It isn’t attitude, it’s anxiety

I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember Kevin and Perry – Harry Enfield comedy sketches, back in the nineties. Kevin turns thirteen and transforms mid-sentence from a perfectly pleasant child into a stomping, grunting, door-slamming creature whose only line is that everything is SO UNFAIR. Perry is his mate, painfully polite to any adult in the room and absolutely dreadful the second they turn their back.

Well, Kevin has arrived in this house.

Earlier this week I made what I can only describe as a catastrophic error of judgement and asked my eldest whether their extremely polite friend was Perry.

I have never seen a face do so many things at once. They were hovering somewhere between wanting to laugh and wanting to take my head clean off, while I stood there in fits of giggles trying very hard to hold it in and not really managing it. I reined that one in fast. Fairly fast.

The night before that had been the same, and that one wasn’t funny at all.

They were absolutely convinced I was telling them off. I wasn’t. I promise I wasn’t, although I’m well aware by now that what I meant and what they heard are two completely different things. There was grunting. There was stomping. There was a lot of anger and a child who was very obviously overwhelmed and couldn’t tell me why.

And then they opened the back garden gate and announced they were going out to the park.

It was gone eight. I didn’t stop them and I didn’t follow them.

They came back not long after and told me they’d done several pull ups on the monkey bars and had a go on their bike. And then they said that actually, maybe they’d ask for a bigger bike for Christmas after all, because it’s regulating.

I was so impressed. That’s a child who took themselves off, worked out what their body needed, did it, and then came home and told me about it. Nobody suggested it. Nobody sent them.

So I apologised. I said if my words had upset them I was sorry, even though I hadn’t meant them that way. I said I needed to remind myself how much they’ve got going on at the moment. I told them I love them and I’m here. I asked if they wanted a hug, and they did. And then I handed the evening over to them, and they chose a Spiderman film, so that’s what we watched.

Here’s the bit I keep thinking about though.

I remember this same child at five and six, in mainstream primary, in the week before a new term started. Climbing on the kitchen table and across all the furniture. Chewing everything in sight. Making low grunting noises. Taking hours to fall asleep, even with melatonin. And then being sick in the back of the car on the way to school one morning. It was anxiety, and it had gone straight through their body long before it reached anything they could actually say to me.

Back then they told me they weren’t made for school. That school and them didn’t fit. That even when they looked happy there, they were crying inside, and that going to school felt like their heart was breaking.

They’re eleven and a half now. Secondary is coming. And I can tell you the anxiety hasn’t gone, it just looks different.

It doesn’t look like a small child sobbing at a school gate any more. It looks like being accused of having a go when I’ve asked something perfectly ordinary. It looks like storming off. It looks like grunting, and slammed doors, and everything in the world being unfair. It looks, honestly, like Kevin.

And that’s the tricky part, because when it looks like ordinary teenage behaviour, it becomes very easy for everyone around them to treat it as ordinary teenage behaviour. Including me. Underneath it there’s a nervous system that has already started bracing for something that’s still a week away.

It always did. Years ago they told me they didn’t like the school holidays, because the holidays always came just as they were getting used to school. The anxiety has always turned up long before the thing it’s about.

And to top it all off, their sibling’s birthday falls this week, which in a PDA house is its own particular kind of tricky. Years ago, mid-meltdown, this same child sobbed at me that they hate Christmas and Easter and all our birthdays. Occasions are demands. Waiting is a demand. Being expected to be pleased for somebody else is a demand. Add hormones on top and honestly, we’re in for a ride.

So this week I’m putting the scaffolding back up. I’m growing a thicker skin, because most of what’s being fired at me right now isn’t really about me. And I’m dropping whatever demands are left in this house, which at this point mostly means not asking questions I don’t actually need the answer to.

If you’re heading towards September with a child who’s suddenly furious about absolutely everything, it might be worth asking yourself whether the fury is the anxiety wearing different clothes.

And if you’re the one soaking all of that up, day after day, please don’t underestimate what that takes out of you. I know how much capacity it uses, and I know you probably haven’t got much spare.

Take a breath. Take a few. And if you can find a couple of minutes that are just yours somewhere in the middle of all this, take those too.

I’m right here with you.