The day is grey and rainy, requiring headlights on, although it’s April. There is not much traffic on the way to the Playscheme, but I can’t help feeling that the cars passing, and the drab wet people, look almost funereal. I feel the same. It’s Britain; the same place where, up north, tightly terraced streets cower beneath glowering skies; headlights seem to dissolve in the drizzle on the windscreen, and the verdant hues of the land are dulled.
We are not up north, but I wonder about the Yorkshire sense of humour, and consider that it is a tribute to triumph over banality, this being funny. It’s a funny in-spite-of things sort of drollery. There is much to be said for having a sense of humour; else I’d be pushing up daisies.
On arrival at the Playscheme, the hall darker inside because of the greyness outside, everything seems in a state of suspended animation. The young volunteers’ enthusiastic welcome seems like sarcasm, a red scream out of the grey; daunting. Non-sequitur.
Daniel declares it “boring! I’m not staying here; I want to go home” and kicks a small exercise ball, a plastic chair, a table and the door we came in through. He grabs the end of a handle from the table football game and it comes away instantly. He throws it hard, and it comes to rest at my feet. Hurriedly, I replace it, partly because I don’t want to see what else he is destroying. I can pretend, in this tiny moment of repair, that he has just decided to like it and is smiling like an ordinary child. I turn around just in time to see him head towards the art table, and the tubes of brightly-coloured (not in this light) poster paint.
The volunteer and I are doing that exaggerated surprise and interest at other objects, and I’m not so enthusiastic because those poster paints are about to go everywhere if we’re not fast. Luckily, I am quick enough to arrest the tubes before they are thrown, and I say, “I know this isn’t electricity, but give it a chance, please.” The volunteer picks up on this and points to sockets on the wall. We all enter the kitchen through the door marked NO ENTRY by a laminated A4 sheet and stare at washing machines and a hoist charger on the worktop behind the hatch.
This serves as a small diversion, until one of the volunteers says, “Would you like to do some junk modelling?” It turns out there are empty snacks tubes and toilet roll inner tubes, plus a couple of tiny cardboard boxes and some low-tack masking tape. This seems to occupy Daniel for a while, because he likes to utilise discarded objects (such as packaging) for inventing. He gets stuck in, and enjoys wrapping masking tape around the base of a kitchen roll inner tube where it meets the cardboard box. I know he isn’t going to manage to secure the items together but, at this point, I’m buying time. If he can settle here, I can go home and take the laundry out of the machine and – who knows? – clean the bathroom up a bit.
There is an interlude in which the day might actually turn out to be fun; painting and ball games are not a bad idea. Throwing the small exercise ball through hoops on the climbing wall seems to arrest the interest of another little girl, and then the snacks are being laid out: crisps and breadsticks, biscuits and pieces of fruit are being set out on little plastic plates, and two jugs of squash appear – one orange, one purple. Daniel carries on painting and I wonder about making my escape. I’ve left my vape stick in the car and I’m beginning to feel the urge for nicotine. I am permitted, by Daniel, to go to the car and reclaim my vape stick, as long as I come straight back.
After this comes the familiar part of having a child with special needs. After I vape, I sit at the art table and hope to be able to leave, while volunteers also try to encourage me to leave. We all try to encourage Daniel to let me leave and, after several attempts, and several more episodes of tedium at the table while he plays on the piano for a little while, I announce my intention and he starts shouting, “I want to go home! I’m bored here! It’s boring; take me home!” I am doing calculations, in my head, about what needs to be done at home and about how to persuade him to stay, because he has to learn that he can’t always get his own way and, if I leave, he might knuckle down and behave better and enjoy himself, and … I’ve been on my own with my son for months now. No school no play dates no excursions no support from any of the agencies whom I naively hoped were there to provide support. Daniel wants to come home and I want to persuade him to stay, but I am hungry now and I know he’ll do the same things at home that he always does but, at this point, I’m feeling mentally sapped and this lends an air of physical apathy to the proceedings, and ennui has settled in to me again, to the bone.
“I’m going to have to take him home” I say.
When we get home, Daniel eats his packed lunch and I eat the breakfast that he left this morning while I wait for toast of my own. I manage successfully to poach an egg, by stirring up a centrifuge in the water in the saucepan before quite deftly cracking the egg into it.
I have yet to take the laundry out of the machine, and I know the bathroom is going to be left undone (again). I was going to buy the ingredients for a butternut squash bake recipe that the Trainers (Waleed and Holly) have emailed to me in a nutrition guide that they have formulated because they are both fitness instructors and eating for energy and stamina is something they know about. However, having pigged the malted and honeycomb chocolates in the Tupperware tub, left over from Mother’s Day I wonder whether it is worth it after all.
ASD: on being a special-needs single parent 