Changes – Weds 13th Jan 2016
By Jeannette | January 13, 2016
Changes aren’t easy to accept in an autistic household. Routines are needed, if not craved to ensure settled children.
But some changes can’t necessarily be factored into our day, changes that are forced upon us. Like those this week.
Usually D and I walk to school (and home) through the “deep, dark woods”. It’s a bridleway near us that takes us from our road to opposite D’s school. There’s always birds happily chirping and a lake to walk past, which is ever-increasing with rainfall and sometimes has a few ducks quacking away.
Unfortunately it’s virtually (it is) impassable due to recent rain and, at the end, the pavements opposite D’s school are being widened, which means barriers, machinery and diversions.
So, we’re using a longer route, a route that D really doesn’t like, going past a primary school from which people stream twice a day just as we’re going past. Her anxieties around strangers means she’ll grip my arms tightly as we pass and, as she told me, she doesn’t like going that way because “people give me (her) odd looks”.
Sometimes changes can be *ahem* my fault. I was about one minute late yesterday and she was already downstairs in reception, glowering and then looking away to let me know she was NOT happy.
When something like this happens, D doesn’t stand in the same place and tells me. She’ll bolt to a quieter place within school (tricky as everyone is on their way home) and then sit down, sit down and eventually tell me she’s angry because I’m late, because she wants to go home… but then her bolt and then refusal to say what’s wrong means that we leave even later.
As her head teacher said to me today, it’s all about control, about D feeling that she’s “in charge, in her own world”.
Which is what we all want, aside from those pesky changes, eh?
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