Even Joseph Heller couldn’t cook this one up. I don’t wish to disrespect another creed or race, but I can’t help thinking that, if the above headline were the case, there would be outcry from several quarters.
But my son is just a white, middle class high-functioning child with ASD. High-functioning? As long as it has to do with electrical plugs and sockets, yes. Otherwise, anxious perfectionism creates a tiny tasty geezer who will not engage with learning-based activities. And he’s clever enough to spot them when you try to sneak them past him.
I emailed various newspapers last year to try to draw attention to the failure, by yet another Local Authority, to provide an education for yet another child with special educational needs. Or should that read yet another failure, by Surrey County Council and of Elmbridge in particular, to do its legal duty and provide a child with special needs with a school place.
Whichever way I could have worded it, the lack of interest provided yet another cause for despair, and yet another example that no-one in any position of authority really cares. Brief interest, a telephone interview and a photography session for the Surrey Advertiser soon fizzled out. Other national broadsheets and tabloids did not publish my son and I’s experience, and I cannot help but feel that there is a limit to the amount of publicity this sort of thing receives because otherwise, the system would have to change.
It is Monday 8th April and at midday today the leading item on Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine Show featured a woman who has given up her child for adoption and, in stipulating the reasons why, she had written a letter, which the judge read out and requested to be kept on record for her daughter, should she seek to make contact in the future.
As I listened to the letter being read out, in which the woman stated that she didn’t want her daughter to have a Mummy who was sometimes poorly, which meant going to others, and sometimes well, and that she would rather her daughter go to a family who could give her stability and consistency of care, as she deserves, I could relate. I can relate: I am a mentally ill single mother of a special-needs child, who has been clamouring for support from the appropriate (it seemed) agencies for years now. Initially, I was slow to seek help, out of a mixture of low self-esteem and a bloke-like ability to troop through much crap by setting external goals.
Reading between the lines, I could hear a mental health-challenged woman who has had to make this brave/tragic decision because she has not received enough support. It is this to which I relate.
Last Autumy, when I emailed the case worker and associated personnel about the challenges of trying to resist distressing thoughts of self-harm as well as dealing with a son with special needs who hasn’t been given a school place, a reply from the social worker said that I am “resilient”. Which is convenient for social services, since they have done nothing to provide support or respite for me, or financial assistance or recompense for the months of babysitters as I try to continue to do the things that enable me, mentally, emotionally and physically, to function.
Eight months since the start of the new school year last September, I am almost sanguine about the thoughts of self-harming which visit me several times a day. I wonder whether I ought to stripe my wrists with lacerations and then rock up at the GP, saying LOOK! LOOK AT THE EFFECTS OF THE STRESS! But I am not prepared to do something that would make my son a witness of unhealthy behaviour and a Mummy who is cracking up. There is no way I would or could give him up; but I know that for many, this seems the only way forward.
I am blessed: my mother is brilliant,I have been receiving Disability Living Allowance since a severe brain injury 11 years ago changed my life immensely, and I have my own house to live in comfortably with my son. I do what I have to do to manage my mental health effectively: eat as healthily as possible; rest as often as I need to (this is often impossible due to stress and other factors), and I get to the gym to work out. By doing this, I find that I can cope and function to a better ability than when I don’t do these things. Crucially, I am on medication for depression and, without the exercise component, their effectiveness is minimised.
I have a responsibility to manage my mental health, not just to myself but to those around me, particularly Daniel. My emotional availability as a mother is compromised by my failure to ensure that I am in the best possible shape. Daniel already knows that I get tired sometimes and run out of energy, and I hope he can’t remember my breakdown three years ago, when Mum had to look after him because I simply couldn’t function.
Fortunately, using a portion of the compensation money from the brain injury, I was able to see a consultant recommended to me by a close friend and, over approximately three months, the medication began to enable me to function.
Many people don’t have the sort of money that enables them to see posh private doctors, and perhaps this is the misfortune of the lady who has given up her daughter for adoption. I know that there are so many more. There are approximately twice as many children in need of adoption as there are families available to take care of them, and this is again perhaps one of the results of the lack of support available, on a broad scale, in this country.
ASD: on being a special-needs single parent 