Asperger's on the Inside

Okay, so after having quit Valcorp, I decided that I really didn’t want to go back into the engineering world or any type of full-time work again—for real this time! My problems in the workplace were something that I still didn’t fully understand, but it was clear that whatever was going on, being in a nine-to-five job had a way of leaving me void. And the more time I had to pause and really feel what I’d gone through, the more I could see just how shut down and damaged I’d become from such prolonged stress. I’d come out of the workplace like a train wreck, and I didn’t want to put myself in any environment that could do that to me again.

Being the driven person that I am, I became focused immediately on what I should do next. Naturally, I had to have a job. More than that, I needed a long-term plan and goals. But nothing I could think of felt like it was going to be better. Perhaps I needed something simpler, I thought to myself. Perhaps I just needed to do a more mundane job. So I spent a little time looking for part time-work that I thought might be okay as a simple job on the side.

However, after sending in applications for a dozen or so part-time roles and having several interviews, the answer always seemed to be the same: I was overqualified. I guess the employers didn’t see me as a serious candidate who was going to stay in the role, and in hindsight, I guess they were probably right. I wasn’t really ready to re-enter the workforce yet. Who knows how long I would have stayed? It left me in limbo, unsure of my next move. Oh, how I hated being in that limbo.

In the back of my mind, I also spent a lot of time thinking about how much I wanted to start a family and began to try to do so during this time. But things didn’t seem to be happening for me quickly, and it became clear after a while that those plans were going to have to wait. Could I not fall pregnant at all? No, I refused to accept that, and later on after the mandatory year of trying, I turned to a fertility specialist to begin the process of testing for issues and taking fertility medication. Everything came up clear, and it was puzzling why things were just not happening for me.

I saw a lady who counseled me briefly over that time, which helped me a lot to find a little of myself again. In particular, I remember one thing she said to me that really changed my perspective on seeking work. She pointed out that I wanted to work because I was running away from something—away from social pressures and being depicted as lazy or a non-contributor in society, not allowing anyone to think poorly of me. But that’s not a good motivation to start anything. The right motivation to do something is from a place of stability toward something I want to do.

She also pointed out to me that I didn’t have to work. I was married, and we had enough income to get by. Puzzled, I replied that I thought it was unacceptable for me to just depend on someone and not give back. How could I accept myself that way? To even consider it for a while, I needed someone to tell me that would be okay. She asked, if she gave me her permission not to work, would that make it okay, and I realized no. She asked how many people would need to give me permission not to work for it to be okay, and I said, “All of them.”

And then I realized the true answer to be only one—myself. I decided to just sit with the idea for a while, and instead of aggressively searching for a job, work on finding myself again, to let the goals and dreams come to me.

Shortly after making that decision, I came up with the idea that I might like to study childcare while waiting to start my own family. I wasn’t sure I had ever seen examples of great parenting, and I wanted to know how to do it better for my children, so I enrolled myself in a six-month course with childcare placements two days a week and began a Certificate III in Children’s Services.

I guess in the back of my mind, I also still had the notion that this could be a way to get part-time work. Even though I was trying to let go of the work idea, I would’ve felt too guilty to justify the cost otherwise. So you can give me a slap on the wrist for that! I couldn’t help myself. It gave me something to look forward to and that feeling I love of going somewhere with my life again.

Thrown back into the study environment, I thrived once more. My work was of high quality, and the teacher praised me for thinking outside the box and giving mature, well-considered answers to problems. Socially, I found myself a central member of the small group of women who made up the class and felt popular and admired by others. The group was culturally diverse, and I think that may have helped me fit in so well. I’ve read before that sometimes Aspies can fit in well in other cultures because any nuances in behavior may be dismissed as cultural differences.

The teacher was fantastic and made the class fun with more interactive lessons and a chance for a little play and silliness. For this six months of my life, I was really, really happy again.

And then, in what felt like so little time, the course was over, and I found myself back in employment limbo. Just like that. I remember how, in my exit interview with the teacher, I’d emphasized to her how I was going to miss the group and coming in to study each day. It wasn’t just a thankful comment. It was almost pleading. In reply, she said in a bubbly way, “But look on the bright side. Now you get to work!” And there was that sinking gut feeling again.

Instinctively, I knew that work would only make me unhappy. She and my other classmates thought it was an exciting thing to look forward to. I couldn’t explain why I didn’t feel the same way. And then after the interview, it was just me again. No more fun classes again or people to see each day. I was back to where I had started.

Pregnancy-wise, I’d still failed to conceive for the duration of the course, even on fertility medication, and was starting to lose hope about it ever happening. The concept of potentially growing up childless, when I’d always seen myself as a family person, was devastating and gradually left me more and more depressed with each negative test. Infertility has a way of making you question your whole existence. What’s the point if I can’t have children? Isn’t it the whole biological purpose of life?

This is a topic that I could write a whole book on alone, as those who have suffered from infertility know. It can become the center of all your focus and a real sore point over time. But I’ll spare you that degree of melancholy.

My next attempt to get out of limbo was to follow along with what my classmates were all doing and give working in childcare a try. After all, it was a simple job—the type I’d been after before—and had part-time options. So I applied for a role with a temporary agency that served many high-quality childcare centers in my area. My classmates had tipped me off that this one, McArthur, was a particularly nice place to work if you could get in. The agency was prestigious and required a full interview plus at least a Certificate III and good references.

Fortunately, my placement references were excellent, and I was accepted quickly. The staff at the agency treated me well, allowing me to pick and choose the days that I pleased. I really couldn’t say anything bad about them.

At first, I opted to work just three to four days a week, usually only half days. It was great that I was able to pick my hours each week. The agency would call me up each week with the addresses and shift times, and in I would go. It was as easy as being able to drive to a new location and then just sit and help out with the kids as directed. But very quickly, something was not right again. Ugh. Those old feelings of workplace dread started to re-emerge, much to my dismay.

I thought, “How could this be? This is an easy job and requires little mental effort. That was supposed to make the difference.” But the feelings were unmistakable—exhaustion, anxiety, and feeling sick in the gut both at the idea of going in and while I was there.

I remember one particular day that I found the most unpleasant of all. The center I was at was holding a puppet show for the parents and children in celebration of a special event. The crowd gathered in the one room to watch this display, which was extremely creative, with spectacular lighting and images. It would’ve been enjoyable. All I had to do was sit there and make up staff numbers, really, but all I could think about was how I wanted to run out of the room—the noise, the crowd, my growing self-consciousness.

Trying to analyze what the parents, who had paid for me to be there, would think of me sitting and doing nothing, I was struggling to figure out what I should appear to be doing. Where to look. To make eye contact with people or not. How to remain alert and concentrate on what the children in the room were doing (after all, that is what I was being paid for) while watching the show at the same time. I couldn’t do both, so I opted to tune out of the show and focus on “behaving right.” I was so glad when the day was over. I went home feeling quite unwell. I think this was the time in my life when the social anxiety had become the worst.

It was all so frustrating. The kids were lovely, and I loved being left in the childcare room when it was just me and a few little ones. Heck, I even liked getting laundry duty when I was left alone. I loved folding such cute baby clothes and sheets. I wanted a job just doing laundry. I wished I could just be okay there in general. Why couldn’t I feel okay?

Most of the centers that I went to were lovely places and probably have been great to work at had I found a way to settle there in a room that didn’t stress me. But I also encountered one or two that disturbed me. I recall an experience with one child in particular. Upon entering the room, I was introduced to him with, “This is Miles. You’ll get to know him. He’s trouble.” He looked up at me as an innocent two-year-old—big blue eyes, curly blonde hair, curious, no malice.

Mid-morning during play time in the room, there was a minor incident with Miles pulling out some blocks that he wasn’t supposed to touch. The carer snapped at him to put them away, but he refused and threw a few of them instead. He was told to sit in the block corner indefinitely until he had packed them all away, but of course, this was a two-year-old. Of course he wouldn’t, so a standoff was created.

The carer downright refused to let him out, and he refused to pick up any of the blocks. It went on so long that it caused him to miss his morning tea ^[34]. Then the carer even took a toy of his from home and pretended to throw it in the bin. It didn’t motivate him at all.

Later in the day, another substitute carer and I had difficulty getting Miles to sit at the lunch table. The main carer was on a break, so I was free to interact with the children my own way and went about trying to calm him. I picked up a fish toy and said to him, “If you sit at the table nicely, I’ll let you play with this fish. Do you want the fish?” He said yes. Surprisingly, he cooperated. He sat nicely while he ate his lunch, dipping the fish in and out of the empty part of his water glass.

When the main carer returned to the room, however, she shook her head and snatched the fish off him with a few words of disapproval. Miles screamed. I tried to protest that I’d given the fish to him, but she said, “It doesn’t matter. He needs to learn to sit at the table without toys like the rest of the children. Don’t worry about giving it to him. He’ll forget in two minutes.”

Why does he need to learn so fast, I thought to myself. Why can’t we start where he is and move in baby steps in the right direction? But I didn’t argue. It wouldn’t have achieved anything. Miles protested so much that he was put in the corner. The other children in the room were told, “Miles is misbehaving again.”

The next day when I came back, I gave Miles quite a bit of attention in the form of fun and play. He was skeptical at first, but he came around, and by the afternoon, he was packing up balls for me. I pointed it out to the main carer, thinking what a positive thing it was. Miles was cleaning up! But she replied with something accusing along the lines of, “Ah, so he can pack up. Interesting that he will do it for you.”

What I find interesting is that when I tried to show her, “Look, you treat him the right way, and he responds,” she interpreted it as, “He really is a ratbag. His defiance is on purpose.” I didn’t try and explain the concept any further. She wasn’t going to get it.

I still think about Miles sometimes. It haunts me. How did he grow up? Did he learn to go through life fighting with everyone? Did he learn the assumption that life sucks and that people are going to treat you like crap, so you just have to take what you can get? After all, I learnt in my course that most of our major life assumptions (such as that one) are made when we’re around two years old. That young! Back then, he had so much potential for it to be all turned around. I wonder now if his life is scarred because of selfish intolerance from his carers that he received before it was even in his control.

In the same center (another room) one morning, I found a baby sitting on the floor crying, a little Indian boy or girl (I couldn’t really tell). I went to pick the child up and was told not to bother. “That child cries all day unless it’s carried. It needs to learn to play on its own.” I couldn’t stomach leaving the child. I was defiant (a rare moment for me) and picked the child up anyway until it was comforted. I guess I didn’t help it in the long run.

And so it continued. I could write a few more stories about the same sort of thing (and I actually did in the first draft!), but I think you get the point. So I’ll move on!

After finishing my Certificate III, I ended up working in this temp role for around five or six months and went to perhaps twenty or thirty centers. Some I imagine I could’ve been happy in had I been able to settle in okay in a part-time, comfortable role. However, at least as a temp, those stress feelings really started to gnaw at me, so I slowly cut down my days per week until eventually I decided the stress was just too unpleasant to cope with and suspended coming in entirely. I told the agency I was “unavailable indefinitely” and never did end up going back. I knew something was just wrong with me in the workplace. I needed to figure out what.

As an excuse—probably more to myself than others—I told people I was going to stop work for a while to focus on fertility treatment, as all the stress probably wasn’t helping with that. I went in to have laparoscopic surgery, and the doctor removed some endometriosis. Then I went back on fertility meds that I was only supposed to take for up to four months because, apparently, if it doesn’t happen by then, it’s not going to, and the meds are unhealthy long term.

After the third month, still nothing, and I gave up and prepared myself mentally for starting full-blown IVF. Given my particular issues, there was no guarantee it would work any better than the meds, but I was running out of other choices. And then on the fourth month, out of the blue, the most wonderful thing happened. After eighteen months of trying and undergoing fertility treatment, I was finally fortunate enough to conceive my first son, Isaac.

The news was amazing and quite unbelievable to me. Being off work at the time, I was relaxed and free to have a most enjoyable pregnancy, and I went about reveling in my new obsession of reading up on baby books and parenting advice. You can imagine how fixated on it I became! Two years later, with a few more fertility meds, I was then blessed with another baby boy, Trent, and have remained a stay-at-home mum ever since.

And what can I say but that after having my boys, all those silly worries about being in limbo and what other people think just melted away and became unimportant. Who cares what society thinks of me when I have my boys to think about? They’re the most precious things in my life and the only ones that really matter in the long run. And I’m so glad I was finally able to mature in that way!

But don’t assume my story is over just yet. It turns out that parenting and dealing with other mothers was a brand new ballpark for me, and I had a lot more uncomfortable social lessons to learn.

To be continued…