the kitchen table and his nose is inches from a plate of chicken.

  We move to the sitting room. The fire is roaring in the grate and for once the heating is working too. The room is bathed in warmth and the glimmering light from the tree. It’s lovely having them all here, sprawled on sofas, eating their way through a giant tub of Heroes.

  This house was made for Christmas. It was around this time of year when we first saw it. Between Christmas and New Year, when real life feels like a dream and the days merge in a haze of dog walks in the cold, eating, and watching endless classic films. The family that lived here then had children slightly older than ours, which allowed me to see what it would be like for mine to grow up here. They were all sitting around the kitchen table when we arrived at around 6 p.m. Tim and I were alone.

  As soon as I saw the house I knew I wanted to live here. As I stood in the doorway, ostensibly taking in the kitchen, I watched the easy scene playing out and experienced a feeling I found difficult to name. I get it whenever I’m given a glimpse into a stranger’s life. It’s sort of a cross between embarrassment and melancholy. Within it there is a hunger too. As if I want to be able to take something from the scene and make it my own. I guess it is my long-held desire to know what it is like to feel normal, to experience life in the way other people do. Proper people.

  I could see us living here. Tim could not.

  ‘It’s too big. We’d never fill it,’ he said as we looked around its rooms, ranging from the Georgian period at the front to much older at the back.

  We did fill the house. Rather too easily. We grew into it and our lives expanded to light up the dark corners and rooms we once struggled to find a purpose for.

  Everything comes full circle. Now, with the boys having left home, it is too big again. Tim and I rattle in its emptiness. The space, though, has given me time to parent myself. I have spent the extra time putting into place strategies that have made life work more easily. Like water allowed to flow, I have found my level.

  Lucie, Jack and Toby are ordered to go to bed (another Christmas Eve tradition) and they trudge off like giant children, complaining jokingly that it’s just not fair.

  Tim and I organize their stockings, filling them with colouring pencils, stickers, magnets, tangerines, chocolate coins and playful books.

  ‘I can’t believe we’ve been doing this for twenty years,’ I say, adding a copy of the Ladybird book, How it Works: The Cat, to Toby’s bulging stocking.

  ‘It doesn’t seem possible.’ Tim gets up to pick up a bauble that has dropped from the tree.

  ‘Do you ever wish you could turn back the clock to when they were all small?’

  ‘God, no! It was exhausting.’

  It was, of course. But it was also magical.

  ‘We’ve done a good job with them,’ Tim adds. ‘Despite everything, they’ve grown into such great people. We’ve made mistakes – of course we have – but we are close, they talk to us about anything, and they each have unique characters and unique skills. They’re also very funny.’

  I add the final novelty plasters, cocktail shakers and book lights to the stockings and curl up on the sofa next to Tim. A recording of It’s a Wonderful Life is playing on the TV with the volume down.

  I, too, have grown up in recent months. I still feel stuck in my late teens – always a girl, never a woman – but I have learned to deal with the world more effectively.

  I built myself a sensory kit, something M had suggested. I bought a soft, furry coat and noise-cancelling headphones. I made sure I had sunglasses packed in my bag, even in winter. I used some old gift vouchers to buy a cashmere scarf and made sure I had a block of my favourite scent in my bag at all times. It has made going out so much easier. If any of my senses ever feel assaulted, there is something I can use to negate the effects.

  I have allowed myself to feel sad. Slowly I began to accept that, while I don’t have the life I had planned and probably never will, I have the life that suits me. I began to count my blessings and started to note down the things I was grateful for. My family. My job. Living somewhere beautiful. My few, but important, friends. My books. My dogs. The autistic community. Audiobooks. Each time something I am grateful for pops into my head I jot it down.

  I have learned to think small. I can’t control the whole world. The political landscape is not something I can change. All I can do is make tiny, incremental differences where I can. I respond to the parents of autistic children when they get in touch to ask for advice. I write copy for Cata’s charity for refugees. I volunteer my time for organizations doing work I believe in. It’s manageable. It keeps me out of trouble. It helps me meet new people.

  I am working hard to cope with areas of my life I find challenging. I have been breaking difficult things up into bite-size chunks, so I don’t either ignore them as being too hard or become overwhelmed trying to deal with them all at once.

  I’ve begun to experiment with clothes. I still wear mainly muted colours and I will never be able to cope with patterns, but I have bought some jumper dresses and even a pale blue coat. I like how it feels to dress differently. It lifts my mood. I still have a host of rules for my clothes: they need to b
e made of natural fibres; they need to be comfortable; and I need time to accommodate them into my life, allowing them to hang in my wardrobe for a couple of weeks before I can think about wearing them. But it’s a start and I think if Tim were to buy me something as a surprise now my reaction would be less visceral.

  My planner has become my handbook for life. Every Sunday I sit down and put in everything I know will happen for the week. I plan our weekly meals and we shop.

  In my yellow book I list the things most people don’t even have to think of. I schedule baths, food, and breaks to go outside. I write down calls I would like to make or messages I would like to send. I limit my time online and mainly look at things that are nurturing. I use the block button on Twitter and don’t allow myself to get drawn into conversations with people whose views I will always find abhorrent.

  I am being kind to myself.

  I can identify so many more emotions on the feelings wheel now. Sometimes they hurt and are unpleasant, but sometimes they are lovely. I still struggle to feel anger. M once told me that unexpressed anger sometimes manifests as anxiety, so I am working on that too.

  Tim and I have kept to our do more things together plan, meaning I’ve spent a lot of time outdoors and he has listened to a lot of audiobooks. I feel better for time spent outside. Often it’s hard to motivate myself, but I’ve been on more dog walks. I watched kingfishers from a hide as Tim told me how the young only stay in the nest for around twenty-five days and that the parents only feed them for another four after that. Imagine keeping one’s babies close for less than a month.

  Later, back at home in the office, Tim uploaded pictures from the day and showed me a video of kingfishers going backwards and forwards to their nest. Over and over again. Each hatchling can eat up to eighteen tiny fish a day. The parents spend all their time collecting fish and feeding their young. It’s relentless. In some ways it’s not that dissimilar for us. We work to pay our bills and feed our young, often going backwards and forwards doing the same thing again and again.

  Since the boys left, I have missed those daily routines, but the kingfishers reminded me how tiring it could be. I have instead focused my energies on teaching myself new skills. As M suggested I should, I have looked for greater support. I began to say yes to invitations. I went to the American Embassy on the night of the US election and, while I was destabilized by the result, I had prepared myself this time.

  We went to the party at Cata’s. She and Dave are parents to one of Jack’s oldest friends and it was lovely to see all the children so grown up. The party was loud and chaotic, with standing room only in the kitchen and sitting room. I stationed myself by the door, so I was able to see my exit route to the outside world. Lucie perched on the arm of a sofa, while Jack disappeared upstairs with his friends and Tim chatted to a man I didn’t know. After around three hours I was exhausted and ready to go home, but I had seen how doing a party on my own terms could actually be fun.

  It made me feel Christmassy, as does the sound of the children upstairs. Although they are meant to be sleeping, they are actually having a loud conversation on the landing. With the oldest twenty-six and the youngest nineteen, I can’t really expect them to be tucked up with the lights out before midnight on Christmas Eve.

  ‘I’ll stay up and put their stockings by their beds once they’re all asleep,’ Tim says, flicking through film options on the TV.

  ‘You could be up for hours. I don’t think they’ll be sleeping anytime soon,’ I reply. ‘Why don’t I do it first thing in the morning, when I get up to deal with the goose?’

  I go into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. When I get back, Tim is half asleep on the sofa. I perch on the arm. In getting to know myself I have got to know Tim better. Accepting my quirks and frailties makes it easier to accept his. He has become more flexible too. He doesn’t understand why I won’t use green lighters or why my sandwiches need to be cut in a certain way, but he just accepts that it is how it is. I have given up trying to be perfect and, in doing so, have given up trying to make our relationship that way.

  Tim raised early the question of what we would be doing on New Year’s Eve. It has always been a low point of the year for me. It is the night I feel I have most failed. By not being able to go to big parties. By not having friends to hang out with. Tim’s suggestion was that we find something nice to do during the day rather than sitting at home getting ever more miserable. We agreed that we will go for a lovely lunch in London before seeing the matinee performance of Lazarus, the musical by David Bowie and Enda Walsh.

  It’s a good compromise and, for once, I am looking forward to the end of what has been a trying and revelatory year. We feel like a team, as if we’ve been through something big and have survived.

  I look at my watch. It’s 11 p.m.

  ‘I’m not sure we’ve ever been this organized so early before,’ I say to Tim.

  He opens his eyes and looks at me. ‘It helps that we haven’t had to read them endless bedtime stories.’

  ‘Don’t,’ I say. ‘I miss it so much.’

  I look over to the bookshelf in the corner, where I have kept some of their childhood books. The thin yellow spine of Margery Williams’s The Velveteen Rabbit catches my eye. Toby loved it best. He would read it clutching his favourite toy, itself a stuffed rabbit called Diddut.

  ‘I don’t miss looking for Diddut at bedtime,’ I say as I walk over to the bookshelf. ‘Do you remember how upset Toby used to get when we couldn’t find him?’

  I take down the book and begin to read aloud.

  ‘“What is real?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

  “Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse – “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become real.”

  “Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

  “Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse – for he was always truthful. “When you are real, you don’t mind being hurt . . . It doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept . . .”’

  Tim smiles at me, his expression soft in the lights from the tree.

  ‘Well, you certainly need to be carefully kept,’ he says. ‘Do you feel more real now?’

  In many ways I do. It’s as if I have come full circle. Initially, I thought my diagnosis was the end of the story, that once I was given that knowledge it would be my happy-ever-after moment. I would know myself and my problems would magically disappear.

  What came after was almost the opposite.

  ‘I think I do,’ I say, yawning and rubbing my eyes. ‘I’ve sort of learned to know myself.’

  ‘In the end, isn’t that what all of us are really looking for?’ Tim asks. ‘A sense of understanding of who we are and how we got here.’

  I suppose it is.

  There’s a section on the feelings wheel I haven’t touched. It has words like relaxed, open, warm and safe. While I don’t imagine I will ever feel totally relaxed, completely open or even perhaps safe, I do now feel understood, accepted and slightly more secure.

  I take my favourite pink pencil and colour in loved.

  Acknowledgements

  A huge and heartfelt thank you to everyone who helped make this book possible. To my psychiatrist, Somayya Kajee, who really did change my life, and to M for helping me make sense of it.

  To my agent, Rosemary Scoular at United Agents, for embracing the idea with such enthusiasm and making it happen. To Alison Lewis at the Zoe Pagnamenta Agency for her support, direction and encouragement.

  The right editor is so important and the minute I met Carole Tonkinson I knew she was the perfect person to make my book a reality. The Bluebird team have been amazing,
so thank you to Laura Carr, Nicole Foster, Rachel Cross and Hockley Spare for all their help in getting the words just so. To James Annal, Wilf Dickie and Ena Matagic for making it look so beautiful and to Jodie Mullish and Jessica Farrugia for letting everyone know about it so brilliantly.

  Thank you to all the autism experts who contributed their knowledge, time and wisdom. Also to Louisa Mullan at the National Autistic Society for being brilliantly helpful. Huge thanks, too, must go to all the autistic women who have shared their stories with me and helped me realize that different is most definitely not less.

  To my amazing children for being utterly gorgeous and for allowing me to write about them.

  To Lucie, Eileen Slattery and Mary Clark, who read my manuscript while it was still a work in progress and offered such valuable input.

  Finally, I’d like to thank Tim. Not only for sticking with me when things have been tough, but also for all his help in editing and shaping the story of our life.

  ODD GIRL OUT

  Laura James is an author and journalist and the owner of a communications agency. Her writing has appeared in many national and international newspapers and magazines. When not frantically fighting deadlines, she can generally be found hiding under a duvet with a stack of good books and lots of chocolate. She is the mother of four adult children and lives with her husband and their dogs and cat in north Norfolk. Since her diagnosis she has campaigned for autism awareness and acceptance.

  First published 2017 by Bluebird

  This electronic edition published 2017 by Bluebird

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR