Showing posts with label Choices. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Choices. Show all posts

Wednesday, 16 December 2015

Frazzle

She’d been on a Christmas shopping trip with her class. 

Yesterday’s quest had followed a similar life-skills/shopping expedition last week, when things hadn’t gone smoothly. All I need to say about the previous trip is this: she'd spent the money I’d given her for LUNCH on a book. Parents of non-PWS kids may gloss over this sentence. PWS parents will probably do a sympathy faint. (Her teacher sorted it out, in case you were worried). 

And sure enough, yesterday’s visit proved another occasion when her brain over-frazzled with the stimulation of a big shopping centre and the stress of making choices.

I’d told my daughter exactly what the money I’d put in her purse was for. She was under strict instructions to use the cash for the following: 
  1. Lunch (menu choice written down on a note in her bag)
  2. A Christmas present for her dad (a diary)
  3. A Christmas present for me (bubble bath)
[Trust me on this, she needs the specifics].

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES was she to buy a book, or spend any money on herself this time.

A few hours later she arrived back at school having successfully shopped for a suitable dad diary, and having had a Maccy-Ds with her classmates and - as per her instructions -ordered herself a (relatively) low-fat wrap. 

But it was what else she’d bought that was interesting. She took a children’s magazine out of her bag, and looked at me. I raised an eyebrow.

“This is for me, Mum, but I didn’t buy a book - I bought a magazine which came with a free book attached!”

“I thought I told you not to buy anything for yourself!”

She looked stricken and stammered: “I did get you this...”

And presented me with a large bottle of water. 

I think it's funny today, I do, I really do. 

But yesterday I should have poured it over myself to wake myself up, catch myself on, and not do what I did next, which was to lecture her about listening to instructions, looking after her money better, and not being sidetracked when she was shopping for certain things.

Because I’d forgotten that she’d traipsed round a big shopping centre all day. Had had to make choices all day. Had had to deal with money, and change, and budgeting, which she doesn't really understand properly. How she'd worn herself out completely.

She was shattered. And now she stood there in floods of tears. Her anxieties were popping up one after the other like a game of Whack-A-Mole. She couldn’t contain them. I couldn’t contain them.

The emotional storm subsided. Well, hers did after a shower, hugs, and the lure of her pillow and duvet. I tucked her into bed, trudged downstairs, and sat recriminating myself, whilst she slept like a log.

Today she went on another trip, catching the bus with her sixth-form buddies and their teacher, and heading to Wetherspoon’s for the Christmas dinner she thought she was going to miss when it looked like she’d be in hospital.

And this afternoon she returned, triumphant. She had kept enough cash to pay for her food. She’d foregone her morning snack in order to be able to have the extra calories in her special meal. And she’d bought me a present, which I was not allowed to see.

Fuck knows what it is. I’m just pleased she’s in one piece. And that I am, too.


Song is The Decemberists - Foregone.

Tuesday, 8 May 2012

Choices

My daughter tied herself in knots today, struggling with choices.

She was red-eyed and wild-headed when she got home from school.

Her teachers are trying to gently wean her off her current obsession with Hello Kitty by trying to get her to occasionally choose something else when she has the option. 

She’s so single-minded about her inexplicable love for the Japanese animated cat character that she’s announced she doesn’t like anything apart from Hello Kitty.

So the innocent suggestion that maybe she could pick a different picture to be used on her reward tokens went down like a cat in a sack in a well.

The tokens are little laminated pictures that the teachers stick on the wall of the classroom under the pupils’ names when they complete good work, or behave well. Unsuprisingly, my daughter’s icons have a feline theme. And she really didn’t want to change them.

We had a good hour of discussion on the matter. I say discussion, it was like looping the loop on a verbal rollercoaster and ending up back where we started, slightly out of breath and with a headache.

After some further contemplation, however, she suddenly voiced a new mantra.

“I am going to try and be good with choices, Mum,” she informed me. “You have to learn to make choices, don’t you? That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to try and choose different things. Because you need to choose, don’t you?”

I agreed. The first time she said it, and then the second, third, fourth and fifth. By the 50th, despite my ability to filter out the repetition (a skill I’ve developed over the years to cope with the perseveration element of her syndrome, although my Mum would say I’ve always had ‘selective hearing’) I’d lost interest and much of the will to live.

I patiently explained to her that perhaps she’d talked about this whole thing for a little bit too long and that it might possibly have started to become annoying.

She tipped her head to one side, raised her eyebrow, and gave me a withering look.

“It’s because I’ve got Prader-Willi Syndrome, mum. You should know that by now.”


Video is Fat Boy Slim - Weapon Of Choice

"You can go with this,
Or you can go with that".

Related posts: 
Magazine 
Perseveration