Did your eyes pop out?

4 years ago I was struggling to find something as a Christmas present for my daughter. She was at that age that was a grey area between being a young child and being a teenager and nothing seemed appropriate until I decided to get her a pet…..a guinea pig. It seemed perfect, she loved animals, they were fairly low maintenance. And even better, after a bit of research I found you needed to get them in pairs…that meant one for my daughter and one for my son. Perfect. I contacted the local guinea pig adoption place and they had two girls who were 10 months old ….Hannah and Heidi. I arranged it all and the Christmas of 2020 Hannah and Heidi joined our family.

And my daughter loved them. But my son really loved them. Well actually he was a little scared of them if I’m honest, but he really loved cleaning them out with me. In fact he was the only one who cleaned them out with me. He loved it.  Fast forward 3 and a half years and the guinea pigs were still with us but on Thursday as I was cleaning the kitchen I glanced over at the guinea pigs and immediately knew that Hannah (the white one) wasn’t right. I shouted my daughter and she knew too. She picked her out the cage and she was limp, barely alive. I said to put her back in the cage so she could die in her home and my daughter did. Hannah then had some sort of seizure and promptly died. My daughter was heart broken, as was I. It was one of the saddest things I’ve ever witnessed. My son wasn’t at home and I was so worried about telling him, he would be so upset. This was his very first death. He loved cleaning those guinea pigs out. He came home and I started off by saying I’ve got something really sad to tell you. He wasn’t interested though he just wanted his custard. Again, I said I’ve got something really sad to tell you he asked what and I said Hannah has died. He started to pull a face like he was going to cry and I thought this is it….so I said don’t worry I cried my eyes out. He immediately stopped pulling his crying face and asked deadly serious….

“Did your eyes pop out?”

And it made me laugh. No, my eyes didn’t pop out when I cried my eyes out. And I once again wondered who made up all these phrases that don’t actually make sense. I mean they do make sense but they are misleading. I told him it was just a phrase.

And once again my son had surprised me. He didn’t seem bothered about Hannah, in fact the next day he said “I preferred Heidi anyway”. And he never mentioned Hannah again.  I thought there would be millions of questions about heaven, death, dying, all of which I was prepared for but there was nothing, nothing at all. And I couldn’t quite believe it. This left me pondering how differently he processes things. And this was shown when we woke up for school on Monday. Despite a period of relatively calm school mornings, my son had a meltdown on this morning. We had had a good run on the school mornings, we had had some edgy mornings but nothing like what we went through in April/May. So on Monday when we woke up and my son shouted at me, really shouted at me at the top of his voice I felt the familiar dread return in the pit of my stomach. I didn’t react just went and laid back in bed as did my son. We all stayed quiet. And we just laid in bed. I didn’t remind him he needed to get up, I didn’t get up, we all just laid in our own beds waiting.

Tick Tock.

Tick Tock.

Tick Tock.

The pressure of just waiting is second to none. You know you have to be up, you know mornings are crazy anyway when you do get up in good time, you know your son cant be rushed through anything, anything at all. And you know more than anything that you staying calm and not folding under the pressure is the key to making this work but as the time is ticking your own mind is ticking and the school run time is ticking ever closer you know something has to give somewhere. After 30 minutes my son shouted and I knew that his anger had subsided and he had got through whatever he needed to and so we got up. I got him settled on the sofa and gave him his ipad. He looked at it and broke down in tears, like absolutely broke down. Now THIS was the reaction I was expecting about the guinea pig but no THIS reaction was because his ipad had told him it was now July….not June. He was hysterical. Within the space of a few seconds my mind tried to think why he would be upset it was July and not June and I knew straight away that it was because his birthday was in June and quickly I told him….

“This is good, it means you are getting closer to 7 years old. There’s only 11 months now until your next birthday.”

He was completely unsettled for the rest of the morning. I could sort of understand if this had happened after his birthday but his birthday was around the middle of June so why was he so upset many many days after his birthday. Why was his birthday month, the whole of his month so significant?

I got him to school and for the rest of the day I didn’t dare mention July, I still haven’t turned his calendar over in his room. And I wondered about my sons special interest in time. I’m not sure it was a special interest but his life was certainly governed by time in the most unique way. He had an analog clock in his room, but as I am sure you are aware, this caused its own issues. He frequently needed me to put the clock back on a time that he wanted and restart. We were always counting down or back from something. Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days, Months, Years they all frequently made an appearance in most of the conversations we had. If I could add up the amount of time we actually talked about time that would be a lot of time!!

And it didn’t escape my notice that the key to helping my son was to give him more time. In a lot of cases this helped him massively, more time to get dressed, more time to eat, more time to process what is being said to him, more time on a morning, more time to process things happen, more time between activities. Everything we did my son needed just that bit more time. And from an early age all he asked about was time. And I realised that although he couldn’t quite make sense of it at this early age he subconsciously knew that time was a thing for him.

And so, I’ve come to understand it’s not the big, expected events that unsettle him, but the small, seemingly insignificant details that throw him off balance. Through it all, I’ve learned that giving him more time—time to adjust, time to process, time to just be—is essential. After all, in our house, even time needs a time-out!