This week, my daughter woke up on Tuesday 19th November and announced, with the surety of a small child in a superhero outfit, that it was, in fact, the 17th. When corrected she growled, stamped her feet and then told me I was wrong. Realising I was heading down a rabbit hole that I would not be able to climb back out of, I agreed with her. After all, what’s a couple of days between friends, or in this case fae children? This did not mollify her, and she grabbed her iPad to show me I was wrong. When it confirmed my reality, not hers, she had the meltdown I had been hoping to avoid. She screamed at it, she checked my iPad, my watch, phone, the TV (why do so many things display the time and date these days?!) and when they all said the same thing she became inconsolable.
This isn’t because she was mad about being wrong.
Let me correct that, this wasn’t solely because she was mad about being wrong. My fae child has a hyperfixation with numbers. I know a lot of neurospicy people have what are known as ‘special interests’ but that fails to convey the lengths and depths of focus that can be applied in their chosen field of fascination. My daughter will count anything and everything. She won’t stop. She will track every number she can and this isn’t just an idle interest. Numbers are regular, predictable and will always do the same thing in the same circumstances. 1+1 will always = 2 (I’ve been asked to put in here by some of the more pedantic grown up neurospicy family members I have that in base 10 1+1=2). So, when she had lost track of the date, suddenly the numbers were not doing what she expected, in the pattern they should: this wasn’t a little thing that could be shaken off, like most of us would with a shrug and ‘I never got the hang of Thursdays’ comment whilst trying to see if the amount we drank at the weekend would account for the lapse. To her, it meant numbers had broken and the world no longer made sense.
It was only when she was sat down in front of a year planner (if you have a fae child get an a1 year planner, trust me) and had the days explained to her from where she lost track – in this case Children in Need Day (which fortunately on our planner had a pirate teddy bear drawn on it) and was able to account for each day and what she had done on it, that she could accept that actually the numbers WERE still making sense and she had simply gotten mixed up.
This accepted, the world realigned, and breakfast could commence. But seriously, it’s not what you need at 5am on a Tuesday morning.
Raising the Modern Fae 