The A-Game Part 4: Lessons from my autistic daughter on achieving your potential

It's all Hagment, really.         

“Can I take it in for show and tell?” she asks me delightedly. “No, darling…I…I…don’t think it’s appropriate” I respond. “Take a picture then!” she commands without inflection.?

My son, Luca, gasps for breath, his bright blue eyes turning red and swollen from the big round tears cascading down his face. He is devastated. He is overcome with grief.

“Don’t look so happy about it” my husband states, nodding towards her brother. ?“Let her feel however she feels” I retort.

I take the picture. She is exultant. She is joyful. She doesn’t look at Luca. She is transfixed. Two ends of a spectrum, both experiencing the same event.

The parakeet, which has soared into our (newly cleaned) window is dead.

She didn’t want it to die. But it is dead. Life was in the past. It now means she can stroke a (dead) parakeet. She is tender. She is curious. There is nothing to lament.

• She likes the “flouriness” of its soft, tufty feathers.?
• She likes the “frizzy-but-smoothness” of its wing feathers.
• She doesn’t the feeling of its “blobbly” little feet.

She doesn’t understand why anyone would be sad. We dig a hole. We complete the mandatory “dead celebration”. “I wonder how it’s?getting on in there?!” she ponders. Followed in the same breath by a query over whether clouds taste “stuffy”. Luckily this time it is a rhetorical one. ?

It’s hard to disagree with her rationality. It makes sense to her.?I feel like I've flown into a window. But I do agree silently that clouds would taste “stuffy”. ?It’s her world. It makes sense to her and she seems to be drawing me in. But she has no empathy for her older brother who is now knelt sadly by the grave and I can’t relate to that.

“Harper can be…a little egocentric” her school tell me during her 6-monthly SEN review. “She only likes doing things her way”. ?I nod, quietly.

Trying to teach the concept of empathy to a child with autism is like trying to teach someone the concept of humour.

How do you describe why and how to feel laughter. She laughs a lot. But she doesn’t feel empathy a lot. And I don’t know how to teach her. In the absence of true empathy, she develops occasional mimicry. She will coo, and ahh when is socially acceptable. But it’s skin-deep and this is why girls are rarely diagnosed with autism until much later.

“And, she does the bare minimum, but we know she has more potential”. ‘Potential’ is a word that chokes me. Knowing, that women are seldom judged on potential, and more so on performance. “How are you asking her to complete the work?” I question. “Well, when we ask her to write as many sentences as she can, she will write one” they state. “Ah…I see where you are going wrong” I answer. “She CAN write one, so she has written ONE!” They gaze at me as though I’m from Mars. I feel lonely. “Have you asked her to write a specific number of sentences?!” ?I leave them to ponder that one, hoping they will see this as an opportunity for her to ‘reach her potential’. ?

You have to speak to her in a manner that makes sense to her.

Not in a “the parakeet has gone to heaven” way. In a “the parakeet is dead” way.

I want to ask them if they think clouds would taste stuffy. But I don’t.

Her life is experienced through facts. Through clear language. Through performance. Her potential is phenomenal. In a game of (the gender-neutral version of) hangman, her chosen word (which we failed to guess) is ‘hagment’. “What is ‘hagment’” we ask curiously. “HAGMENT!” She responds loudly and with more conviction in order to put this interrogation to bed. “Put it into a sentence then” we smugly request. “I spelled HAGMENT!” she cries. She wins the game.

She could write the words ‘written’, ‘beautiful’, ‘chocolate’ and ‘laughter’ at the age of 4. She has potential of a stuffy cloud if she is allowed to reach it. It’s not her that needs to change. We need to help her unlock her potential in a way that is meaningful to her. It’s us that needs to change.?