Happy Birthday

It's official, I am now half way to 70! I had a lovely day but somehow it was tinged with sadness, as I remembered my last "big" birthday when I hit 30.

Rewind 5 years and I am 18ish weeks pregnant, feeling my baby kick me, enjoying the blooming and blossoming stage (the nausea and exhaustion was starting to tail off by then!). We were abroad as we had decided to take a 2 week holiday in a deserted part of Cephalonia - we knew our lives were going to change forever in a matter of weeks, but we had no idea how much. I was a realist, and knew that the early years would be hard but I never expected it to be this hard. I guess that in my line of work, you can't ignore the fact that not every pregnancy has a perfect outcome and that even if you have a healthy baby that's no guarantee that you won't encounter problems further down the line, but like most people had never imagined it would happen to me. It's one thing seeing and diagnosing children with autism and other developmental difficulties but quite another to discover that your own child has a life long disabilty. Perhaps it's because of my professional background that I've struggled so much over the last 2 years - I haven't been able to be "innocent" and "uninformed" as everyone has expected me to know the answers. Sadly, with autism there are no certainties and I still don't have the answers. They say that too much knowledge is a bad thing, and I couldn't agree more - perhaps because I have seen the worst case scenarios and the poor outcomes I've wallowed more than most parents. I've talked to parents of older children who have said they were glad that at the time of diagnosis they didn't know how hard the struggle might be - I don't have that, I have seen the struggles, inadequacies and failings of the systems and I have seen both the positive outcomes and the negatives. I feel overwhelmed, surrounded by this sea of knowledge, unable to filter the useful from the inappropriate.

Another reason I've found this year hard is that so many things are happening on a daily basis that make me realise that James was struggling for a few months before I "noticed". The parenthesis are there because I often wonder if I was subconsciously denying the problems, or whether I was so wrapped up in my pregnancy (which was not without its complications) and new baby that I ignored them. Almost every day Bea does something that I know James couldn't do at the same age (and still can't - but that's another discussion altogether). So when my husband sent her in to me with my birthday card and she gave it to me with a big grin on her face as she said "Happy Birthday Mummy" I wept tears. Tears of joy because she looked so earnest and it was so touching and tears of sadness because I remember trying to get James to wish his daddy a happy birthday a couple of weeks after he was two. I shrugged and thought it was a bit much to expect of him. Clearly it wasn't.