Just When You Thought It Couldn't Get Any Worse..............I Wanted To Cry!

Yesterday I was filled with hope……………… Hope that things couldn’t get any worse right? I mean, we’ve had a pretty tough 18 months but the last 6 months things have gone from bad to worse.

We were forced to come back to the UK, there was nothing else we could do (although looking back now I kinda wish we’d pitched a tent in a friend’s backyard and stuck it out n Oz!). Relationships have changed with family and friends, not just because we’d been away for almost 2 years but also because some don’t know and can’t “deal” with J’s behaviour and I just can’t be bothered to deal with them. That might sound harsh but I’m being honest, we’ve got alot going on at the moment which has and is causing alot of stress and I don’t have the energy to deal with those people. We have housing issues which I won’t get into right now but they are causing us alot of stress right now. We’ve had various tests done regarding our recurrent miscarriages and have been told that we may be referred to a specialist in London. Hubby is still seeing specialists regarding his back and I don’t think I could explain how desperate he is to get it fixed and to get back to work. I’m seeing a surgeon this month due to my Carpal Tunnel. We’re still waiting to see the Peadiatrician in order to get J’s all important UK diagnosis, cause obviously all the specialists he saw in Oz didn’t know what they were talking about and we’ve just wasted.

However the biggest cause of stress this year has been school! Ok so J has always had school issues and I’m pretty sure he’ll always have issues with school but this year (and he’s only been there for 4 months!) has made last years school related issues look not so bad! He’s not wanted to go, (I know nothing new there right?), he’s become so anxious about school that he worried himself sick and so had to have the last day of last term off because he simply couldn’t cope! He’s both expressed his anxieties with negative (and sometimes violent) behaviour and has completely shutdown. It takes almost 2 hrs each and every school night to convince him to get into bed due to his anxieties about school the next morning. The school really doesn’t understand Autism and in all fairness we knew this when we chose it but they did seem like they wanted to help and said all the right things etc……… ofcourse not much of those things have happened *sigh*  His current teacher really doesn’t understand Autism or J, she and a TA have attended a course about Autism but neither seem to have gotten much out of it, they say they never see any ASD or anxiety behaviours at school, so obviously they don’t see him flapping, constantly bouncing,  the literal thinking, the chewing of gaping holes in his mouth, the dirty issues he has or the lost look in his eyes. And his TA has even said to me “To be honest I don’t treat him any different, I don’t make any allowances, I don’t see the point!”……… yep those were her actual words!!!

But yesterday we met what will be J’s teacher from September. It was awful, she left us feeling that not only does she not believe in ASD but she also doesn’t want to! Some of her comments included “All parents find it hard the first time round” (she actually said this one twice) and ofcourse the comment that all parents hate “All children do that, it’s normal for children his age!” She actually made his current teacher look like she understood and was supportive!! It was so bad that I wanted to scream when we left and very nearly cried. So now we’re stuck, we can’t simply change school due to our housing situation (long story) but we have serious concerns about sending him back to his current school in September with that teacher!

Just gotta hope we can sort things out over the Summer holidays I guess………..and if we can’t, who knows what we’re going to do