20th of November. What a difference a day makes. That all depends on the day, but there are certain days that make such a huge difference. They flip the switch, they change the narrative, reframe the paradigm, even turn around your worldview. Tuesday, the 18th of December, was one such day.

The Journey Begins: Reluctance to Reunion

The day started with a very familiar reluctance: the hesitancy to leave my house, a lack of energy, and an overwhelming lack of enthusiasm. I was battling feelings of guilt because I was visiting my previous hometown and wouldn’t be catching up with old friends, alongside worries about not feeding the birds during a cold snap. Then came the usual frantic check: Did I lock the door? Did I turn off the plugs?

By the time I’d got to the train station, however, a tiny spark of excitement had started to ignite. I was heading to Bristol, and I had a lovely evening ahead with my eldest son, daughter-in-law, and two beautiful grandkids. It was an evening filled with gorgeous giggles, comforting cuddles, and a delicious dinner, topped off by a satisfying slumber.

The Magic of the In-Between

I can’t forget that wonderful feeling you get when reading a child off to sleep. You both get lost in the story, and then their eyelids gently close, open again, and then close longer this time. Unable to resist sleep any longer, they finally surrender to that delicious moment—for children and adults too, I suppose—where you feel so safe and secure in between the awake and the sleep worlds. It is one of life’s greatest pleasures and gifts. Words from the pages of a book, taking the reader and the listener off on a journey into Dreamland—it’s amazing. There should be a word for this. Maybe there is. I bet the German language has one? 

(I found that later—they do. Geborgenheit, a state of absolute security and peace)

A Bright Old Faff: Arriving in Brighton

It was a very cold but beautifully sunny morning setting off on the journey the next day. We were able to enjoy the last of the autumn colours, gazing at the majestic countryside, while the radio offered up great tunes. I love that I can still enjoy music with my boys; they are both very musical—it’s in the genes.

We arrived in Brighton and, after a right old faff trying to find somewhere to park, a space magically appeared. Within a few minutes, the three of us were reunited. None of us could actually remember the last time we had all been together. It was very emotional. I cried several times that day, tears of pure joy and pride.

We don’t get together anywhere near enough, a combination of busy lives, timing, and my younger son’s difficulties with travel. He’s never been a good traveller, suffering badly with motion sickness when he was a child, which has become compounded through a complicated, multi-layered web of anxiety, agoraphobia, panic attacks, and a complete and utterly devastating fear of train journeys. This has rendered him a virtual prisoner to his little corner of the world. He’s lucky that his corner of the world has a lot on offer and is right on the sea.

My biggest hope in life is that he finds his way to overcoming his travel phobia. Many, many different approaches have been sought, but this remains a pernicious stealer of some of life’s opportunities for him, and the main culprit in why we don’t often get to spend time together as a wider family. So, seeing my beautiful, wonderful boys—now men—together was really, really special. A mother’s pride is the best feeling. Both these boys have grown into such fine men and overcome considerable life events and circumstances to do so.

Triumph Over Trauma: A Graduation Story

We travelled to Brighton to attend my younger son’s graduation. He’d achieved a First, a Master’s with distinction.

This is the boy who’d been completely failed and let down by a secondary school system that seemed intent on only protecting its own reputation. It’s impossible not to stick two fingers up to that secondary school and think, See? Just look what he was capable of, and you literally wrote him off out of existence.

I’m still carrying anger towards that school. One of my biggest life regrets—and I have many—is that I should have taken him out and either homeschooled him or found a school that cared for its pupils more than statistics. I was taking him out on two separate occasions, but the school fought me and made promises they’d offer him support and persuaded me that his best interests would be served by keeping him there.

They failed, though, over and over to do this. The final letdown being the final exams. He was supposed to be able to sit in a quiet room and have extra time. When the exam days arrived, this provision hadn’t been made for him. He tried to tell the staff that he couldn’t sit in the exam room, that special arrangements had been made, but they told him they didn’t know anything about that and he’d have to go into the exam room and do his exam with everyone else and not have any extra time.

Like a rabbit in the headlights, he entered that exam room and just sat there. Frozen. And then had a panic attack, which meant having to leave the room. Many calls were made to the school that day. Apologies were offered, but no explanations, and no assurances they’d get it right for the other exams. So he didn’t do his exams.

The final kicker—and one the entire teaching and support staff of that school should be thoroughly ashamed of—is that instead of trying to make amends, they silently, without any pre-warning, removed him from the school register the day before the official last day of his time at secondary school. This was just to make their stats look better, to improve their results. We could have fought it, but we’d spent years already fighting. We were exhausted and so deflated. It’s near impossible to take on an institution and win.

There’s much more to this story, but the immediate effect was that he couldn’t go on to college to do music because he hadn’t sat the exams, so he didn’t have the grades. The effects were really devastating, and we are talking about an intelligent, enquiring, capacious young man with so much potential.

Look at him now, a masters, First Class, distinction. So up yours secondary school!

Challenging the System: Beyond the Label

He was eventually given an Autism diagnosis just before his 18th birthday—that probably would have helped if that had come earlier. But why do people need to be labelled to receive education in a way that’s appropriate to their needs?

We are told that there is a SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) crisis and told that it’s because there are simply too many children and young people being diagnosed. I don’t accept that. You don’t need a diagnosis to understand how to teach a young person. It’s all down to finding the right way to communicate. I didn’t need my son to have a label or a diagnosis to be able to understand him. I understood him.

Why can’t the school system develop ways of teaching that incorporate individual needs wholesale across the board? We all learn differently. One size does not now, and never has, suited everybody or anybody.

The Question of Labels

Why do we need to label ourselves? This is a wider question and one I ask now as an unmasked older woman who’s often struggled through life trying to fit in. School was a disaster for me, too. I was kicked out before I had the chance to do exams, and I too was intelligent, enquiring, and with enormous potential, but that’s another story. And then I struggled with work. I’d probably get an Autism, ADD, PTSD verging on dissociative disorder diagnosis if I wanted to go down that road.

I very firmly don’t want to, though, and I won’t. What I do want is societal change where we make significant, permanent progress on accepting and understanding people, as we find them. Stop trying to fit square pegs into round holes. Get rid of the holes, or offer lots of different shapes of a hole so that we can all fit in, everywhere and everyone.

I’m not being very eloquent here, and I’m aware I’m still full of anger. We find our own way through, eventually, some of us. Some people don’t make it though, battling this society that has such fixed ideas and systems for an idealised, homogenised idea of what we should be like. This just needs to stop.

I don’t have the answers, but it starts with conversations. It starts by being prepared to rip up what’s not working. We come in all shapes, sizes, and forms and need to feel welcomed, supported, understood, and included by systems that are reflective and responsive—not rigid and reactionary. We shouldn’t need to feel we can only be understood if we have a label, or a diagnosis, or an identity, which is just another way of conforming to something to try to find acceptance.

I wish I could be better with my words here. What if we just say every child is special? Every child needs an education that suits their needs. Stop labelling, remove the need for diagnosis and individual budgets. Just make schools provide a special education for everyone. Wouldn’t that be something?

A Lasting Glow

The pride I feel thinking about my two amazing sons is filling me with a lasting glow, and it’s wonderful. I’m so blessed. They have beaten the odds, survived, and thrived in spite of a school system that utterly failed them. And that’s down to them and their hard work. All’s well that ends well, but not without a reflection on what might have been easier for them, and me, or a more fulfilling, richer, nurturing journey through a school system that wasn’t so archaic.

The card that I pulled today is the Six of Pentacles.

• Liz Dean suggests a beneficial understanding between you and the people you are close to.
• Sarah Bartlett offers the power to decide who should receive and who doesn’t.
• Tina Gong says one person’s help can make all the difference.

Oh, yes. I can see how that fits in with what I’ve just been writing.