When the carpet of hearts starts to stab your feet

It seems a while since I wrote about the adventures of Kevin the Nintendo DS.

What's been taking up more of my focus recently is Alec, and more specifically Alec's metamorphosis from a gentle and gentile little soul to the human equivalent of a wrecking ball.

When Alec's trying to be affectionate, he mugs you, and as he's got older it somehow feels more like he actually means to grab your handbag. This is to do with being bigger physically, growing up hormonally and generally not knowing his own strength.

When Alec's not trying to be affectionate, we have started to know about it. Whereas before he might have whined slightly or just ignored you altogether, now he's developed a real skill for finding the upper part of your arm that smarts most when it's pinched. He's also developed a vice-like squeeze from which his fingers have to be prized one by one.

God knows, if the way I feel about Alec could be manifested into form, the dude would be permanently walking on a cloud of little hearts. There is nothing I wouldn't do for him. Which is why I, and I suspect many other mums, have gulped down the pain of the pinching and the assault of his high-pitched screaching.

You can acknowledge to the world in general that your son is being a pain in the backside, but that doesn't mean that you wouldn't walk on hot coals if it meant saving them a moment's discomfort or pain.


Alec's aggression is no doubt a good thing. All the AuKids panel experts think so (we have done an Ask the Panel on pinching since we've had other parents write to us on the same subject).

Tori's often said that you can work far more with 'difficult' than 'docile', as 'difficult' behaviour is at least an attempt to communicate which you can mould into a more productive kind of communication.

Aha, yes I get that. In a practical, sensible, co-editor of an autism magazine sense, I get that.

But as a parent who's basically pissed off with it, the message is slower to sink in. Emotionally, I am wishing that the docile dude was back.

The carpet of hearts has been my undoing in some ways with Alec. So docile was he, so grateful was I for his mere presence on this Earth (after a near fatal accident in 2005), that cotton wool has become his comfy existence. He wasn't getting away with murder, because he never particularly looked like he was going to commit it.

But since his demeanour is changing, my parenting style has got to adapt. I've got to toughen up a bit whilst recognising, of course, all the things that he's trying to tell me in his own somewhat painful way.

In amongst all this is my brain's terrible habit of sweeping generalisations. If we're to get through this, I mustn't keep saying that Alec's difficult at the moment, or that he's going through a 'bad' phase. He is no more going through a phase than I am.

Alec has difficult moments and they are just that - moments. The pattern of his behaviour has changed for sure, and let's just hope that he's busy working on a miracle. The time I spend analyzing the bad moments, though, and getting upset by them, far outweighs the time Alec demonstrates behaviour that I find hard to deal with.

The 'phase' if there is one is more a phase of my own worry than any unrelenting pattern of Alec's.

So I've decided to keep a little diary. Not one of those diaries that chart behaviour so that you can understand its source (I've already sussed that). Just a diary focusing on all the good things Alec does during a day. The positive attempts to communicate, the times he's told himself not to grab, the big smile he woke up with... I've found that there's rather a lot of the good stuff to focus on. He is mostly still a very sweet little boy. It gives me a real sense of perspective and when times get tough, perspective is very much what it's all about.

Once you've told yourself you've had a bad day, or a bad week, or a bad month, it's not long before you say to yourself that your life is rubbish, why can't you have a nice normal life like everyone else...and that self pity can really bring not only you down but everyone else around you.

Not least the very little person who relies on your positive energy to influence their own behaviour.