My PDA Kid

as told by a non-PDA parent

Tag: autism

  • PDA and the BIRTH demand

    The midwife’s eyes flickered.

    Concern.

    She was monitoring my baby’s heartbeat and apparently it was too ‘stable’.

    “Hmmm. Your baby shouldn’t be doing this,” she said, putting away the equipment.

    An hour or so later, I was being prepped for an emergency C-section.

    My son was due in June but he was a BIG baby.

    I mean, one doctor had unwisely mentioned ‘gigantism’ in an early appointment.

    The decision had been made to induce a week early.

    After an induction with my first boy, I’d desperately hoped to avoid this, trying all the natural ‘bring it on’ methods I’d heard about.

    But it wasn’t to be and in late May we’d entered the hospital, me still on high alert for any small sign our baby had decided it was time to move out.

    Induction gel had been inserted, as it had with my first, and I settled in for a wait.

    But at first check the midwife had made that annoying call – the baby should have been showing signs of change, movement, disturbance.

    He was, however, determinedly still. And that worried her.

    I was reacquainted with ‘the claw’ (anyone who’s had their waters broken knows this one) but that yielded amniotic fluid AND blood.

    So on to the table I went, tears streaming down the side of my face while my husband obliviously had fun playing dress ups with the theatre gear while chatting to the team.

    Our son came out a silent scream.

    They literally held him above us and his face was a scene of utter devastation.

    Then he was whisked away.

    “Follow him,” I told his dad, as I waited for my tummy to be put back together.

    He was the biggest baby in NICU – by far.

    A source of affectionate fun for the hospital staff and for his family.

    The meds I was given didn’t touch the sides so instead I had something that wiped out the pain – and me too.

    I was taken to see him in the unit but kept falling asleep in my wheelchair.

    I refused the drugs after that and laid in my hospital bed waiting for him to come to me.

    I was told they’d have him out of the little hot box and with his mummy by midnight, 22 hours after he was born.

    Awake, alert, I was desperate for my baby.

    I’d hear wheels roll down the hospital corridor and wait excitedly, expectantly, only to hear them roll right past.

    Eventually he came to me, probably around the same time he’d been born the day before.

    He was put into the crook of my arm, all nine-and-a-bit kilos of him.

    To me, he was tiny.

    And I was in love, all over again.

  • PDA and the BUYING demand

    He turned to look at me, his smile wide but his eyes flickering in panic.

    “I hear they’re already out of the new Switches,” his support worker had just said to me, as he stood in the hallway with my son.

    I looked at the support worker then back at my son.

    “Yep, already gone,” I confirmed my son’s lie.

    My son had been saving for the latest Nintendo Switch for months.

    The big windfall had come on his birthday, bringing his total to the $745 needed to buy it.

    Only he couldn’t.

    In the weeks after his birthday, he couldn’t even bring himself to count his money.

    When he finally did, a day was set to travel into the city to make the big purchase.

    His agitation the night before was nearly akin to the bad old days of ‘sunday-night-before-school’.

    (No, I doubt it’ll ever again be that bad.)

    Needless to say, he didn’t get out of bed the next morning.

    Days later, I found playing with the old Switch.

    “I’ve got a good plan Mum,” he declared. “I’m going through all my old Switch accounts and deleting every profile we don’t use so when I get the new one I can just transfer the one account across instead of all of them.”

    “Such a great plan,” I agreed. “Makes so much sense.”

    Over the following weeks, I muted questions from relatives about whether he’d spent his birthday money yet.

    I gave his psychologist a heads up that he was struggling with the demand of spending his birthday money, or buying the gadget he wanted, or both.

    She told me she tried to weave it into their conversation but he headed it off by saying I was going to buy it for him using his money so it was all sorted.

    One night he called me into the garage – which has been transformed into a sensory and gaming space just for him.

    “Look mum,” he said, gesturing to the screen.

    It was some sort of menu and meant nothing to me.

    “They’re all gone,” he said, excitedly.

    “What are?”

    “The other profiles. Only one to transfer to the new Switch now.”

    Uh oh.

    We were back at ‘time to buy’ stage, I guessed.

    Fortunately for me, for now, I was wrong.

    “Mum, I think we should paint the garage,” he said.

    ” Then I want to set up some new shelves and get a new beanbag.

    “After that, I’ll buy the Switch.”

  • PDA and the TRAVEL demand

    I stood on the tarmac behind him.

    He was wearing beige cargo pants and a top not dissimilar in colour.

    His hair was gelled enough that it didn’t move despite the wind whipping a frenzy around him.

    As the people in front of him shuffled forward, his fingers wrapped even more tightly around his suitcase handle.

    Rather than roll it, he spun it in a 360 degree turn beside him, propelling it forward and nearly crashing his face into the backside of the passenger in front of him.

    This was my four-year-old son.

    And I was terrified of what he was about to do…

    (13 months earlier…)

    He didn’t roll his suitcase back then.

    Not yet three, he was carried across the tarmac by his daddy.

    I carried his baby sister, while their nine-year-old brother trailed along behind me.

    Our toddler started squirming in his father’s arms, the first stirrings of protest.

    He wanted to get down and head back.

    Dad held him firmly.

    By the time we were on the stairs up to the plane he’d started screaming.

    I smiled tightly at the flight attendant’s practised grin as she took our boarding passes.

    “Someone’s not excited about the plane,” she said, patting my son on the shoulder, which just made his scream louder.

    Once we found our seats (row 25, I’ll never forget) my eldest passed me the bags to put up in the overhead lockers.

    I fussed about getting out drink bottles and books, textas and toys, unable to bring myself to look into my husband’s panicked eyes.

    Oldest sat with youngest on his knee and, with nothing left to do, I turned to our hysterical son.

    His face was dark red, relentless noise and air flying out of his mouth, pointing toward the rear door through which we’d boarded.

    My husband slipped into the seats across the aisle from the rest of us and plopped our son down.

    He stood on the seat, fists tight, not stopping for breath.

    Passengers began to shift uncomfortably.

    Some tut-tutted him gently.

    One thrust a bunch of keys at him.

    Another blocked her ears.

    “You’re going to need to get his seatbelt on soon,” a flight attendant said, smiling gently as she fluttered by.

    No shit sherlock.

    “We’re trying,” I managed, through gritted teeth.

    My husband and I had been both trying to gently bend our son in half, hoping that once he was at least clipped in, we could turn our attention to quietening him down.

    But we’d been here before.

    This wasn’t a tantrum.

    He wasn’t a kid that could simply be consoled.

    Or distracted.

    Or disciplined.

    The doors of the plane were now closed.

    Everyone, except our little boy, was sat.

    The pressure was on.

    My husband held his wrists as I tried to pull his legs out.

    Each physical coercion took his volume up a notch.

    He wriggled.

    He writhed.

    He refused.

    We were officially in delay and passengers were shaking their heads or sighing loudly.

    Even the ones politely pretending nothing was happening added to my anxiety.

    We knew it was no good.

    This kid’s distress could outlast a full season of Play School.

    “I’m going to take him off,” my husband said, defeated.

    I looked at him, something unspoken passing between us, then nodded.

    We knew it was the only option.

    And so my husband took down my son’s little Lightning McQueen suitcase and carried it and him to the door and down the stairs (which had to be driven back in by the way).

    I felt shaky, vomity.

    My eldest sat crying, holding his oblivious baby sister.

    “You didn’t need to do that,” said a passenger, the one who’d had her ears blocked.

    “He would have settled down,” threw in another.

    I smiled, heavily masking my own distress, and said: “You don’t know my son.”

    After that, the flight to Melbourne was uneventful.

    My husband took our son to his grandparents then flew on to join us for a weekend of, well, recuperating.

    (13 months later…)

    Back to the tarmac with my beige-donned now four-year-old.

    This trip was to Queensland and we were nervous as hell.

    But my son didn’t squirm.

    Or scream.

    There was no protest on the tarmac.

    I’d brought ear defenders in case it had been the noise last time but he absolutely refused to wear them.

    Why would he?

    There was no problem here.

    He excitedly jumped into his seat and clipped in his seatbelt, eager to get into the sky (and on to the iPad).

    It would be easy to suggest that he was just having a bad day, a toddler moment, that earlier plane trip.

    Maybe he was.

    But getting off a plane just before take off is one of many radical things we’ve had to do as parents to manage his distress.

    We didn’t find out he was autistic for another six years.

    And I didn’t even hear of PDA for another year after that.

    When I did, we had to change everything.

    Just as a PDAer would expect!