Brotherly love?

So I see from the stats that a handful of people across the globe have alighted upon this blog; what I don't know of course is how long they lingered, what they thought, or whether any of them/you will come back, or have already. Hello out there! Any frazzled mothers amongst you?

We separated the boys on Saturday. When I get time alone with P, I get so excited! I feel like a kid going o

n a play date! He was coming down with a cold, so we kept it low-key, staying at home. But we chatted, played games together, drifted apart at times & came back in a lovely, natural rhythm. This is utterly exceptional. I must sound rather shrill, but the little guy manages to defeat every single interaction that I have with his older brother. If P tries to tell me something, S starts to talk over the top of him. I try to tell P something, S interjects with his own topic of interest. If P idly picks up an object, S snatches it out of his hand. He is so smitten with his big brother that he has to have whatever he has, or do whatever he is doing, at the same instant! And S does not respond to gentle attempts to redirect his behaviour, so these disruptions frequently end in tantrums, with P completely deprived of attention, & often nursing an injury to boot. It is so, so, draining, & particularly unfortunate given that P is so in need of help with communication, and with understanding social behaviour. He learns a lot from having a brother, it is true, and I'm sure someone might think that of course the little brother behaves like this, siblings of children with special needs have to fight for attention! But explaining his behaviour this way is just not overly convincing.

At any rate, Q rang late in the afternoon to say he was on the way home. I told P they were coming back in about 20 minutes. The passage of time is one of the most confusing, stressful aspects of P's life. We have tried making charts & timetables & we have various timers around. Timers he understands, and at last he has the concept of how many "sleeps" he must wait for some event; lately he has been asking me if "after" is "in front" or "behind", so he is starting to process these concepts in his own way, but I have not found much that helps (and anyone who has read this far who has any suggestions, please share them!). I thought it would be a good idea to "show" him 20 minutes on his timer so that he could get some sort of feel for what that unit of time felt like. I turned the timer around, knowing he was starting to count in multiples, & counted to 20 by 5s, as they are drawn on the timer. Dad came home a few minutes early, we looked at the clock. End of simple little shared learning activity.

That evening we decided that they could stay up a bit later as long as they played quietly in their bedroom. P jumped up, said "20 minutes" & set the timer, counting in multiples of 5. When it went off, he came & got us, & put himself in bed. This must sound so trivial; my heart just welled with happiness to see him implementing something that I'd shown him. It speaks such volumes to me about his love & respect for me, & I can't say how greatly I am honoured to receive these things from him. But the sadder source of my emotion is just how rare these transactions between us are; if S had been here in the afternoon, he would have interrupted, fought, tried as hard as he could to disrupt that connection. Indeed, when P suggested the timer that night, S almost compulsively cried out "no!", but seemed to lost interest, mercifully. I put the timer on a very high shelf even so. For what it's worth, within 5 minutes of S returning home that afternoon, I'd had to take him to the bathroom & restrain him after he started fighting with P, even with their father there facilitating their play. And the next morning began pretty much the same way, I can't even remember why. So that charging of the batteries that I got last week is wearing out now.

There seems never to have been an opportunity for me to weave between the 2 boys, giving one a bit of this, the other a bit of that, bringing them together for a bit of something else. S has from the beginning been so fixated on the big one that everything for him seems to be through the lens of "am I getting what he is getting?", rather than "do I want this?" I have a very strong memory of S at about 4 months old, in the baby carrier on my chest one rainy day. I had just managed, somehow, to dress P, a toddler with compromised motor skills, in a puddle suit and boots, with the said carrier filled with baby on while my back ached as usual. I put up the umbrella and out we went to find puddles. S was watching P intently. P found the first puddle, readied himself, and jumped, splash, both feet in. S, to my amazement, let out a heartfelt laugh. He was delighted. It was the first time I'd realised that already, he had figured out that this other little person was part of his life. Little did I know how complicated that intense love would be for us all to live with.

As I write, I am thinking that I need to increase the sessions with the OT, and perhaps talk to a psychologist. I did last year, & got some hints, mainly about anger management, & also about ensuring that I treated the boys equally. This is excruciating, as it means, apparently, even allowing the little one to copy P's dreadful eating habits (like many kids on the spectrum, P's diet is dreadful, no doubt the subject of a future post). I needed to trust, she said, that the neurotypical (NT) child will eventually grow bored with the limitations that the older one has set for himself & move on to try new things. I feel there is a lot more I could say about this, but it might be time for us to do a bit of painting, which I actually promised a couple of days ago, so it's very overdue!