For my son, I tended to opt for "quirky" rather than any of the many acronyms on offer, such as ASD (autism spectrum disorder), ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), ODD (oppositional defiance disorder) or my favourite PDD-NOS (pervasive development disorder, not otherwise specified.)
But I digress. There I am back in my doctor's consulting room, trying to organise to go to see another doctor, who won't really understand my son, to get a diagnosis I don't really want, and being lectured about how I can't get a referral unless I get a Kafka-esque report from the Ministry of Education saying that he needs a diagnosis in the first place.
In case you're interested, even with the requisite report, the waiting list to see a developmental paediatrician is about six to eight months. (Have hospitals cunningly cut their waiting lists using the Procrustean Bed method: arbitrarily deciding there are whole classes of patients they won't see?)
Anyway, it's lucky I don't really want a diagnosis for my son, because I am rather inclined at this juncture to give up on this practically fulltime venture of trying to manage my son to be "normal", whatever that is, and just let him grow free to be as gloriously odd as he wants, without a platoon of chin-stroking experts fluttering around telling me I need to feed him more Omega 3s and make him gluten free or have less screen time.
This is the dark side to that cosy aphorism that "it takes a village" to raise a child. Everyone feels they have a stake in telling you how you should do it - which would be dandy if it worked but even the so-called experts don't really know that much.
Also, I suspect that if you are a single mother there is a special feeling of obligation on others to tell you where you are going wrong "just because we care".
So, here is my suggestion. Let's stop telling all mothers all the things they are doing wrong.
Don't tell working mothers to stay at home. Don't tell stay-at-home mothers to get a job. Don't guilt-trip single mothers for failing to onehandedly rustle up a nuclear family. Don't tell mothers with thin children to make food fun. Don't tell mothers with anxious children to make them join in. Don't tell mothers with nerdy children to do team sports. Don't tell hippy mothers to be stricter. Don't tell bourgeois mothers to chill.
Basically, just feel free to cease telling any mother what she should and shouldn't do to make her children more acceptable and successful. Because you don't really know what you are talking about or what success is going to entail in the future or what any of it means really or whether perhaps everything was genetic and thus a waste of time anyway.
And if anyone sends me a helpful message about what supplements I should be giving my son, I'm warning you: I will send you back a dead donkey.
