Reflecting and looking ahead plus A Poem For Matthew Jnr #ThisIsAutism

I realised today that we’ll have been in our home 10 years tomorrow. A lot has happened in the last 10 years.

I mentioned here what a race it was to move in before D arrived, my ever-growing belly was waiting for no-one!

D was born in our bedroom six weeks after we moved, T was a toddling everywhere 18-month old and the first year or so after D’s arrival was a bit of a sleep-deprived blur. Having two children 18 months apart has meant that neither of them could remember a time when the other wasn’t around, we used to call them “The Pack” as, once D could walk, they’d follow me everywhere.

Our house looks quite different cosmetically from the one we moved into. It had quite rotten wooden doors and windows, which were replaced with UPVC white ones. Everywhere (and I mean everywhere) had very bright orange paint, some rooms were orange and yellow but it was predominantly orange. Nothing wrong with orange but it was a bit overwhelming.

The front garden was a mass of spiky bramble bushes and the back had a raised neglected herb garden and weeds, plenty of them. In time, the back garden has seen plenty of garden toys, been bark-chipped, then back to grass, had 3 chickens in a playhouse and fun, lots of fun. The front has been fenced and there’s lots of butterfly and bee friendly plants. In the left of the picture below is a tree we brought from our old house and we all used to run around it humming the Benny Hill theme tune, chasing each other. Something T and D still enjoy doing!

Of course, the last ten years have also
seen autism diagnoses for D (at age 4.5) and T (at age 10, but we “knew” for ages before that, so it wasn’t a surprise, more of a relief that he would (hopefully) be able to access support if required).

Looking back made me wonder about the next ten years, both T and D will be close to finishing their education by then. Something I can envisage T “coping” with, with support, I’m not so sure about D. I cannot imagine her sustaining a relationship or an independent life. I hope that Society has changed a bit by then, to become more accepting of invisible disabilities.

Whatever happens, we will ensure that they have their “base”, our home. The one D was born in, the only one T remembers.

This Is Autism

I still have a few spaces left for nightly guest posts on autism-related topics, please email me at autismmumma at aol dot com if you’d like to feature.

Tonight’s guest post comes from @YoungDadddy, someone I’ve only recently connected with on twitter. He has written a poem for his son, Matthew Junior, which encompasses the hopes and feelings that I can certainly empathise with.

For My Little Man:

He loves his stuffed doggy for comfort and always runs to his big sister who is a year older, those are the two things that can calm him down easiest, he loves his big sister.”

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