Last year, our younger daughter was confirmed as being on the autistic spectrum. It was a fairly late diagnosis, as she’s in her early teens, but, apparently, girls in particular can be good at masking it.
In many ways it was a relief to me and explained a lot of things, but my wife didn’t react the same way. She’s more furious and embarrassed, rather than thinking about our daughter before anything else, and her own family don’t help because they come from the “a good smack will sort her out” school of thought.
We’re lucky because we’ve got good support at her school and have been referred to a psychologist, who saw us as a family, and then my wife and I saw her on our own. Our younger daughter said very little, but our older daughter really let it all out, including a lot of chat about what a noisy family we are.
We’ve always had a fairly loud relationship, which was simply how we lived our lives, with everything a drama. Our older daughter was very much the same, fall in and out, happy one minute and sad the next, all at the top of her lungs. Our younger daughter wasn’t – she retreated from other people’s rage, but was like a screaming toddler herself if pushed into an argument.
The psychologist suggested that we calm things down, as that will make life easier for our daughter. My wife was quite angry with her and said she felt awful, but our daughter needs to live in the real world.
The psychologist was very tactful and said she understood we felt dreadful, but we always need to remember that our daughter felt far worse. She also talked about the necessity for calm – not giving in to our daughter’s tantrums, but to recognise that all the shouting in the house was making things worse – and I really want us to make the effort to tone everything down.
Our older daughter totally gets it. She’s changed her approach to her sister so much that their relationship has transformed in the past six months. They have the odd spat, but in the main they get on so much better and do a lot more together, which has had an excellent effect on our younger daughter’s social skills.
Academically she’s always done well, but for the first time ever she has made friends and become part of a crowd. We always worried because she was so alone and I think it’s worth any effort on our part just for that.
I just concentrate on staying calm and doing what the psychologist and the school suggest, because they clearly know what they’re doing and the positive results are obvious. But the one huge stumbling block – unbelievably – is my wife. We decided after that first psychologist consultation to remain calm, but she never does, no matter how often we discuss it. She always agrees, then 10 minutes later she’s shrieking at our daughter and all hell breaks loose.
It’s particularly upsetting if we’ve had a couple of weeks of peace and quiet where we all seem to be doing really well and suddenly the house is full of tension and anger again and I see our daughter regress. I worry that it will affect her new friendships, though I think that age group and her sister are far kinder than our generation.
I wish my wife would realise this isn’t about her and that this diagnosis isn’t a tragedy. It’s helping transform our daughter’s life and happiness, but her mum is constantly derailing that.
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