AS and NT living: the volcano erupts

A toxic series of events conspired this week to result in a huge explosion (mine). I shouted, cried, told Ethan I didn’t love him and didn’t want to be married to him anymore, and made him sleep on the sofa. Today, with the benefit of time, my period having started (hormones were partly to blame) and Ethan having been honest with me for the first time in months and having tried really hard since then to be a better husband, things feel calm – even hopeful – again. I know that it won’t last, that Ethan’s goodwill and extra effort will wane, that my intolerance will build up again, that we’ll both slip back into taking each other for granted and pleasing ourselves. But I’m encouraged by the fact that Ethan does care enough to keep on trying to give me what I need, that bust-ups for us don’t mean break-ups and that he, actually, is tolerant of me with my all my intensity, dramatic claims, hurtful words and emotional outbursts. I think Ethan finds me as hard to live with at times as I find him – we’re just so different.

Last week started badly when I went to collect the old dear that I take to a coffee morning on a Monday only for her to tell me bluntly,“I saw Ethan walking home with the kids last week. He looked miserable. What was wrong with him? Oooh, he had a face like thunder.” I replied, resignedly,“That’s just how he looks. That’s how his face is in relaxed mode, when he’s not forcing himself to smile.”

It’s true. Ethan’s natural look is one of irritation. The fact has bothered me ever since my dad observed, a little pointedly, that some people’s natural facial expressions are pleasant and content and happy-looking, even if they’re not smiling; whereas other poor souls seem blighted with a face that constantly looks angry and at odds with the world. Ethan has this second kind of face. I know it. But it’s not nice to have people notice and comment on it first thing on a Monday morning. 

On Tuesday (day one of two days off that he had) he said, surprising and delighting me in equal measure that he was going to go and help a friend to fix his floor. I hung around for the first hour or so after the kids had gone to school – no sign of Ethan leaving the house. He got sidetracked by the burglar alarm playing up and got snappy if I suggested that he should maybe leave that for later and get to his friend’s house. When I left for work, he assured me that he was about to leave to go and help his friend. Twenty minutes later when I had to pop back unexpectedly I opened the front door to the sound of the TV blasting out and the front room shutters down. I was more sad and frustrated than anything else – that he’d lied to me to get me off his back and that he’d chosen to watch (yet more) TV rather than be with a real person in real life building up a friendship. I tried to let it go but couldn’t stop myself – I phoned him up to tell him what I thought about his decision. He said sorry, and I hoped that might mean he’d re-thought his decision. But, an hour later when I drove past the house again, the car was still in the drive and the front room shutters still firmly closed.

Thirdly, on Thursday evening, we were all set to have a cosy evening together in front of the fire, me still feeling pretty deflated by him, when he lost it - suddenly, totally and utterly - over me putting Sam’s shoes on top of the log burner to dry out. “What do you think you’re doing?” he bawled at me. “Don’t ever do that again. Are you stupid?” etc, etc. Even omitting the fact that I was only going to put them on there for a few minutes and was going to be around to make sure nothing untoward happened, it was a horrible way to speak to me. Really, really aggressive (I can’t accurately reflect the volume and disdainful way the words were hurled out here). He finished his tirade, which had taken place in front of the children, by saying “And I’m not going to apologise. You deserved that.” As if I’d just been giving a good thrashing that would, in the long-term, do me good. I was crushed. And angry. And just utterly fed up with putting up with him. I helped get the kids to bed then kept out of his way. Then decided I couldn’t not respond so stormed into the living room and told him, frankly, what an ass he was and never, ever to talk to me like that again. I told him he made me miserable and ended my tirade in tears. I went up to the bedroom to cry, imagining that what I’d said was enough for him to follow and apologise. He stayed downstairs, ate his tea and watched a programme about traffic police. 

I was totally gutted – lonely, sorry for myself, angry, disappointed. And slightly crazy with hormones. I couldn’t leave it. I went downstairs and had another huge go at him. I really didn’t hold back and said some awful things about the kind of person he was and how I should never have married him, etc, etc. In his defence, he genuinely didn’t realise I was that upset or that I’d been crying (impossible for a NT to believe, but I’ve been with him long enough and read enough books to know this is true). Things were only made worse when I went to the freezer for ice-cream only to discover that he’d eaten the entire tub of in one sitting before I’d even got a look in. I know it doesn’t seem like an earth-shattering discovery but it’s the selfishness behind the action – that he didn’t give a single thought to me and that I might want some, whilst he was scoffing the lot. Or, worse, that he did but scoffed it anyway. It didn’t help that he had done exactly the same, with exactly the same ice-cream (Ben and Jerry’s peanut butter cup for anyone that’s interested) a few weeks before and I’d had a go at him about it then. 

He spent the night on the sofa and I spent the night thinking about leaving him. 

The thing is that the almighty row, the awful things I said and the fact he actually got how miserable he was making me – resulted in things changing. First of all, he apologised – not just for that night but for the last few weeks when he’s been far from easy to live with. Secondly, he was honest with me about how down and lonely he’s been feeling and how hard it’s been for him to force himself to do anything other than work (which in itself, is a hugely social, hugely exhausting thing for Ethan). And thirdly, he’s tried so hard since – to do more at home, to talk to me about how I am and about how he is, and he spent the whole weekend with other people: out on Friday night prompted by me, and helping the guy he should have helped earlier in the week all day on Saturday. For my part, I’ve gone back to reading more about AS, which really helped me see Ethan’s actions from an AS, rather than my NT perspective. And which helped me to separate his AS-induced actions from the person he is underneath the frustrations of his AS. The interview with Tony Attwood (http://www.different-together.co.uk/frequently-asked-questions) is a great place to start...

And so we’re still together – and in a far better place than we were last week. Perhaps we needed a huge fall-out like that to clear the clutter and start again. What gives me strength is that, whatever his shortfalls, Ethan will keep trying. He stays committed and loyal to me however vicious I get in my attacks (because I do), he always says sorry (although it sometimes takes a while) and he keeps trying to do better.

I know not everyone with an AS spouse is so fortunate.

Aspergers, miscommunication and being Different Together

Unbelievable! After a week of stressing and hours spent looking for my car/house keys and not wanting to tell Ethan because of how he would react - I finally 'fessed up on Tuesday night. Only to discover that he'd had them all along.

Apparently he told me that he was taking one set away to avoid the chance of them being lost. Really don't remember that. He says I was walking in the opposite direction at the time and doing something with the kids....well there you go then. It didn't occur to him to wait until a calmer time when I might actually be able to take in what he was telling me! Anyway, all's well that ends well I suppose, although could have done without the week of stress. It did give the opportunity to have a discussion though about why I'd held back from mentioning it for so long - for fear of how he'd react. I told him that it's very lonely feeling  I can't be open with him about life's little hiccups and frustrations, like lost keys, because of how stressed and annoyed he'll get. Told him that, when things go wrong, as they inevitably will, I need to know he's not going to make things worse by obsessing over it and spreading an air of tension and gloom over us all. He promised to try harder not to over-react and get angry the next time something annoying happens. We'll see...

In the meantime, I need to tell you, dear readers who have stuck with me on this journey we all travel, that this blog will be changing.

I'm linking in with the absolutely fantastic website and support network - Different Together. For any of you who haven't discovered it yet, visit www.different-together.co.uk  The website is filled with information on living with an AS partner as well as a forum where you can chat to other people living the same reality. There's also an excellent interview with Tony Attwood on the home page.

In future, I'll still be writing this blog, it'll still chart the everyday challenges and mini triumphs of living as an NT partner of an AS spouse, but I'll also be pulling in news and content from the Different Together website and Facebook page and keeping people up-to-date with developments for the Different Together conference that looks likely to take place in May 2016. And the blog will look a bit different too and will probably change its name. But rest assured - it'll still be Ethan and I muddling through!

Lost car keys and aspergerisation

I’ve lost my car keys. I keep hoping they’ll turn up – when I’m not actively looking for them (because I’ve already looked everywhere I can think of) - but it’s been two weeks and they haven’t appeared yet.

It’s a relief to be able to write it down – to tell you. Keeping niggling worries to yourself makes them worse. But I can’t tell Ethan. He’ll hit the roof. And we’ve only just recovered from horrible rows and resentment last week over an £18,000 BMW Ethan wanted to buy (yes – really, never mind that we’re overdrawn and getting more so each month, in debt on our credit card and have all our kids birthdays and my 40^th in the next few months...oh, and that we can’t afford to go on holiday this year. Ethan couldn’t seem to link any of this to the fact that he wanted a BMW. He seemed reluctant, or unable, to let his desire for a BMW be influenced by the money we have (or don’t have) as a family). Anyway, we’ve just about managed to find a compromise and the tension and hopelessness that has hung over us for the last week has gone. I really don’t want to start a whole new thing with the loss of my car keys (my house keys are on the same key ring).

It’s at times like these that I mourn the fact I don’t have a husband that I can share the whole of life with. I’d love to be married to someone who I could feel confident telling I’ve lost my car/house keys, knowing that he would rib me a bit but that, overall, he’d roll with it as one of the little yet constant annoyances in life, we’d take appropriate  action and get over it. But with Ethan, I know it will lead to him being totally stressed, aggressive and frustrated with me for not putting the key in the ‘key place’ that he’s created and that the frustration and irritation will linger for days, possibly weeks.

Keeping things from him (we’ve got one of Sam’s seven-year-old friends coming for a sleepover on Friday and I’ve not plucked up the courage to tell him that yet) is one of the ways that I feel I’ve been aspergerised through living with Ethan for so long. My habits, tendencies, outlook even have been tempered by how he reacts to things. Take a couple of weeks ago when we had friends over. They’d arrived at 2pm to go for a walk and then we’d invited them back for drinks and nibbles. Both of us expected that our guests would leave by about tea-time. When at 10pm that evening they still hadn’t left, I could sense Ethan getting stressed, drying up, extracting himself from conversation (fair enough – he’d been making the effort for the last 8 hours. He had pretty much run a social marathon and needed to rest). He started conspicuously looking at the clock, he’d already put our youngest child to bed as a kind of almighty hint (unfortunately our guests had drank too much and failed to pick up on it!), he’d tidied up around us all and sighed a few times. I felt myself getting more and more stressed too – because I was worried about what he might do/say next, because I knew how desperately he needed them to leave now and partly, although it’s hard to admit it, because although I used to love drinking and chatting into the wee hours, a combination of young kids and being married to Ethan has changed me. I find that, almost by proxy, I too want my social exchanges these days to fit into a specific time-scale with a start and end point and to not go on too long. I like impulsive meet-ups or long conversations or parties that run on less and less. And then I feel frustrated with myself for feeling this way instead of just relaxing and enjoying myself. Perhaps this would have happened to me anyway as I got older and had more responsibilities and life got busier – but I think being married to Ethan and always conscious of how long he can keep going until he hits burn-out or says something rude and we need to get him out of there, has made me far less relaxed and more intolerant too.

Well, no-one’s broken into our house or stolen our car yet – perhaps I should just keep quiet about the keys and hope Ethan never notices...

The Clarke family (a frustrated wife, 3 moaning kids and a husband with Aspergers) go sledging - Take 2!

So, we attempted the sledging thing again.

I’d prepared a carnic (picnic in the car) to eat on the way, I’d convinced Ethan that there would be enough snow on the hills to sledge and I had a rucksack filled with gloves, balaclavas and extra socks. Whilst I prepared everything I thought we might need, Ethan lingered (as he does) over his morning routine of time sitting on the loo with his Iphone followed by a lengthy shower.

The time came. We extracted ourselves from church swiftly and headed for the hills. Unfortunately, it seemed, everyone else was doing the same. The queue started as soon as we hit the main road. I, in forced cheeriness, tried to make the best of it with comments like: “doesn’t everywhere look pretty in the snow?” and “who’d like another piece of pizza?” Ethan, when he bothered to speak at all in-between sighing loudly, said things like “We’re going to be stuck in this queue for at least another 40 minutes” and “Great [meant sarcastically]– now it’s snowing. This is going to be pleasant.” He made no effort to join in general conversation and looked thoroughly hacked off for the entire journey (more on Ethan’s face which seems to be frozen in an expression of gloom another time...). After a while, my irritation at him had built up sufficiently for me to blow a fuse. I told him he was selfish and miserable and spoiling everyone’s afternoon, that we couldn’t do anything about the traffic but what we could do something about was our attitude, that I was sick of being the one always trying to jolly things along while he did everything he could (knowingly or not) to drag everyone down, that the very times that things don’t go to plan are the very times we need to support each other to make the best of things. I was shouting and close to tears. The kids witnessed it all and the subsequent mood for the afternoon seemed set.

When we finally got into the country park, I spotted a hill where a few kids were sledging and suggested we park there. As Ethan went further along the road to turn round, I spotted another hill, closer to the official car-park where people were sledging and suggested that we went there instead. Ethan snapped at me “Can we just stick to what’s been agreed please?” – unable or unwilling to bend and flex with circumstances.

Finally, we got to a hill. From the moment we got out of the car Oliver (aged 4) started moaning that he was cold and wanted to go home, Sam (aged 6) started crying when snow went down his welly and Ava (aged 9) spent the whole time desperate for a wee! In-between all the moaning and arguments we had some nice moments (Ethan made a snowman with the boys - which Oliver then proceeded to kick down making Sam cry, Ava enjoyed the sledging - until the sledge went over a tree stump and broke and Ethan and I found an acceptable way to take our aggression out by throwing snowballs at each other – it even had the effect of seeming to the kids that mummy and daddy were having fun together!)

Why is it so hard to have fun together as a family? Either the kids moan and argue or Ethan is miserable and withdrawn (or both). The eternal pessimism of him gets under my skin and frustrates me hugely so we argue, so the atmosphere between us is tense, which I’m sure plays a part in the kids behaving as they do.

As is the cycle, Ethan apologised afterwards for the way he behaved. He says he felt really angry (all it had taken was a traffic jam to create this anger) and he couldn’t snap out of it. I appreciate the apology – but am getting a little (a lot) tired of the pattern: Ethan gets angry/frustrated/gloomy over tiny things (just life, really) and makes no effort, which causes an argument between us, which ruins our family time together. Repeatedly saying sorry after the event doesn’t quite cut it.

And yet, what can I do but accept his apology (and apologise myself for my outbursts of temper and the hurtful things I say) and keep on going? I have to believe that we’re both capable of better, that we’ll both keep trying, that – one day - we’ll go on a family outing and, even if there are a few hiccups along the way, I'll report back that we had a lovely time.

Aspergers and the details of life

On the one hand, my Aspergers husband is tuned in to the fine details of life - the exact shade of green in a spring meadow, what someone is saying on the other side of a crowded, noisy pub, the type of moulding on a kitchen knife that a person is using to chop salad when we go round for dinner...

On the other hand, details that are actually important completely pass him by. A couple of weeks ago, in a bid to find enough snow to sledge on, we drove into the countryside. The road we stopped on was fairly narrow and the curb was high - definitely a 'park two wheels on the pavement' job. There were two points at which Ethan could have driven up a drop curb onto the path (which I pointed out twice - once for each drop curb). Yet he completely ignored me (he said later he didn't hear me - although I was speaking loud and clear. The reality was that he was aware I was speaking but wasn't actually listening to what I was saying - a too frequent, very frustrating pattern). He rammed the car up the full curb, too fast, and burst our car tyre (the £150 car tyre that had been fitted a month earlier). I was adamant the kids should at least get a go with their sledge out of the whole sorry incident - but it was no fun. I was hugely p****d off, he was grumpy and distant and, although they gave it their best shot, it was hard for the kids to have unhindered fun in-between two frosty parents.

In his defence (because, of course, that's the approach he took. A man with Aspergers, at least my man with Aspergers, finds it so hard to accept responsibility and say he's sorry) Ethan says that he didn't realise the curb was so high. And yet he works in facts and practicalities. I'm not car aware at all and even I could see that the curb was flipin' huge! And anyway I TOLD HIM! If only he'd listen.

The second incident, and I know I just sound like a frustrated wife moaning about her husband now...is that he threw away my year planner. Fair enough, you may think, since 2014 is well and truly over. But this was a September to September year planner. And it was covered in my scrawl highlighting important dates, deadlines, when I'm away with work, etc. It wasn't his fault though (of course it wasn't) because he didn't realise it ran until September (is there a theme emerging here?!) That's OK then. Although it did say, in very large bold letters across the top: Year planner: 2014-2015. But it's unreasonable of me to expect him to actually read what something says - or, indeed, to simply ask me if I want to keep what's mine. Silly thought.

We survived Christmas!

For many people with Aspergers, Christmas induces feelings of dread...

Social engagements, extended amounts of time trapped in the house with the family, small children screaming (in our house anyway!), mess (in our house anyway), noise, lights, a loss of normal routine...my Aspergers husband was even subjected to sitting through an all-singing, all-dancing, shouting, flashing, dough-throwing pantomime whilst selected children (ours and my sister's) at various times throughout the evening, wriggled on his knee, trod on his toes, argued, shouted "I believe in fairies" in his ear and clung onto him with sticky ice-cream fingers. He did us all proud: only closing his eyes for extended periods twice (that I saw) and bravely putting on a smile each time I caught his eye!

For partners, it can be a time of heightened stress, will or won't your Aspergers spouse play ball? How many family events can they take before they lose it/say something rude/get their iphone out during conversation? Would it be better to just leave them at home? Or will that in itself seem rude/miserable? Will they remember to act pleased with their present from your parents even if they wonder why on earth they would buy him such a thing?!

Personally, some of our biggest blow-outs have been over Christmas, usually involving his engagement, or lack of it, at social events and/or his irritability with the kids' high-volume over-excitement on Christmas Day. But things have definitely got better. A huge contributor to this is Ethan himself. I know that Aspergers is Aspergers and that his brain won't suddenly rewire itself into a jolly, optimistic, chatty, tolerant, happy-go-lucky geezer just because it's Christmas...but, for us at least (albeit with a lot of effort and the promise that days of high sociability will be punctuated with escape time on his computer) Christmas can be a 'success' with Aspergers, it just takes a bit of adjusting - both of expectations and in practical terms - on both sides.

I don't force Ethan to come to every friend and neighbours' gathering anymore. I don't get stressed or disappointed if he's not very 'chatty' at family parties, I accept that, sometimes, while I watch a Christmas film with the kids, he might need some time recharging without us, and I try not to take to heart his odd small explosion over a spilled drink or bit of mud on the carpet. He, in turn, does his best to be 'with us' in mind as well as body when we are together and to accept that he is going to be with us a lot more than normal - for a time - and that the house is going to be messy and that life will be loud. But that it will pass. This acceptance from us both, along with the QI book of 1,411 facts that I got him for Christmas-escape time during extended sessions in the loo, has meant this Christmas has been not just survivable - but pretty good.