I remember vividly the day my husband and I came to the realization that our son wasn't like other children. On our way to LAX airport in Los Angeles where my husband was to depart back to London, we were having one of our by now regular conversations about our son, and this time, we were both in tears, exhausted from trying to tie all the puzzle pieces that make up our child together, for life to make sense.
A few days before I had yelled at my Mother, who dared to suggest that our lovely boy might be bipolar, as my Father had been. Our son was 6 years old.
But now, in the car, on this beautiful sunny California day, my husband and I were crying.
Because what if she was right....?
We had read all we could about disorders and diagnosis that might fit our son.
Aspergers/Autistic Spectrum disorder, ADHD, Depression, Anxiety, you name it.
Nothing quite seemed to fit.
But bipolar.....
7 years before, we had gotten pregnant after our honeymoon, straight away, which we considered very very lucky, knowing the enormous difficulty many couples face in trying to get pregnant.
Before getting pregnant, having had terrible hay fever since my teens, I had managed to rid myself of my allergies with homeopathic treatment, as I was adamant I wanted a clean body with no chemicals harming my growing child. We both stuck to an organic diet and I had no chemicals in my house.
This baby, was going to get the Rolls Royce of healthy Mommy bodies!
Pregnancy was a breeze, if such a pregnancy exists, and when he was breech a month before birth, defying obstetrician's expectations, he was turned using acupuncture.
My birthing pool was ready, herbal teas, homeopathy and candles had been bought.
Now, we just had to wait.
12 days after my due date, our longed for child still wasn't here.
I had agreed with my medical team at the hospital, that if he didn't arrive by the Monday two days later, I would go in for monitoring, and agree to an induction if he seemed distressed.
That night, I had a stern talk with my son, and told him, if he didn't come the next day, that his birth wouldn't be as nice as it would be at home, and to please hurry, because we wanted to meet him.
He listened.
In the night, my contractions started, and by 10 the next morning, he was born in our birthing pool in our sitting room, surrounded by the autumn glow with candles on the fireplace, jazz on our record player, our little cat purring on our sofa, and my midwives high on all the tea my husband had poured them throughout the morning (yes, it really was that nice).
The moment our wrinkly, long and slim little boy looked straight up at us with his inquisitive blue eyes as I sang the same lullaby I had sung for him every night whilst pregnant, was the most magical, and happiest moment we had both ever experienced.
His baby days was as baby days are. A dizzy mixture of dreamlike bliss and utter despair, sleepless nights, sore nipples, breast milk shooting across the good people of Starbucks as my boy was curious to look at everybody, walks in the park with my boy in a sling, struggles to do grocery shopping with a baby buggy and a basket, and well meaning people waking up my baby to have a look at him when he was clearly asleep!
Our boy grew, and we couldn't have loved him more, or thought he was any more wonderful than he was. Not at any point in those first few years did we or anyone in our family think he might have difficulty with certain aspects of life.
He was our loving, kind, cuddly, funny and imaginative son, and he was our entire life.
We discovered early his incredible ability to draw, something he's still very passionate about, and his obsession of Thomas the Tank Engine never seemed to us anything less than normal.
Young children in general tend to lock into one character, tv show, sport or singers.
When he played with his trains, he would reenact stories he had seen on the tv show or read in the books. He wasn't interested in driving the trains unless it had to do with the story, and I always had to build the track. He couldn't care less about my by now amazing engineering skills. I became an expert in making every piece fit, with bridges and turntables, farms and stations.
Together we sang all the songs from Thomas that he knew by heart, and life felt pretty good.
Our alarm bells didn't ring when he would get extremely upset if he got the wrong train for his birthday or Christmas, or, as what happened to my Mother once; while taking him to visit me at work, the train that arrived on the platform was red, and he refused to get on it, because he was expecting a blue one, like Gordon.
She eventually convinced him that Gordon had gotten sick, and so the Fat Controller (Mr. Toppamhat) had sent James instead, and so he got on the train, reluctantly.
Our son in fact, seemed nothing less than radiant and absolutely fine until he started full time at our local school nursery (kindergarten).
At first, he was very excited and happy to go to Rainbow nursery. Who wouldn't be with a name like that?
And all the women working there were warm, engaging and lovely, and the nursery itself was brilliant, with a lovely outdoor space, making tables, musical instruments, a reading corner, and regular themed weeks with space ships, bugs and celebrations of different countries and cultures. Perfect, we thought.
But it wasn't perfect, not for our Son.
After a while, although he had many close friends and many fun days, he started to say he didn't want to go, that he didn't like some of the children, and that he hated it.
As a 5 year old, we thought most of his tantrums were fairly normal, although he had never had many tantrums at age 2 or 3, which is when you tend to expect them.
But when he started to kick and hit me when I took him to and from nursery, it wasn't so easy to blame it on normal tantrums. However, as parents do, we made excuses. We hoped and believed it was a phase, and that it would pass, that it was hormonal, he was a boy after all. Maybe his testosterones were kicking in?
He ran away from nursery one day, just as I was on my way to pick him up. The staff at the nursery were mortified of course! When I asked him why he had run off like that, he said "I wanted to go home Mommy".
My alarm bells were still not ringing loudly enough for me to hear them.
He started in reception (preschool) the following year at the same school as his nursery was.
The new headmistress had decided not to mix up the classes, unlike her predecessor, but to make sure the kids stayed in the same class.
Our sons class was already showing strains between the children, and some of the relationships were very destructive, and they still are to this day.
It didn't help that they had a newly qualified teacher, who appeared to dislike little boys, and who ran a very strict and unfeeling classroom.
Our son hated it. Hated it with a passion.
By this point, he had moved away from lovely Thomas the Tank Engine, and on to Ben 10, the American ten year old who discovers an alien watch (Omnitrix) that has the ability to turn him into 10 different aliens. He was obsessed about Ben 10. He knew all the stories, all the abilities of the different Aliens, and in the end we had to cave in and get him the toy Omnitrix.
When he was told he couldn't bring it to school with him, he would get horribly upset and angry. Sometimes he might have a crying tantrum, and on very bad days, he might throw things at me, or break something deliberately.
If you've never had your child, who you believe to be lovely and kind, and who you love more than life itself hurl hard objects at you, I can tell you, it's extremely distressing, and even frightening.
To give you an analogy of what it looks like, when your child goes from 0-100 in a split second, it looks like the physical change that happens to Gollum in the Lord of the Rings, when he goes from lovely and sweet, to very frightening upon putting on the ring. His entire physicality is altered.
And all you can say to yourself is, 'he doesn't know what he's doing, he is no longer in control over his actions'. It's very very hard, and it breaks your heart piece by piece every single day.
I should also explain that by this point, our lovely daughter was born. We had promised our son a Batman costume upon her arrival, and sure enough, the first words he spoke to her when he saw her was wishing her welcome, and "where's my Batman suit?"
So now, not only did I have to protect myself from being hurt or my son causing himself harm, I had to protect our baby too.
School didn't listen to our concerns, that our son seemed to be bouncing between moods from high to low. None of it made any sense to us. Our son had never been violent, and he wasn't violent at school. It seemed to us that he managed to keep it all together for only so long, and then all of his stress, heartache and worry would all be unleashed at home, mostly on me, and in a form that just wasn't how our son truly was.
Some days, he would have so much energy, I didn't know what to do with him, he was like a bouncing ball that seemed to bounce forever, high as a kite, and on other days, he was clearly depressed. A heap of bodily mass in the corner of our sofa or our room, like a bear. Our blond, blue eyed boy, with dark and heavy bags under his eyes from deep sadness he couldn't explain, and the tiredness from not being able to sleep at night because he was so worried about going to school in the morning. Our boy, who we didn't know how to help.
It wasn't all doom and gloom mind you.
Some days were what I call "normal", if there is such a thing. You know, just everyday life, with no great events of any kind, just what it is. In some ways, the best kind.
We did experience some very funny interactions with people when my son insisted on wearing a full superhero costume to the grocery store and other public places, and a lot of staring from strangers who weren't used to seeing the Flash at full speed, or Batman walking down the street like this was the most natural thing in the world.
I did a lot of modifying costumes (I am useless at sowing) so they could be "accurate", painting T-shirts and green fleeces so my kid could look exactly like Ben 10 (his blond hair didn't seem to be an issue). It never occurred to me that other Moms didn't do this for their kids. I just thought he was very keen on details, as he noticed things I wouldn't even have thought about, and I thought to myself that this was probably perfectly normal.
You don't think though do you as a first time parent, knowing how many "weird" people that seem to function in society just fine, that your kid might not be?
I don't like the concept of "normal" anyway, as I believe the world needs creative thinkers and diversity in order to move forward.
But there is a big difference between being creative and innovative, and freaking out and throwing a chair because you're not allowed to bring your Ben 10 Omnitrix to school.
The beginning of year 1 at school went much the same. By now, our daughter was walking, and had a strong mind of her own, and I had the huge challenge of holding my willful 1 year old in one hand, and dragging my screaming 6 year old son to school in my other, whilst being stared at by concerned parents who probably thought I was a terrible Mother. Fun!
I did a lot of annoying my children by singing "Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive and Eli-min-ate all the negative, latch on to the aff-irmi-tive but don't mess with mister In-Between", which drove them crazy, but it helped me to keep my sanity, which at times, really felt like it wasn't going to hold.
After Christmas, my kids, my Mom and I moved to sunny California for 3 months for my work, while my husband kept the fort at home.
I saw this as a huge adventure for the kids, and although my husband and I were both concerned that it would be hard, especially on our son, we thought that the American positive outlook on life might be just what he needed, after the trauma of school uniforms and the what we perceived to be the strictness and rigidness of the British educational system.
It didn't quite work out like that.
His new teacher in LA, at a very nice school where many Hollywood stars sent their children, clearly had no idea how to deal with this very passionate, opinionated and creative child in her classroom.
I had no idea about the pressures some children are under in the States at school in order to
"succeed". They had a ton of homework every single day, and for our son, who does not have the longest attention span in the world unless he loves what he's working on, it was torture.
Some days, it took an hour and a half of persuasion, bribery, coaxing, encouragement, threats of consequences of removing a favorite toy, and in the end, huge arguments (things might get thrown by my son), to get him to finish his work. My Mother was the one who lucked out on having to do this on many of our days there, as I was working.
The lack of a school uniform wasn't as great as we'd hoped either, as now, his obsession with superheroes, went into daily battles over what was acceptable clothes at school.
"No, you cannot go dressed as Superman with a cape". "Why not?"
"Because they can't allow superheroes to come to school, it would distract all the other children". "But I can save everyone at school Mom! If there's a fire, I can carry people to safety!" ....and so on and so forth. He always had a "logical" argument.
His new teacher was understandably not so open to him wearing his Ben 10 watch to school, because suddenly, all the boys at school also wanted to wear one, and none of them were paying attention in her lessons.
Friendships were equally difficult since all the parents knew we were only staying for a few months, they probably weren't too keen on their children bonding too closely with a child who wasn't sticking around for very long.
With my husband in London, me working a lot, and my Mother taking care of the kids, our son especially found life very difficult.
As he did in England, his moods were all over the place only now it was if possible, worse!
Elated one minute, utter despair or anger the next. He was clearly under an enormous amount of stress, and he couldn't handle it.
So my Mom, suggested very delicately, that perhaps, our boy had pediatric bipolar, and I exploded! How dare she suggest that just because the school system was stupid and didn't know how to deal with a kid that just didn't like too many limitations and restrictions put on him, that he had a mental health disorder? How dare she? HOW DARE SHE!
Silence.....
My husband and I, have no more words in the car on our way to the airport. Our hands are clinging on to each other for dear life, for if we let go, we might fall into the abyss.
We have cried ourselves empty, and the road to the airport suddenly feels as though we're in a vacuum, in a Matrix.
Because we know that if my Mother is right, our beautiful, innocent little boy, has a very hard road in front of him. A road with more questions than answers.
Our lovely boy, with his 'many colored days '.
Just as rain can only make color when the sun shines through it, so is our son.
Our Rainbow child.
http://www.amazon.com/Many-Colored-Days-Dr-Seuss/dp/067989344X
