A Christmas Cactus

Happy New Year everyone, I hope you had a peaceful Christmas. We came through our first official Miso Christmas remarkably well, with two big set-piece family meals and a potentially unsettling break from our usual routine.

A couple of weeks earlier I'd asked Cactus to think of her plan for Christmas dinner. She could eat on her own as usual, or with us at the table, wear headphones, listen to music, sit near the door, get up and leave halfway through, whatever she wanted to do would be fine. I briefed our guests, my closest friends, that she may or may not do all of these things and that it was not a big deal either way.

On the day she set the table for me and left an empty space between her seat by the door and the next chair. "I'm social distancing a bit, just in case". And it was brilliant! We ate together as a family for the first time in 6 months, Cactus in her fetching colour-matched wireless-headphones-and-bobble-hat combo pulling crackers, smiling and laughing with everyone else. She did amazingly, and in the whole history of her first lost tooth, first reading aloud, first bike ride and all the positive notes home from school, I have never been prouder.

The next day we did it again, this time a lunch for 11. Due to a seating plan oversight she ended up next to me, her main trigger, and there were a few withering looks but nothing like the usual reflex fury. I'm not sure that we'll be able to replicate this regularly, as the enormous dining table that put acres of space between her and her brothers is packed away for another year. But it gives me hope for the future, HER future, with all the social situations that will bring. She has the self-knowledge, confidence and agency to do what works best for her, and to ask for the help she needs. I really think she's going to be ok.

We both had lots of lovely pampering gifts this Christmas and are working our way through an arsenal of bath bombs and other sensory self-care delights. But my best gift this year, and possibly my best gift ever, was this one: