Active Imagination

Whoever said that those with ASD have trouble with imagination never met my daughter. Actually, I suppose that depends on how you define “trouble.”

She absolutely has an active imagination. Too active. In fact, dragging her out of her reality and back into the real world is met with resistance that the Home Guard would have been proud of. I’ve seen terrorists with less conviction than my daughter when she’s told that she actually can’t fly and does, in fact, have to walk up the stairs.

I frequently wonder if she knows she doesn’t really have ice powers, that she can’t blast me with them, and that no amount of concentration on her part is going to cause the car to levitate.

She insists that “the cold doesn’t bother her anyway” (I can’t imagine where she got that from) and will happily attempt to go to school in summer uniform, shorts, and no coat or jumper regardless of climate change and the hailstones bouncing off the pavement around her.

She did cheerfully inform me that the hail was because I told her she couldn’t stay home and play with the puppy and so it was my punishment.

Fair enough.

She has also informed us that she used to live at the North Pole with other superheroes before coming to live with us. Frankly, I wish someone had told me this at the time. It would have saved me five days in hospital and fourteen hours in labour.

Apparently, at the North Pole they only had ice and polar bears to eat.

She’s been insisting on this for months, so eventually I caved and asked whether she’d seen Father Christmas while she was living there.

She stopped.

She frowned.

Then she informed me, in no uncertain terms, that and she had never really lived at the North Pole and Father Christmas was too busy to deal with such nonsense. 

Of course.

What was I thinking?

So apparently she has an overactive imagination rather than delusions, and I’m not entirely convinced that’s better when she can spend an entire car journey seriously explaining that the only reason her plush tiger doesn’t eat humans is because humans don’t fit in its bowl.

Which, admittedly, was a relief.

The tiger does apparently eat chickens, sea chickens, pigs, cows, and meat-flavoured ice cream.

I have no idea what a sea chicken is. I suspect it comes pre-seasoned.

I’ve also been informed that I have fire powers because I like things hot. By this she means that I prefer sleeping in a room that doesn’t actively have icicles hanging from the windows and that I drink tea.

I have also been known to wear a hoodie instead of treating goosebumps as a fashion accessory.

My husband, meanwhile, has “warm” powers.

I’m a little hazy on exactly what these are, other than being somewhere between mine and hers. Any attempt to gain clarification is met with eye-rolling and dramatic sighing.

She may only be eight, but she’s doing a remarkable job of being thirteen.