Treading on Eggshells: My life with my autistic mother

By Christine Breakey

Autistic mothers are mostly invisible in literature and research, yet autistic girls grow up to be autistic women, many of whom become autistic mothers. Mothering is always challenging, but autistic mothering in a neurotypical world is fraught with many difficulties which are not recognised or understood. Like all mothers, autistic mothers need

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christine Breakey
• Release date: Sep 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781802271386

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Finding me

My life began in September 1972, at the age of nineteen. This may sound a bit odd, but for me, 1972 brought a freedom and release from the tight parental and community controls which stifled and suffocated the very essence of my existence. Like many Welsh teenagers in the 1970s, I was part of that first generation of working-class children to have the educational opportunities (funded by an attractive government grant), which enabled us to leave home and to either ‘go to college’ (as it was called back then), or to ‘seek our fortunes’ elsewhere. There was an atmosphere of social mobility and opportunity, and the expectation was that I should take advantage of that and leave home. It was in this context that I joined what seemed at the time to be the mass exodus of Welsh teenagers, heading to the great continually developing metropolis of London. An exodus which had been made more achievable by the opening of the Severn Bridge, just six years earlier. I however, trod in the footsteps of the thousands of Welsh emigrants before me who travelled on the ‘boat train’ from Pembroke, via Llanelli, (which teachers had told us was the largest town in the largest county in Wales), to Paddington Station, having sent my one small trunk of belongings ahead of me. Paddington Station is probably the most familiar London railway station for all South Walians and as my working-class roots had not provided access to the literary delights of Paddington Bear, it was to me simply the gateway to the rest of the world (which it might also have been for the duffle coated, bear, although I wouldn’t know, having still not read any of the books). I have a huge nostalgia (or hiraeth as we Welsh call it) for Brunel’s station, with its wonderful, glazed roof supported by magnificent iron arches. This nostalgia was both created and is fuelled by an unusual memory which embraces all of my senses: I often have a verbatim memory of conversations, particularly when they are linked with strong emotional experiences; I have a pronounced sense of smell which is also linked to memories, and music has the ability to transport me back through time and conjure up memories which have lain dormant for many years. I have memories from when I was very young; even before I could speak properly, which I had assumed everyone had and still find it difficult to believe that this is not the case. This memory of mine is both a blessing and a curse, as it enables me to reconnect with good times and experiences almost at will, but it can also play back memories of unhappy, unpleasant experiences and conversations when I least want them. These intrusive, visual and verbal ‘flash-backs’ can be difficult to deal with and as I have a tendency to ruminate, are also difficult for me to get rid of. I think though that they are balanced, or perhaps even outweighed by the pleasure of being able to experience joyous and happy memories, sometimes unexpectedly but also as a matter of choice. One of my favourite memories which I can conjure up and experience on demand, is of travelling ‘home’ from London, unaware at the time that Paddington Station would be filled with victorious Welsh rugby supporters who had just beaten the English at Twickenham. As was my usual habit, I arrived at the station breathless, only just in time to catch my train and I was met with the barrage of Welsh voices (mainly male) singing Sosban Fach (the anthem of my hometown) and Bread of Heaven, in a natural harmony as only the Welsh can. The sound of their singing reverberating around the glazed arched roofs of the station was such a powerful experience for me that it is no exaggeration to say it touched my heart and physically hurt. It moved me to tears and almost brought me to my knees, there on the dirty, oily platform, suffused by railway station smells. This memory remains to this day to be one of my most powerful and vivid ones, which I can still hear and feel whenever the need takes my fancy. The often misquoted verse written in a poem called ‘In Passing’ by Brian Harris written in 1967, just a few years before this says:

To be born in Wales,

Not with a silver spoon in your mouth,

But, with music in your blood

And with poetry in your soul,

Is a privilege indeed.

and that privilege is most often seen in the almost physical need or compulsion that the Welsh have to either ‘wax lyrical’, or to raise their voices together in harmony at every opportunity or on any occasion. The sound of Welsh voices singing is always able to touch deep in my heart and soul and this experience in Paddington Station had the effect of elevating this architectural monument of Victorian industry to an almost church like status, or a place of pilgrimage for me. I now rarely go to London, choosing to avoid if it at all possible, and living in Sheffield means that my occasional visits take me through St Pancras: a railway station which although grand, will unfortunately never hold the same place in my heart.

My escape was prefaced by two or three years of anguish and despair which I internalised and didn’t communicate to anyone, not even my long-term boyfriend. This may have been because I couldn’t find the words to express what I was experiencing but with forty-eight years of hindsight, I now realise that it was more likely that I was unable to recognise, acknowledge, or articulate my feelings at that time as I had no idea what those feelings were or why I might be feeling the way I did. I had passed the 11 plus exam and attended an all-girls grammar school, much to my mother’s relief as I had always said that I would have preferred to go to the secondary modern school, but I always had a sense of imposter syndrome and felt that I shouldn’t really be there. I had always been a tom-boy who didn’t get on with girls as I just didn’t understand the girly stuff, and still don’t. Outside of school, I had a great all male (except for me) friendship group where I was accepted as one of ‘the gang’. We did exciting things together. I wasn’t allowed a bike, but the boys lent me theirs and taught me to ride in an empty car park. They looked after me when we played endlessly on the local riverbank and in derelict garages. In school, I didn’t fit in well in an all-girls environment and I only had one friend at a time to relate to. During lunch time, she and I used to sit on a grassy bank which formed the boundary between the Grammar School and the nearby Secondary Modern School’s playing fields, where we chatted with two of the boys who I knew out of school. Despite being bright I only just got by academically and I realise now that I lacked the academic skills and motivation to achieve as I knew I could. I think that now, someone might recognise that I had weak executive functioning skills, but this was simply unheard of at the time, and I suspect that I was just labelled as ‘disorganised’, ‘untidy’ and ‘lazy’. In fairness, I think that I was very skilled in devising ways to hide or mask my difficulties. Homework was a contradiction between the words home and work and to this day I don’t know how I was allowed to get away without doing any. I do remember sometimes hurriedly scribbling something in panic, just before the teacher arrived in class, so that I at least had something to hand in, but I was never questioned about its many absences. My parents didn’t seem to have any expectation that I should do schoolwork at home, so they never asked if I was doing any or what marks I was getting. Needless to say, I did badly in those subjects which required additional reading, or memorising rules or learning vocabulary, relying purely on my short-term memory and understanding of concepts, which was just about good enough for me to succeed, up to my GCEs. I walked the one and a half miles to and from school every day carrying a heavy, hand-made, leather satchel which contained my books for the whole of the week, because I realised this would enable me to just pick it up every morning with no preparation. I never knew which lessons I had on which day and in those days, with the exception of specialist subjects such as cookery or science, most lessons were delivered in the form room, so I didn’t have to worry about being in the right place at the right time. I followed the other girls when we had to move classes, so it was never obvious that I didn’t know where I was going, and my lack of organisation skills wasn’t a problem as I had all I needed for the week in my satchel. If I hadn’t brought ingredients for cooking, then I would just skip that lesson, and no one seemed to notice. The satchel had been made by a saddler in Llanelli market, according to my mother’s rigid sense of what was traditionally required for a grammar school pupil. Unlike a rucksack, which I would probably have preferred, it had one long strap fastening in a buckle about three quarters of the way along. I shortened this by making an additional hole with a hammer and a nail, which enabled me to carry the heavy weight of weekly books high up on my back, on my left shoulder. This was never a problem for me, although I do now suffer with stiffness and rotator cuff injuries in that