This ship has been drifting for a while now. We left the Law dockyards some time ago - as you may have read - but we haven't put into port anywhere else yet. This sense of being rudderless has recently become more unsettling to me, which I think is progress!
To leap from one clumsy metaphor to another with the grace of a hungover hippo, I'd say that up until a couple of months ago I have been wading grimly through the swamps of Right Now with occasional foreys into the marshland of Later This Week. The shining far away land of The Future has appeared continuously out of reach and out of focus with the perspective never shifting.
In the swamps and marshes of Right Now and Later This Week there is quite simply no room for existential doubt or identity crisis. That treacherous terrain is littered with immediate and pressing mysteries that you step on, like horrible booby traps, unsupecting.
Great mysteries like
"why sandwiches are wrong today even though they are identical to those made yesterday",
"how on earth are we going to get the Boy on his school bus today when he is refusing to get out of bed let alone dress and eat breakfast?"
and my personal favorite, a wily hit and run terrorist that smacks you between the eyes and leaves you reeling
"why is the whole world wrong with no apparent trigger or remedy".
Ok. You get the point. Parenting a child with autism takes a huge amount of what can be summed up as "emotional capital". For a couple of years we have been simply getting on with it and hanging in there. Just about.
But we are emerging from the swamps. We don't look pretty but we have survived. Our beautiful Boy is now at a wonderful special school and is transformed in two terms. We have an amazing autism assistance dog from Dogs for the Disabled about whom I blog here and said Wonderdog changed our life in his first four weeks with us - and continues to make every single day brighter and easier.
And so now I've started to emerge blinking into the daylight and sniff the air like an autism assistance dog looking for buried cat poo (don't ask) and so I am starting to look towards The Future. And my clumsily metaphorical rudderless ship is therefore drifting perilously close to the looming iceberg of What Shall I Do With My Life.
Answers on a postcard*
(*Clue: NOT be a lawyer)
