Competing needs

This morning's school drop-off was a dog's breakfast. We arrived early enough for a before-school play, which P desperately wants, and which consists of him imitating some toy or computer game but with no discernible structure or goal; however, no matter who is there or what he does, it almost always ends with him exclaiming, "but I didn't get to play anything!", & subsequent degrees of melt-down. He has had trouble with transitions forever, and this seems to be the latest manifestation. I try to figure out what the essential components of this play session are for him, but haven't cracked it yet. I know he has a good friend who plays these "games" with him at recess, but it seems to be parallel play at best. He also asks me to join in sometimes, so I try to take advantage of the situation by applying a few Floortime principles, and this is where my frustration really starts to overtake me. He starts to respond, but S does his level best to disrupt. He has of course been included in all negotiations about play but almost compulsively opposes every suggestion or action that is not his own. And for me, it's not just about a mediocre play session, but about a lost opportunity to open up P's horizons.

I have not delved as deeply as I would like into the literature on sibling rivalry. Suffice to say that it dominates much of our daily life. It's hard to disentangle the specifics of the sibling relationship from the other effects of S's temperament on family life. I have heard Tony Attwood say that in a household with an autistic individual, the whole group will march to the beat of the autism drum. In our house, that has not been true since S was born. His drum is by far the loudest.

But worse was to come. S knows when we are leaving to wait at the school gate for me with his scooter, but today I saw him in the distance going through by himself. I yelled, and a couple of mothers leapt into action. By the time I got there, one had his scooter, one was dragging him from a nature-strip back to the path. He was beside himself. He collapsed into my arms and heaved with emotion. As one of them said, all the yelling probably frightened him, but knowing him as I do, anybody taking hold of his scooter, giving him an order, stopping him from going about his business, combined with the suddenness, would have made him volcanic with rage. He at least accepted comfort from me, and clearly there was no place for a telling off after all that distress, but it seemed necessary to say something about what had happened. When he seemed to be calm, I reminded him, in a gentle voice, that he needed to wait for Mummy at the gate. "No!" he yelled. A few more attempts to make the point calmly, more defiance from him. My stress levels were somewhat elevated by this, & the previous stuff in the playground, & a little by the parade of mothers eyeing us sprawled motionless on the footpath surrounded by scooters & helmets (this time not as bad as many of the public parenting disasters I've had. Perhaps I'll elaborate some time). And so despite myself I did eventually snap "then you won't be allowed to ride your scooter to school any more!" Then I got hold of myself again. Sometimes the days feel like extended attempts at provocation. Too often in the past they got the better of me. The older the boys get, the less exhausting they are, & the less this is a problem. But still, the theme that I think will keep coming back through the posts makes its appearance here; I do try, try, try to model calmness to my children, but so often my efforts seem utterly inadequate. I often feel like there is just not enough of me to do this job properly.

I've asked the therapist we see about ODD, & she says that besides being too young for a diagnosis, she suspects that it's more about emotional regulation with S, feelings that are just too big to handle. That certainly makes a lot of sense to us: people are always saying "it's his age", but his parents remember a baby who howled with anger from very, very early in his life. Perhaps next time I'll go back to those early days with him.