I am sitting in bed in a cabin in a caravan park, my laptop is balanced precariously on my knees and I am trying to write outside of my comfort zone. I only have picasa installed on the laptop and not being able to edit my photos how I am used to is bothering me much more than it should.
I stopped on the side of the Midlands highway just outside of Campbell town yesterday to talk to my daughter Veronica on the phone. As usual most of our conversation was about the apple of my eye, my grand daughter Amy and Aspergers.I took this photo as the trucks were roaring past my window, shaking the car and shaking me.
I am here in Launceston for the Junction 2010 Regional Arts Conference and Festival. I have been sent up here as a delegate for the Greater Green Ponds branch of Tas Regional Arts. This is an amazing opportunity for me to network and meet other artists and arts workers. My focus this weekend is the role of Arts in health and the Arts and disengaged youth.
The fact that my gorgeous girl most probably has Aspergers has made me determined to pick the brains of every Artist working with children like Amy. I am going to be very busy this weekend.
As humans we like to judge. We apply our own experiences and moral compass to situations and make snap judgements.
Sometimes I read a post written by my daughter and it breaks my heart because the pain in her words is the only clue that I have to the pain in her heart.
Other times I will read a post written by Veronica and I know that it was written purely to get the words out of her head, to give a tiny glimpse into how difficult parts of her life are.
Amy is an exceedingly difficult and tempestuous child to parent. She stretches and challenges every single one of Veronica’s parenting skills every single moment of every day.
It is very nearly impossible to get Amy to do something that she doesn’t want to. It isn’t because she is naughty or because she has pulled the wool over her mothers eyes.It certainly isn’t because Veronica is lacking some vital parenting skill. It is because Amy is so focused on doing what she wants to do in that moment, that nothing else registers. Some of the parenting advice that Veronica receives makes me shake my head and roll my eyes with frustration.
I have impeccable parenting skills. My ability to get small and not so small children to behave is legendary. I am also very good with dogs and horses. But with my grand daughter Amy I am at a loss. So I don’t bother with traditional discipline at all. We skirt issues and avoid situations and I use distraction as my main tool.
We do the same things every single time Amy comes to visit. We check for eggs, then together we cook Amy an egg. We paint a picture or two, play with some clay, watch a bit of telly together or read some books and then we go outside and throw the ball for the dog.
When Amy was still eating gluten we would do all these things at a frenetic pace and at the end of her visit the house would be trashed and I would be exhausted. Minus the gluten we are still very busy together and Amy isn’t quite so exhausting.
Veronica and I have been talking about Aspergers and Amy, we have been talking about how there is a very real possibility that Amy has Aspergers. Now that the A word is out in the open I can look at Amy’s behaviour with fresh eyes. Veronica and I are noticing more and more things that Amy does and more importantly we are noticing things that Amy doesn’t do.
So the next time you see a small child running amok in the supermarket or having a tantrum in the middle of a shopping centre don’t be so quick to judge, to shake your head, to glare at the obviously incompetent parent. And as for the whispered advice that all the child needs is a bit of discipline, a good smack will fix her.You can keep that under your hat as well.
It just goes ahead and does its own thing, skipping merrily along any number of tangential paths, spinning off in any direction it likes while the logical side of me gets very grumpy waiting for my brain to behave itself.
I can not explain to you properly how Amy’s sensory processing issues affect her because when Veronica explains Amy’s difficulties to me my brain misbehaves and wanders off into a ceramic daydream and I only process bits of the information. It is bloody annoying.
It was the same when Mum was dying. We needed to go to all the appointments as a threesome because both Mum and I relied on Veronica to remember all the information and then pass it back to us, sometimes Veronica had to repeat herself numerous times before it all sunk in. When Mum was in palliative care the doctor was showing us an X-ray of Mum’s shoulder and talking about the cancer in her bones and all I could see, was that the line of Mum’s rib cage would make a very nice shape on a large pot. *sigh*
As I understand it Amy sees her world very differently, it is like she is in a room with a hundred televisions all turned up as loud as they can go and all on different channels. The world screams its information at Amy and she cant handle it very well.
I don’t think that I would handle it very well either.
That is how I feel today, all blurred and mimsy. Yesterday I felt shattered, emotionally shattered and I missed my mother with an intensity that had me weeping at inopportune moments. It must be quite disconcerting to see a woman weeping into the oranges at the greengrocers.
Amy is being assessed by the early intervention people and she has some sensory processing issues. Veronica will write about this in due course and I wont go into detail other than to say the news reduced me to tears. I see a bright future for my grand daughter as she will be a strong, talented and determined woman but I also know that her time at school wont be easy and that makes me unbearably sad.
My gifted and intelligent youngest child has taken under-achieving at school to a whole new level. His school report is almost a carbon copy of mine at the same age and I worry about my son.
The spouse is as grumpy as usual, though he smiles and pulls me towards him for a hug when I take my teeth out and pull old lady faces at him.
The dog has rolled in roadkill this morning, thoughtfully filling the house with the delicate bouquet of putrefying possum. I am trying to ignore the persistent whining at the backdoor and I wish it would hurry up and warm up a bit so I can hose the dog down without us both risking hypothermia.
This Sunday the 15th of August is the opening of the Tas Ceramics Society’s annual exhibition. It is being held at the Rosny School house Gallery and will run until the 5th of September. I have two pieces in this exhibition and I will post some photos later on in the week as I forgot to take any before I delivered the pieces to the gallery. *doh*
Making a film is an incredibly time consuming and eye straining job. I really underestimated just how much work was involved and so I have temporarily postponed the zombie, mutant fish gorefest. I am working on a project using vision that my son and I shot while we have been driving through the Brighton bypass road works.
I have finished my three week sculpture block and it has been a delight to work with Belinda Winkler. Thanks to the ideas that Belinda shared I am going to make some quite large dragon eggs for installation at Chauncy Vale and I will publish photos of the sculptures once they are fired.
I cant decide which of these images I like best so I have published them both.
I was playing with my camera as Amy was drawing a picture for me. I have no idea what the shutter speed was but it was about a 3-5 second gap between the press of the button and the click of the photo being taken. I took a photo of Amy sitting on the couch and then before the camera was finished doing its thing I pointed it at the window. I really like these photos.
