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A Parent Perspective: Interview with Amanda

/ jess / Leave a comment

This is my latest interview in an occasional series – A Parent Perspective, I spoke to Amanda about life with her four children. Her son, Matthew, has a rare chromosomal disorder and Amanda has battled to get the support Matthew and her family need. Her tenacity is extraordinary but working against the systems that are meant to support has been difficult for all of them.

My son, Ben, is 12 and I knew very little about disabled people or parenting when he was born. My experience of being his mother has been a rapid education in the issues surrounding disability. I find it helpful and interesting to read stories about other people with similar experiences and I hope you might too.

Could you describe your family?

My husband and I have four children who are all quite close together. They are 16,14, 12 and 10. Our 12 year old, Matthew, was born with a chromosomal disorder called 47,XYY which means he has an extra male chromosome.  He is non-verbal with complex learning difficulties and autism. Matthew‘s siblings are great with him and I think it’s taught them so much. There’s so much to consider with Matthew just to keep him safe, and I constantly worry if I’m there enough for the others. 

How would you describe Matthew, and what are his particular challenges?

Matthew loves music and being outdoors. He has a wide taste in music, everything from heavy rock to salsa to Gangnam Style. So there is always music playing when Matthew is around, although he likes nothing more than to press repeat over and over again on a particular track so we never get past the intro!

Matthew is cheeky and inquisitive and has a great sense of humour.  What makes life hard for him is his sensory processing challenges and difficulty with communicating – he’s nonverbal but can be very noisy! We all do some signing and he has a talker on his iPad that he’s learning to communicate with. It’s difficult for him in the wider world because other people don’t know signing.

The lack of communication leads to a lot of frustration. Sometimes he’ll be doing a sign that I haven’t seen before and he’ll look me in the eyes, coming up really close, like he’s trying to say, ‘Why can’t you understand what I’m trying to tell you?’ He has no sense of danger. He’s always on the go, doesn’t sit still, and doesn’t have a sense of social norms or personal space.

How you get the diagnosis of Matthew’s genetic condition?

When he was born it was suggested that he might have Down syndrome because of some physical features.  After a week of waiting and wondering, we were then told everything was normal. About a week later, the consultant phoned to say the blood tests had shown something in Matthew’s chromosomal pattern. At a hospital appointment we were given a Wikipedia print out to explain that Matthew had an extra male chromosome, but we were told it wasn’t much to worry about – he might need a bit of extra help at school.

Matthew was slow to roll over, then crawled when he was about a year old. He started to walk when he was about three but he wouldn’t tolerate wearing shoes – he would scream and kick. I was thinking about autism because he would look up into the distance, and liked to be on his hands and knees and spin a lot. A paediatric nurse agreed there were enough traits to say it looked like a ASD diagnosis. I thought we might get some help as a result but didn’t.

What has Matthew’s school experience been like?

I had come across ABA (Applied Behavioural Analysis – a particular way of teaching children with autism) when Matthew was in preschool and I was very sceptical, but we did an hour a week and saw a change in him. It was all about play at that age, but we started to introduce some learning goals and it went really well. I found out you can run an ABA programme in a mainstream school, where trained tutors support the pupil alongside the class teacher, but once we said we’d like to do so the local authority said Matthew should go to a special needs school. We had to fight and went to tribunal with an advocate and reports to show why he needed it. It was an awful experience to go through, having to argue our case and be cross examined by an aggressive barrister who referred to our son as a ‘drain on the state’. After that stressful experience we won and Matthew started in reception.

Running an ABA programme in a mainstream school brought its challenges. We were responsible for employing the tutors and I felt like an HR and payroll service. If a tutor was sick, Matthew couldn’t go into school. There were lots of challenges trying to get speech and language therapy from the local authority – nobody saw him for two years. When it came to his secondary transfer, the local authority were suddenly interested and wanted to assess the effectiveness of the programme, despite having shown little to no interest over the years. We said he needed to go to an ABA secondary school because that was the only style of learning he was used to and had made excellent progress. The local authority refused, insisting it go to tribunal, although they didn’t have a leg to stand on. Again we went through the expensive process of employing an advocate and getting our own reports from independent professionals. At this hearing the local authority brought witnesses that had never met Matthew and the judge dismissed them in the first 10 minutes and agreed to everything we were asking for. The whole process was unnecessary and made me wonder what happens to the children of parents who don’t have the knowledge of the system or the financial means to fight it. 

Matthew started at an ABA special needs secondary school last November and it’s going really well. He spends a lot of time exploring the school and they’re gradually easing him into more academic tasks. I feel like finally we’ve got him what he should have always had – regular speech and language, OT and physio input. He’s learning how to interact with others and life skills, which is really what I want for him. I’ve found him being at a special school quite hard to deal with as a parent – not that I was in denial about his needs, but coming to terms with the realisation that he’s always going to need someone to keep him safe.

How much support are you getting out of school?

It’s been an ongoing struggle over the years to get any help.  A few years before lockdown, after many years of refusing, the local authority agreed for Matthew to go to a respite home locally. We built up to three weekends a month and some nights during the school holidays. It was incredibly hard because we missed him so much but it allowed us some breathing space. When Covid happened, the home shut immediately which was tough but we just got on with it because everyone was in the same boat. Sadly it then closed permanently.

Since then I’ve lost count of the number of emails I’ve written (often ignored) and phone calls made (and not returned) pleading for support.  We have jumped through so many hoops and a huge amount of intrusion and judgement to then be met with responses such as “Senior management have not agreed to your request” or “Matthew is not at risk of harm so the best place for him is the family home”.  It felt like we were stuck in this Catch 22 situation where you only get help if you fall apart. 

The irony of all this is that whether it’s social care or education, when you have a child with special needs so much time and energy is spent fighting the system when you are already exhausted. 

Recently we have managed to secure a new respite placement for our son which was not easy. The system of processes and procedures is not set up to help parents of disabled children. I have so many feelings of grief and guilt, of not being a good enough parent, of not being able to cope. Deciding to place our child in regular overnight respite has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.  Each time he goes I feel my heart breaking a little more. 

Having a disabled child has opened my eyes to how parents are left to get on with it on their own. I would have assumed that if you need help – such as speech and language therapy for a child who doesn’t speak, or respite so you can recharge your batteries to look after your child – you’d be given that help, but that’s not the case. I’m angry about this and wonder if I’ll ever get to the day where I’m not battling? I have a dream of building a respite home for disabled children because I don’t want anyone else to go through these struggles.

You are a Pilates teacher. Is there a link between being a carer and doing Pilates?

Pilates has been my saviour, in giving me an identity other than mum or carer but also in keeping me strong physically and mentally. Sometimes it’s difficult to fit in my own practice, but without it I would have gone mad by now. It’s a chance to forget everything else and just move. Movement is a kind of meditation. When I’m teaching, I’m totally in the zone, and I have great clients. You build up a relationship and help people make positive changes which is very satisfying.  I also teach in a forest so being outside in the fresh air is another bonus.

Some names have been changed.

Amanda is on Instagram at @kemp_pilates

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Having a break – the guilt of ‘respite’

/ jess / Leave a comment

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For any parent of a disabled child, the subject of respite is a bit fraught. Often because accessing any is difficult, and will have involved tricky conversations/numerous phone calls with various professionals. Partly because the logistics of organising it and physically getting the child there with everything they require are onerous.

But mainly because it’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand we would really like a break. On the other hand we feel guilty for wanting a break. We are on the knife-edge of knowing that the respite place we have carefully considered is able to take care of our child, but also thinking that no-one is going to be able to take care of them properly.

Almost two years after we were first referred for respite provision, Ben has just had his first overnight stay without us. The somewhat casual timescale allowed us time to get used to the idea, due mainly to the first hospice refusing to feed Ben pureed food so us (and yes, I mean us, social services having still not managed to assess Ben) having to find a different place. We agreed to the new referral, then went for a visit, then spent a couple of hours going through aspects of Ben’s care plan, and then stayed there with him for a weekend, then the time came for him to stay there himself.

It’s a nice place. It’s run by nurses, so feels quite medical, but that means they are totally on top of medication and not at all intimidated by disability. It’s purpose-built building with lots of space, bedrooms opening on to gardens, a huge room for craft, fun and reading. Loads of books and friendly people floating around doing interesting things. There are other kids and their siblings, volunteers making bugs and Gruffalos.

To give some context, I am generally quite relaxed about being separated from my children. We are lucky enough to have lots of family in London who are willing to look after our kids. For the first three years or so of Ben’s life he spent one night a week with my mum, he’s spent loads of weekend with his other grandparents. Max has had ‘sleepovers’ of up to five days with grandparents and my sister and her partner. Molly is somewhat testing the model by being more dedicated to breastfeeding than I would ideally like, but at some point we’ll manage to offload her too. But of course, these people are all in our family. And as Ben has got longer and heavier, and the kit he needs has got larger, it’s got trickier for him to stay anywhere that isn’t our home.

We have therefore shifted the model so James and I (perhaps with a child or two) can go away, leaving Ben in our house with various permutations of carers and family. We realise how fortunate we are to be able to do this.

What the respite hospice offers is an opportunity for us to stay at home and for Ben to stay elsewhere, allowing us to be one child down (which with three of them is a welcome release of intensity), spend more time with the other two, and perhaps get some of the stuff done that we have been planning to do for months but never have time to (e.g. unpack boxes from our house move 2.5 months ago, or actually tidy up our tip of a house). I am keen on this idea.

Except that it also involves Ben staying somewhere else without us or any other family, which makes me feel guilty and nervous.

On the morning of Ben’s solo stay we packed up everything he needed (a full car of stuff) and James and a carer set off. I used Molly as a convenient excuse to not be the one to do the drop off. I called the hospice to say they were on the way, and it transpired that there had been some administrative confusion that meant they weren’t expecting Ben until that afternoon. The idea that Ben was about to arrive for his first stay without us, and they weren’t expecting him, that they weren’t all standing around anticipating the arrival of Ben, made me feel so sad and unsure. Should I call James and get them to turn back? The journey can take up to an hour so that would mean spending most of the day faffing around which would be the exact opposite of respite. As I burst into tears, the nurse said no, they would make it work.

When James got there it was actually okay, and Ben seemed alright, and by the time James and our carer left he was happily entertained and content. We spent the weekend with Max and Molly, and realised that looking after two kids is much easier that looking after three but still pretty relentless which was quite a helpful distraction. Max burst into tears on three separate occasions because Ben wasn’t there.

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Then we went out for supper to celebrate our 11th wedding anniversary, and appreciated that organising babysitting for two non-disabled kids is really straightforward. We ate delicious food, drank too many drinks, faded far too early, and came home to Molly screaming in the babysitters’ face. We had called the hospice and they said Ben was okay.

The following day we woke up to a house that only had our kids in it and us. Ben sleeps badly, and we’re lucky to have nightcarers who get up with him during the night and help us in the morning. We also have day carers almost every day which makes our family life possible. But the flipside of having a lot of help is that there is almost always someone in our house. It is a luxury to wake up and potter around in a dressing gown with only Weetabix for kids to think about.

We went for lunch, where we were just about able to have actual conversations with other adults, at tables with benches that wouldn’t accommodate wheelchairs easily. I had fun. But we were with family, and I felt bad that Ben wasn’t there. Even though we probably wouldn’t have gone for the lunch at all if Ben had been, partly because of the wheelchair, partly because trying to go for lunch with all three of our kids and actually expecting to talk to anyone is an absolutely ridiculous idea. We called again and Ben was apparently happy.

When James went to collect Ben that afternoon everything was okay. He seemed relaxed. There hadn’t been any disasters. When Ben got back home and saw me, Max and Molly he was totally thrilled. Max was so happy to have Ben back, equilibrium had been restored. Max was even content to not be able to watch his TV programmes because Ben doesn’t like them.

It was, by all measures, a success. Ben did fun stuff that he wouldn’t have done at home. Max and Molly got more of our attention, James and I had a bit of a break (it’s all relative).

So why do I feel so guilty about it? It reminds me a bit of Ben’s first week at nursery, when he was almost one. I dropped him off and called James on the way out in tears, saying I would never be able to go back to work because we couldn’t possibly leave Ben at nursery… Am I just further along the continuum of internal conflict that starts at angsting about whether kids should go to nursery or have a nanny (or any childcare at all), and ends at going away for a week with no kids? Or am I just trying to justify something that’s not fair on Ben?

I don’t think there’s a right answer, but for now I’m shattered and have a to-do list that stretches over two A4 pages and Ben was happy during this last stay, so we’ll crack on (as Max would say) and hope we’re doing the right thing.

Or at least not doing the wrong thing.

Making our own fun

/ jess / 2 Comments

It is the Easter holidays and like thousands of parents around the country, we are in the midst of filling the time with fun, Last week I thought we would try a cycling session at a velodrome.

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Wheels for Wellbeing run sessions at the Herne Hill Velodrome where they have a variety of adapted bikes and trikes for people to try, though we actually took our own wheels. The velodrome has a professional track with junior cyclists zooming round at high speed, and a flatter track in the centre where children and adults, with various disabilities or none, were cycling around on adapted bikes or trikes – some hand-powered, some with platforms for wheelchairs, some with two seats.

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There were very friendly, helpful people around. One of whom suggested we try some mittens to help Ben keep his hands on the handlebars. He went and found and gently fitted Ben’s hands into them, and they worked so well that I have since bought some. Then we bumped into a boy from Ben’s school, and Max, Ben and he did some races round the track. We were there for an hour and it was fun.

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I don’t want to paint too romantic a picture of this outing: because it is actually impossible to co-ordinate the feeding and sleeping routines of three children, Molly was hungry as soon as we arrived so I unpacked Ben’s trike to the sound of her bawling in the car. As the helpful man was fitting Ben’s hands into the mittens, I was breastfeeding Molly under my jumper while walking around and making sure Max wasn’t crashing into anyone. Elegant it was not.

It was raining for a lot of our visit, luckily not too heavily (not least because I’d accidentally left the car sunroof open) but I refused to let it put us off. If I have managed to get all of us to a velodrome with everything we require and no major meltdowns, we are NOT going home just because we’re getting a bit wet! Even if I have negligently put Max in a sleeveless coat.

When I mentioned the idea for this trip to James that morning as he headed off for work he said it was a brilliant idea but noted that it was also so ambitious that I might be nuts to attempt it. He’s right, it’s easier to stay at home where everything is familiar, but more fun to go out. Especially to new places, with welcoming people. And lovely for Ben to see a friend from school. A velodrome! Awesome!

I would love for Ben to do more things like this, where he could meet other local kids and make friends. Maybe even without us. But that appears to be near impossible.

A social worker phoned me in September last year and asked if she could come and visit us. I didn’t know what had brought us to to her attention, but she soon came round one day after school. Since she didn’t seem to need to interact with Ben, he stayed upstairs with a carer and I sat with the social worker in our kitchen for an hour while she asked questions and I answered them.

I had never met her before so I described our day-to-day lives. She agreed that Ben needs were complex. She said she could see our lives were difficult, with the tilted head and sympathetic voice that is so irritating. She asked how we were coping, but offered no practical help because I said we were doing okay.

When she asked what help we needed I said I would like some holiday activities, or weekend clubs, or any kind of extra-curricular activity for Ben that was with other kids and not initiated by us. We can find fun things for Ben to do and fill his days, but we can’t create a peer group for him to do it with, and this is what we need help with.

I said that, as far as I know, there are no holidays clubs in our borough for children like Ben and she agreed. I found one last summer in another borough and she said I should keep looking for things like this, and that when I found them I should contact her team in plenty of time and they would see if they could fund Ben’s place. Which was nice of her, because I definitely have lots of time to be tracking down holiday playschemes, liaising with local authority bureaucracies and checking they understand Ben’s condition.

I had heard of an adventure playground in a neighbouring borough that runs weekend activity sessions for kids like Ben, and asked the social worker if he could be referred to this. She agreed that it might be suitable, but warned me that there was a very long waiting list. That is not surprising, because multiple boroughs like ours don’t provide anything like this. Fine, I said. As far as I was concerned, this was obviously the start of the referral process. She had asked what I wanted, so I had told her. She was taking this forward. Right?

Six months later I hadn’t heard anything. Wow, this is taking a while, I thought. But when I called to check, the social worker denied any recollection of this discussion. She said I hadn’t asked for any referral and so she had not done it. She was more interested in telling me that I was wrong than in actually starting the referral. It turns out we need to be assessed, and the assessment needs to go to a panel, and if they approve funding Ben, only then can Ben be put on the very long waiting list for the playground.

I have since had conversations with other members of the team, and am still waiting for an assessment. So we haven’t even got to step one. Meanwhile, each of these conversations has made me feel really uncomfortable – the only way to get anyone to even think about starting this referral is to ask, repeatedly, for help, something I find hard to do. It seems like I am really putting social services out by asking for assistance and I appear not to have the language to make myself understood or to have a conversation without getting upset. I know we are not in dire need, and plenty of people are worse off, but why is it so difficult to access support which other boroughs (and most reasonable people) recognise is important?

I am asked exactly what I want, which I’m not certain of because I don’t know all or any of the options. The whole thing has to be framed in terms of us ‘needing respite’, because presumably trying to help a six year old boy make friends isn’t sufficiently urgent. We probably do need some respite, but even saying that makes me feel like I’m letting Ben down.

So we will carry on organising our own fun, and lots of fun there is to be had. We’ll go cycling again and try to find other welcoming activity groups. Luckily Ben has an enthusiastic brother, carers with energy and initiative, and an easygoing personality, but it would be really lovely, and a huge relief, if our borough showed some interest in helping disabled kids be children rather than ignoring them.

Feeding Ben Food

/ jess / 4 Comments

Ben can’t eat or drink. He tried really hard to learn and we all spent a lot of time on it for 18 months but by age two he really wasn’t enjoying it. He got annoyed at the sight of a spoon and the amount he was eating was tailing off.

Drinking had been a problem right from the beginning. His dysphagia (difficulty swallowing) meant he found sucking from a bottle really difficult – if the automatic reflex to co-ordinate sucking, swallowing and breathing is messed up, it is incredibly hard to learn. The human anatomy at the back of the throat is an awful design and Ben just couldn’t get the hang of it. We spent hours trying to feed him by bottle, and later by cup but it was never enough and he was discharged from hospital with a nasogastric tube which we put milk through (the tube went up through his nose and then down in to his tummy).

At just over four months we started weaning in the hope that eating thicker textures would be easier than drinking and be more likely to stay down in his tummy. This was also hard work for Ben and he did incredibly well given the difficulties but he never got close to eating enough food to grow. Meanwhile he had constant and painful gastro-oesophageal reflux.

So at six months old Ben had a PEG inserted in to his tummy, allowing us to give milk through a tube straight in to his stomach. When he was two this was changed to a button.

If you start out from the position that you have a small child and they have to have a tube inserted in to their tummy, which means even when you have given them a bath and they are lying on a towel all perfect and clean they will still have a tube dangling from their abdomen, this might be upsetting. Which it was in some ways. But if you start from the position that your child is unable to feed and you have spent six months putting milk through a tube in their nose which everyone can see, and keeps falling off/out, and their cheek under the sticky plaster is red raw, and when the tube needs replacing you have to get someone (sometimes your poor neighbour) to bind your screaming child in a towel and hold them down while you push a tube up their nose and down their throat, and every time you feed them you have to do a pH test to check the tube is still in their tummy and you aren’t about to pour milk in to their lungs… if you find yourself in that position, then a permanent tube in their tummy seems like a great idea.

James and I have fond memories of a holiday in Scotland when Ben was 18 months old when he could eat half a yoghurt pot for lunch. That was the highpoint of his eating and once we returned to London the combination of physical difficulty and chronic reflux meant he was less and less keen to eat food. To be honest, we were all weary. There are only so many hours you can spend mixing various mashed and pureed foods with baby rice and spooning them into an unwilling child before you feel there are better ways to spend time. Eventually we got to the point of not offering Ben oral food at all.

That gastrostomy tube is a lifeline – it is the reason that Ben is thriving and growing. It represents a choice to spend time reading books and enjoying ourselves rather than trying for hours to eat enough food and drink enough fluid and the inevitable chest infections that would result.

So for the first three years of his life, Ben was largely fed milk – various hypoallergenic, cows-milk-free and enhanced formulas that began to arrive in big boxes every month. As far as dieticians and general medical opinion is concerned, once a child has a tube they are then fed special milk. So on the one hand you have a typical four year old who eats some cereal, a banana, some chicken and maybe a cake. On the other hand you have a tube-fed four year old who is supposed to have 240ml Nutrini Energy milk for breakfast, 240ml Nutrini Energy milk for lunch and 240ml Nutrini Energy milk for supper.

A few years ago I came across ‘blended diet‘ (BD) which essentially means pureeing food with enough liquid to be able to push it through the gastrostomy tube. I am a natural law-abider (the kind of person who feels uncomfortable going in to a pub to use the loo if I haven’t bought a drink, who scrupulously observes any and every queue) and so having found an academic journal article that suggested children had experienced less reflux and eaten more while being fed puree rather than milk, I approached each of our doctors and asked their view before I started. They were generally a bit bemused but didn’t tell me not to. We started putting Ella’s Kitchen baby food pouches through Ben’s gastrostomy tube.

It’s not a complicated idea – we followed principles similar to when you are weaning a baby. We gradually made more complicated purees and replaced quantities of milk for boluses of puree. Our dietician made clear that she could not advocate this type of feeding (she is prevented from doing so by her professional organisation) but was happy to discuss principles with me. She analysed our recipes to see how much protein, carbs etc Ben was getting and suggested supplements.

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Ben is now fed entirely puree. Instead of being pumped full of high calorie milk with a 12-month shelf life he is fed a bespoke recipe of roast chicken, homemade chicken stock, tahini and avocado whizzed up in a high-speed, super-powered (obscenely expensive) blender. Since we have been doing this he vomits less, has fewer reflux symptoms and has been putting on weight (albeit slowly, but that’s always been the case). We add calorie and vitamin supplements to the blends. Doctors comment on how well he looks and how sensible an idea this is.

Through this process, I have rediscovered some of the mothering instinct that should be part of feeding your child. There is no pleasure in hooking up milk to a pump, but there is real and tangible satisfaction to be gained in roasting a chicken, making stock and feeding it to your child. There is enormous joy to be found in buying blueberries in the morning and giving them to your child in the afternoon; to seeing your child grow as a result of the food you have made with your hands even if it doesn’t arrive in their tummy via their mouth.

Health professionals (mainly dieticians and nurses) are concerned about this method of feeding – they are apparently worried the tube will get blocked (this has never happened to us), that there are problems with food hygiene (which the rest of the population manages when feeding their kids). They are uncomfortable that you can’t be sure how many calories are in blended foods. These concerns are such that our nearest respite centre refuses to give children puree via gastrostomy, and therefore Ben can’t stay there without us being there to feed him (which with the best will in the world, is not exactly respite).

It seems to me that a model of care where children automatically have long-life milk for every meal is better suited to those analysing calorie requirements and setting up pumps than it is to the recipient. I resent the idea that most parents feed their children what they want, with some public health encouragement to maximise vegetables, but us feeding Ben kale and quinoa rather than milk full of maltodextrin is somehow rogue. The world is upside-down when goody-two-shoes-Jess is seen as a rebel.

We all make parenting decisions for our kids. Our choice is to feed our son actual food.

Care/Trust

/ jess / Leave a comment

I met a woman recently who has two small children, one of whom has cerebral palsy. She would like to return to her skilled job but can’t find suitable childcare for her disabled child. A therapist recently asked her whether she thought it was right for her to go to work, didn’t she think she should stay at home with her disabled child who really needed her? I suspect no-one ever said such things to me because they somehow knew I might do something regrettable to them. Only someone who has no experience of looking after a disabled child would think it was a good idea for their mother to have no respite.

I went back to work when Ben was 10 months old. It was a bit more complicated than that sounds because ‘back’ meant to an employer who had last employed me three years previously and the job I had gone on maternity leave from was in Qatar.  But ‘back’ I went, for two days a week.

We obviously needed some childcare. I had no real understanding of how it works in London and so had half-heartedly put Ben’s name down for the two nurseries I walked past each day – one a small private nursery who were perfectly friendly but didn’t seem optimistic about us making it to the top of their waiting list any time soon, and an Early Years Centre run by our local council.

I visited a potential childminder and sat in her sitting room as an evangelical Christian TV channel was put on mute. I explained Ben’s needs (being fed through his gastrostomy tube, medications, needing to be entertained, held, helped to sleep). She was happy with all this but she was recently qualified and had no particular experience of a child like Ben. Then she talked about how she would have up to four children with her. I left and phoned my husband, James, to tell him there was no way that woman could look after Ben; that she had no understanding of how relentless a job it would be.

We decided that if Ben was going to be in any kind of childcare it should be a nursery, where staff could take turns if he was miserable for hours and there would be more going on around him. So I called the Early Years Centre to check our progress on the inevitable waiting list and, in a moment of extraordinary luck, the manager answered. She listened to me describe Ben and called back that week to offer us a place for two days a week, starting in a few months.

Leaving Ben at the nursery was very hard. The first time I took him, I called James to weep – convinced that I couldn’t possibly leave Ben, that he wouldn’t be okay, that I could never return to work. It takes an incredible amount of trust to leave any child in someone else’s care – particularly a child who staff have very little experience of, when they have only just been taught how to feed him, when he occasionally chokes and turns blue with no warning.  A child whose care involves liaising with physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech and language therapists, community nurses, dieticians and who will vomit on you at least once a week.

At the same time it was very easy. All I had to do was go to work, stay there all day and pick him up. It meant leaving the house at 6.30am in the dark and crossing London but it was so incredibly liberating. I could walk up any flights of stairs I liked with no buggy, I read books for the first time in almost a year. I felt a bit duplicitous that people might think I was an average 30 year old woman and not realise I was Ben’s mother. At work, people talked to me about all sorts of things that weren’t related to babies or cerebral palsy or mothering. I could pee whenever I liked, and think about what sandwich I might have for lunch. It was restorative and important to remember I was competent.

James was very supportive but inevitably late for work having dropped Ben and a mountain of bags off at nursery. They had generally been up most of the night anyway – Ben’s sleeping was appalling and we had a deal where James got up with him before I worked. And he had a big job at the time so was normally coming home from work at about 7pm to help me get Ben to sleep, having supper, then working on his laptop until after midnight. It was brutal.

Going to work was absolutely the right thing to do, and only possible because I had a very supportive employer.

One of the challenges for a parent of a disabled child is that your child is highly dependent on you, but you need for your own sake and theirs to find a way to have a break. By the nature of Ben’s difficulty in independently eating/drinking/moving/playing, he needs adults around all of the time and they need to be people he and we trust. We feel we should have him with us all the time. But because his needs are so high, because he can’t entertain or occupy himself, because he can’t sleep through the night, we need to have a break and must learn to let others take care of him.

Ben’s keyworker at nursery was a Sierra Leonean woman (let’s call her A) with only one setting when she talked and that was LOUD. Ben had (still has) a startle reflex so he jumped at loud noises and often found this upsetting. He was totally confused by A but over time he accommodated the noise and the enthusiastic physical affection. A, meanwhile, became one of Ben’s fiercest defenders. She was just the first of a number of keyworkers that took it upon themselves to care for Ben, teach him to look and laugh, buy his favourite books out of their own money. Heaven help anyone who didn’t appreciate him (leading to a succession of agency 1:1 assistants who were deemed unsatisfactory and dismissed).

The nursery story isn’t all sweetness and light and I’m sure I’ll come on to the trickier moments (when I actually withdrew Ben for a bit), but at its heart Ben’s nursery is a place that is totally okay with the idea of difference. It has middle class kids living in the surrounding Georgian houses and working-class kids from the estate down the road, social service referrals and children who are there five days a week while their parents work in media, kids from all countries and permutations of families. It’s often a shambles, but as a lesson to kids that everyone should be included it’s doing pretty well and we were all very lucky to find it.

(Photos are of Ben at 10-12 months old, when he started at nursery)