Dear Phantom 5 - Too Young to Be the Eldest

Dear Temple,

You’re making it sound as though something terrible happened to me just because my brothers were born.  That’s not fair!  They didn’t do anything wrong by being born, and my parents didn’t do anything wrong by having them (except that they were twins, so that makes three of us when parents shouldn’t have more than two children, but that was just an accident).  Most older siblings get a new baby brother or sister when they’re three, and most of them are fine with that. 

My parents didn’t neglect me or stop loving me.  They’re the best parents in the world!  Don’t you dare blame them just because I’m weird!  I’m weird because I’m autistic, not because of anything they did wrong.

Phantom of the Library

 

Dear Phantom,

I didn’t mean to sound as though I was blaming mum or dad.  They are good parents, and it helped that at that stage, mum’s father lived on the floor below us.  All three of them did their best.  Mum was exhausted with looking after two babies who never slept at the same time as each other, but she made time to read stories to you and even teach you to read.  Dad had to work long hours, but he still made time to take you out for walks and play that the tree in the field beyond the woods was a dragon or a ship, and make up stories about your cuddly toy animals.  Grampy wasn’t mobile enough to get down on his hands and knees to play with you, considering that he had a missing leg and a lot of shrapnel painfully lodged in the remaining one, but he was always willing to make you a mug of milky coffee and a bowl of porridge with marmalade as you called in on him on your way out to the garden.  But that doesn’t alter the fact that you went from being a child who got lots of attention to one who spent most of her time wandering around the big, overgrown garden on her own.

Obviously, it isn’t mum and dad’s fault that you are autistic.  But autistic people can also have psychological and emotional problems, just like anyone else – except that the things that we get upset about aren’t necessarily the ones that would upset anyone else.

You are right that most three-year-old children cope with the arrival of a new baby without being traumatised.  But then, most three-year-olds are either starting to make friends their own age, so that they are less emotionally dependent on their parents, or they are confident enough to fight for their share of their parents’ attention, often by causing so much trouble that their parents have to notice them.

You tried, for a while.  Mum says she remembers a time when we left a trail of washing-up liquid all over the house.  I don’t remember that, but I do have one vivid memory: 

You had weed on the floor.  Mum could have understood if it had been an accident, but you just hadn’t felt like using the potty.  Mum, exasperated, is exclaiming, ‘The potty was just three feet away from you!  So why couldn’t you get up on your two feet and walk over to it?’

You don’t really know why you didn’t, except that weeing on the floor had seemed like a good idea at the time.  You’re not really very interested, even by the pun about feet, even though you love puns.  Instead, you are looking past mum, at the row of glass jars filled with foods bought loose from the wholefoods co-operative in the village: pasta, haricot beans, kidney beans, prunes, apricots, raisins, sultanas.  You know that prunes are dried plums, and that raisins are dried grapes and so are sultanas.  You wonder why raisins are dark brown and sultanas are light brown.  You know that you did something naughty, and you know that you’re probably going to be punished.  You decide that probably raisins are made from purple grapes and sultanas are made from green grapes.

Looking back, I think I can guess why you had weed on the floor, and mum could certainly have worked it out if she hadn’t been exhausted from weeks of sleep deprivation.  You had noticed that babies get attention, and that older children who are able to care for themselves get much less attention.  Behaving in a more babyish way was a fairly obvious attempt to put things back to the way they used to be.  Unfortunately, it didn’t get you what you really wanted, which was stability and security.

Mum doesn’t remember that time.  But she remembers the time that the old man from next door brought you in after he found you in the middle of the busy main road.  At first, she thought that you had probably wandered out there because you had misunderstood her warnings.  After all, she had only told you not to go down the drive and into the road by yourself; she hadn’t actually told you not to squeeze through a gap in the hedge and go out that way!  Most young children, not just autistic ones, tend to be very literal-minded about rules.

But later on, she overheard you talking about the incident to yourself, discussing how you knew you weren’t supposed to go into the road on your own, but Mummy was busy with the babies and you were very sad.  In other words, you were quite possibly trying to kill yourself.

So, it definitely sounds as though you were pretty badly traumatised by suddenly being an older sister.  That doesn’t make it your brothers’ fault, or your parents’ fault (they couldn’t have known how you would react).  But it’s there, all the same.  Did you know that it’s even in your records that you didn’t even grow for a year between the ages of three and four?  How much of a shock does it take to make a three-year-old stop growing?

Okay, it didn’t stop you growing into a tall, well-built, physically healthy child as you got older, and you’re certainly not anorexic.  But I think the same anxieties which made you stop growing in physical height for a short while, made you frightened of growing in emotional maturity for much longer. 

I think it made you feel that being three years old meant that you were already intrinsically less lovable than a baby and that not even your own parents could be relied on to like you best, and therefore that nobody else could be expected to want to be your friend.  So you expected to be lonely all your life.  Many of the points that would be exciting markers of independence for most young people – starting school, becoming a teenager, going on holiday without parents, going away to university, leaving home – can feel to us like being more and more cut off from the only people we can trust to love us, namely parents.

Once you realised that dying wasn’t a solution and neither was behaving like a baby, you tried to adjust.  When you asked mum to tell you a story and she was too tired to think one up, she suggested you tell yourself a story, so you did.  You wondered what it should be about, and it occurred to you that grown-ups like to make-believe that a long time ago, they used to be children, and so you could make up a story about something equally unlikely, imagining that a long time ago, you used to be a grown-up.  ‘A long time ago, when I was grown-up, I had a little girl called Nellelli…’

I don’t know where you go the name ‘Nellelli’ from, but I think it was from the song ‘Nelly the Elephant’.  In the Nellelli stories, you were not only a parent (a single parent – I don’t recall there ever being a mention of Nellelli’s father) but also a vet, carrying out gruesome-sounding operations to restore an injured kitten’s sight by transplanting a dead kitten’s eyeballs into his head.  You were confident and competent in your fantasy, even while you dreaded growing up in real life.  It wasn’t that you wanted to be a vet in real life, but you were starting to realise that you wanted to be a writer.

At the same time, one thing mum did have time to do with you was reading practice.  She was impressed that, after she had taught you how to recognise colourful plastic letters with magnets in their backs, you worked out for yourself how to arrange them on the floor to spell ‘cat’, ‘dog’, and ‘mungkee’.  With the aid of games (using a magnet on a string to catch paper fish with paper-clips on their noses and words on their backs) and a bit of bribery (Smarties for making your way through Ladybird Peter and Jane books), you soon learned to be a confident reader. 

Mum says the first book we ever read (other than Ladybird primers) was Harry by the Sea by Gene Zion.  I remember the book, about a dog who gets lost at the seaside, even if I don’t remember reading it for the first time.  But I do remember the first chapter-book we ever read, The Cat Who Wanted to Go Home by Jill Tomlinson, about a French fisherman’s cat who gets stranded in England and needs to find a way to cross the Channel back to her humans.  You found it at a car boot sale, one hot summer day when you were four, along with a glass model cat with blue paws and tail, shortly before you started school. 

I particularly remember the heroine being found a foster-home by a charity that you were convinced was called ‘Ruh-spuck-ah,’ no matter how many times mum insisted that it was pronounced ‘Ar-ess-pee-see-ay.’  After all, you’d been reading for long enough to know that you say the letter sounds, not the letter names!

So, you were getting used to being lonely, and discovering that you liked telling stories.  You were also discovering that you were good at learning to read and that books were a way of getting mum’s attention in a good way.  You knew that she was pleased that you were clever, and so you wanted to please her by getting things right.  And because getting things right, and hanging on to what you had been taught, were so important to you, sometimes you weren’t willing to admit that things you had learned were not universal rules, and that sometimes a word like RSPCA might actually be pronounced by sounding out the letter names.

Now, maybe it’s time to start realising that real intelligence means being willing to learn that some of the things you thought you knew might not always be true.  That way, you have a chance of learning to be wiser, instead of just older.  And you might even find out that ‘wiser’ does not always mean ‘sadder’.

Love,

Temple Cloud