Awake is the new sleep

Sleeping soundly with stacks of ‘stuff’.

IT’S DAWN, barely a trace of sunshine coming through the windows, and already I can hear her crashing around in her room.

The Kraken, also known as my six-year-old daughter Amelia, has awoken.

I know this because I can hear her clumsy, elephant-like footfalls pounding into the floorboards. Amelia is awake and the whole world must know it.

It would be churlish to complain because she is deaf and so has no earthly idea how loud she is, as she moves around gathering her numerous comfort items from the bed for transportation into the lounge room.

This is the routine for her, everyday, my girl who hears little of note without hearing aids and is well and truly on the autism spectrum.

Amelia uses various collective nouns to describe her personal treasures. They are her ‘things’, or sometimes, her ‘stuff’.

“Where is my stuff Mummy? I need my THINGS!”

I always know where her stuff is because it is never far from her side. Amelia burrows these objects into her bed covers at night and I have to creep in after lights out to extract pencils from her hair and uncurl sweaty fingers from straws, tape, glue-sticks. The lot.

For a young child with autism, the ‘things’ have a deep meaning that is mostly beyond our reach. But what we know for sure is that they are absolutely vital to our little magpie’s sense of security, her sense of self.

Amelia clings to these things like a lifeline to some magical source of strength and energy known only to her. With them, she is safe.

And so, each morning, this curious set of bits and bobs is dragged from her room and deposited next to her on the couch. Amelia is now ready at 5am, or 6 if we’re fortunate, to kick off her day.

It’s then that I feel her presence in the doorway to our room. She hovers there uncertainly, watching for movement, for signs of waking life.

I resist for a minute but I can’t help but lift my weary arm to offer her a tiny wave – words cannot travel the distance to my beautiful deaf child but one gesture shows her the way is clear to approach.

And with this green light Amelia runs to my bedside, full pelt, to grasp my hand and throw her body across mine.

It’s easily my favourite time of day, this part when our bodies are so close and her face turns to my cheek to plant big, passionate smooches there. And if I’m very lucky, she might reach up to softly stroke my face with her hand.

Her sometimes-rough hands become gentle in the morning light.

I am barely awake but the smell of her, the feel of her, is everything to me in that moment.

Amelia is up and now so am I, and no matter what the hour, no matter how sleepless the night, and no matter how many ‘things’ I’ll be carting around for the rest of the day, in this perfect moment my heart is filled only with happiness.

[I wrote this piece yesterday after a wonderful day spent in a Gunnas Writing Masterclass with the incomparable Catherine Deveny. The task was to send her a piece written between 10am and 10pm on the day. ‘But how? I’m going straight out to dinner and to see a show. I won’t be able to do it’. But no excuses would do. So I texted my husband the simple words…’Bring your laptop’. Later, parked in our car on a city street, I sat with the laptop on my knee and frantically tapped out this piece from the notes I’d scrawled in the masterclass. I had to do it – would never forgive myself if I didn’t – and so I did. I emailed it to Catherine, typos and all, and felt a great sense of satisfaction. The feedback and support from Catherine the next day was absolutely thrilling and so that mad writing session in my car felt even more worthwhile. It was such a great experience that I’m sure any aspiring writer would enjoy. Plus, Catherine wears amazing shoes with little musical notes engraved on the soles. So there’s that too.]

That’s not a hoard…THAT’s a hoard!

Replete with necessary cuddle space.

Kindergarten klepto

He’s Artful and a total DUDE (Anthony Newley in Oliver Twist)

One of my favourite movies of all time is David Lean’s masterful version of the literary classic, Oliver Twist, one of two brilliant Dickens adaptations made by the director in the 1940s (the other being Great Expectations).

Lean manages to bring Dickens’ colourful world to life in shades of black and white; from the pitch-perfect performances (Alec Guinness’s unparalleled Fagin) to the way he renders the horror of Nancy’s murder by showing only the distress of Bull’s-Eye the dog, frantic to escape the room and all of that screaming.

But it’s the pickpockets I love the most, led so ably, so charismatically, by Anthony Newley’s splendid Artful Dodger. If you’re going to be poor and homeless in 19^th century London, you might as well do it in style.

Little did I know as I watched this film in my childhood, transfixed by the characters on screen, that I would one day grow up to raise an artful little Dodger of my own.

Because my daughter Amelia is a bit of a kindergarten kleptomaniac, prone to cunning sleights of hand that end with her pocketing classroom objects in the ‘secret’ spaces of her kinder bag.

It started with a tiny fish of the plastic variety. It appeared one day in the side pocket of her backpack and I thought, “Oh, maybe it just fell in there by mistake.” You know, the way inanimate fish can sometimes jump into zip-locked pouches.

I quickly learned that there were no mistakes, only carefully-squirrelled triumphs prized by this wily klepto-in-the-making.

And Amelia is quite the crafty customer. She has learned how to purloin a special item during the day and, undetected by adult eyes, find a quiet moment to hide it in her bag for later.

Patience is not a virtue common to Amelia’s waking hours, but when it comes to executing petty acts of larceny, she has more of it than any Saint could claim.

It took me a little while to work out precisely what she was doing – what her racket was – but one day on the way home from a kinder pick-up, I looked over my shoulder at her in the backseat to find her searching her bag for something. It was the loot of the day as it turns out and she held it aloft to me with barely contained glee.

Amelia takes small things like play-dough, toy cars, pencils, marbles – I don’t think she’s that discerning or even interested in the things themselves. Maybe it’s the success of a carefully planned five-finger discount that really excites her.

My (boring) role is to play the anti-Fagin as I collect up all of the stolen artefacts for return to their rightful place.

I had to rat her out to her kinder teachers too. They now know to conduct a little frisk of Amelia’s bag at the end of the day, running a quick hand scan for pilfered products pocketed by my cheeky child.

The teacher holds them up to me one by one through the glass of the kinder door (carefully out of Amelia’s sight) and I nod or shake my head, confirming or denying if she is the legal owner.

In these moments, I wonder at the twists and turns of Amelia’s behaviour and I also recognise the humour she brings home with her too, alongside the pocketed stuff.

The other morning, one of the teachers said to me, “Do these bangles belong to Amelia? They were left behind the last night.” I replied, “Well no, but check her bag at the end of the day and ask me that question again!” We couldn’t stop laughing.

We chuckled because we adore Amelia, our kindergarten klepto, even if we’re not really sure why she does it. It has to be connected in some way to her need for hoarding and the obsessive-compulsive collecting of arbitrary things that are important to her in some way.

Apparently, she’s just got to pick a pocket or two. Or three.

Amelia does the same thing with DVDs, which she loves to watch but equally gets a kick out of gathering into groups and hiding under her bed covers. I never know what I’m going to find when I make the bed each morning.

It’s just another example of the slightly strange acts that pop up in our family soup from time to time and then fade when Amelia doesn’t need to do them anymore. She’s not hurting anyone and the things she ‘steals’ do not belong to other children (thank god).

So while I’m not about to reward or reinforce the dodgy side of her artfulness, I think I can gently guide her to some kind of understanding or awareness without stifling her, well, individuality.

We talk to her about what she’s doing, and then we give the little bits and bobs back each week (when we can find them or separate them out from her own junk).

Once Amelia has developed an obsession with an object or an activity it is very hard to convince her to change course in any way.

Like the orange and black Matchbox car which keeps reappearing in her bag, no matter how many times I restore it to its kindergarten home.

It has struck Amelia’s magpie-fancy for some reason, so I guess I’ll just continue taking it back in this endless loop of secure-steal-stow-reveal-return until she is ready to find a different way of expressing the innermost parts of her self.

Benevolence worked for Oliver Twist, so why shouldn’t it do the trick for Amelia? His time as a nascent thief was short-lived so I’m hoping my resident pickpocket will soon turn over a new leaf instead of stashing it in her bag.

[For you, RJH, with love]

Obsess much? A quirky child’s guide to hoarding

Hoards I have known

For Amelia, the hoarding started small. Just a few disparate objects piled on top of her bed, seemingly chosen at random.

Then, the number of objects and their apparent randomness increased while the bed held fast as the breeding ground for greater mountains of ‘stuff’.

These Jenga-like structures comprised hard and plush toys, linen, cushions, whatever Amelia felt had that special quality, that hoard-worthy ‘X factor’. Sometimes these mountains were hidden under blankets, I suppose for safe-keeping. Who the hell knows?

The ‘point’ of this assemblage of things eluded me, but what was not in doubt was their deep importance to Amelia. She had a clear sense of purpose on hoard-making days, even rolled up her sleeves to better get on with the hard yakka this work entailed.

I did not give this new pastime much thought except to peer into her room from time to time and think, “Hmm…weird”. But the eccentricity of growing children takes on many forms and this was no more odd than a couple of other specialities like, say, chewing on a single grape for six hours or pretending to be blind (replete with ‘cane’) for an afternoon. Quirky is as quirky does.

At this early point, when she was about three, these pop-up installations were fairly temporary. Her attachment to them was shallow and fleeting. When the hoard-police (me) came to dismantle her handy-work, there was no problem and no argument. The piles of stuff had served some inner function, but she did not need to cling onto them then.

I’m not so sure when the hoarding ramped up into something bigger and, to me, more alarming. It was before the clinical suggestion of Autism Spectrum Disorder, but those words were already on my mind. Over summer, the stockpiling got bigger and its intensity ratcheted up about 100 notches.

We visited friends at their holiday house and as usual, there was a backyard gathering centred around outdoor cricket. A handful of kids aged between three and seven fought each other for their turn at the crease, but not Amelia.

She was engrossed in the creation of a makeshift hoard inside a medium-sized, red wheelie bin, the kind used to store (just store) loads of toys. Detached from the activities going on around her, she busied herself with collecting and placing arbitrary objects (not her own) inside the bin.

No amount of persuading could distract her from her core purpose. Other children, attracted by Amelia’s activity, tried to get involved but this caused her stress and she screamed at them to go away.

At my dear friend GH’s suggestion, the wheelie bin came home with us (she would not have been easily parted from it) and for the next few weeks she was its most loyal sentry. Initially, I did not allow it to come inside, filled as it was with bits of concrete, dirt and lord knows what else.

Then, the hoard-creep continued with the bin appearing one day in her room, squirreled past me like a scene out of The Hobbit (in this I’m Gollum, I suppose, and she has most definitely stolen the ring).

Her memory of the artefacts that made up the hoard was nothing less than astonishing.

If I tried to surreptitiously retrieve my husband’s wallet, this transgression was noticed immediately after Amelia had run a Terminator-like scan over her grouping of ‘treasures’. Game over.

So why was I so alarmed? I’m the first to say you should allow children to explore their needs and desires and follow their instincts, as long as they are safe and happy.

But the hoarding had no happy quality to it. For wont of a better expression, it looked to me like the play of the damned. Whatever motivated the sudden need to hoard on a grander and more intense scale – control, security, satisfaction – did not serve to connect her to the world above her eye line, least of all to us.

It seemed only to heighten her anxiety and cut her off from people in a new way; this girl we had painstakingly dragged back to us from the silence of deafness, undetected for her first two years of life.

Amelia was like the boy in The Life of Pi, stranded on a make-shift raft, barely tethered to the life boat of her family, with offers of shelter and food and comfort refused in favour of self-preservation. I felt vaguely horrified.

She could not be parted from her hoard without an epic tantrum. She wanted to sleep with it, take it into the car with her. If it remained at home, she would simply create new ones wherever she went, like at birthday parties while other children sat in a circle playing pass-the-parcel, Amelia would be in a corner safeguarding the paper. It was all so obsessive and joyless.

If I broached the subject with people, mostly they would tell me that their children did the same thing and not to worry. Really? They won’t play with others or engage in any other games or social interactions because they have to guard their ‘precious’ hoard? I wasn’t so sure.

I didn’t want to ‘break’ Amelia of this habit if it meant so much to her. The meaning of it in her life was unclear but I felt if I could help her to rein it in, reduce its importance in relation to other things, then maybe I could help her to re-engage with us, with life beyond the hoard.

The first thing to go was the red wheelie bin of horror. I offered her smaller receptacles (one at a time) for her chosen objects which she came to accept. I started asking her to collect only a set number of things to put in whatever bag or box she had selected for the day.

Thankfully Amelia enjoyed these limits and it gave her a sense of empowerment to think about what items she would choose to hang onto. Far from rebelling against the new rules of hoarding, she seemed to float back down from some obsessive place that had engaged her so intensely for months on end. It was a new day.

With this approach I was trying to say to Amelia, “Have your hoarding, yes, but calm yourself and talk to me about what you like, involve me in what interests you, give me some clue about who you are”. Basically, let me in.

The biggest breakthrough came, as it so often does for us, with art and craft. I bought bags and bags of crêpe paper, crayons, paints, brushes, play dough, glue sticks, cardboard: all the fab stuff reserved for kindergarten storerooms. “Great, more hoardable stuff,” said my husband. I threw it all on the dining-room table and left it there all day, every day, for weeks.

If Amelia loves art (Mister Maker is like the Beatles in our house) and control in equal measure, then for a while I decided to let her have access to her favourite things, all of the time.

Suddenly, we were invited to join her for sessions of ‘making’. The simple offer of being drawn into your child’s play is not common in our experience, so it’s like the Queen has just called you up to her kitchens to bash out a lazy batch of scones. You don’t think twice, you just dive into the making.

Back in the game through ‘making’

Since then, the hoarding has not returned to its previously worrying levels of practice. It does not have that same compulsive life-or-death focus for Amelia that characterised it for some time. These days it doesn’t really seem like hoarding at all.

Like most children, Amelia still likes to carry little cases and stow secret trinkets inside her backpack, but now it’s an exercise that doesn’t dominate her life or detach her from other activities or experiences.

Because of who she is and her profound need for space and control, Amelia will always seek some alone time where her aims are her own. But now that I know I can pull her back to where we are, waiting for an invitation to play, then a little bit of ‘stash-in-the-bag’ is okay by me.

[This post was re-published here by mamamia.com]