A letter to... the man on the train with the well-behaved children
'the letter you always wanted to write'
On a recent train journey I was sitting near a family with a noisy child. Most people pretended not to notice, but as the journey went on there were the usual glances and significant looks. Later, as I passed their table, the child told his mum, loudly, to shut up. She glanced at me and said his name, her tone somewhere between stern and pleading. He sat, arms folded, righteous.
I have been in her position; I know exactly what it’s like. For that reason I didn’t have one ounce of judgement towards her or her son. However, in that packed and silent carriage, I couldn’t think of a way to tell her that.
It reminded me of another train journey, a few years ago now, when I was in the position of that mum – in the middle of a long journey with no escape, travelling with a child who was losing the plot. That day there was another family at the table across the aisle. I have never forgotten them.
From 2006-2021 in the Guardian newspaper here in the UK, there was a weekly series called ‘a letter to…’ Readers would send in anonymous letters to somebody significant in their lives, somebody they couldn’t address directly: ‘a letter to my stalker’; ‘a letter to the friend who ghosted me’; ‘a letter to my dog.’ Its tagline was: ‘the letter you always wanted to write.’
Over the years, following the birth of my son, there have been many people I wished I could explain things to: old ladies at bus stops, parents on play dates, nursery teachers, friends of friends. This is the letter I would write, if I could, to the dad across the aisle that day, not because he did anything unforgivable, but because that experience summed up so much about the unspoken difficulty of parenting a neurodivergent child in a neurotypical world.
I can see you’re proud of your family and I can understand that. You arrived prepared, stocked up with books and games, with a canvas shopping bag that contained a perfectly packed lunch. One of your daughters carried a half-size violin in its hard black case which, at your suggestion, she placed in the overhead rack. Your two girls sit quietly, hair brushed and tied up, reading well in advance of their ages. They don’t bicker with each other. They don’t demand screens or snacks.
We are just across the aisle from you, but you don’t look at us. You don’t look even when, during your game of I Spy, my child starts shouting out answers, trying to join in. You are all too well brought up to say anything. In fact, you don’t acknowledge our existence at all, even though in many ways we are the same: two holidaying families, one setting out, one going back.
Later in the journey, when our son has eaten his lunch and run through all the screen-based games and videos we brought, when we have traipsed the length of the train in both directions twice, when he begins to laugh in a way that means he’s just about to lose it – that’s when you tell your wife about the time you travelled alone with your daughters by train. You tell her the two girls were so well-behaved that, as you drew in to London, a woman came up and congratulated you.
‘They probably don’t do that when it’s the mum,’ you say, as if that had been the purpose of the story all along – to recognise that mothers have it tougher.
‘No,’ your wife said. ‘They don’t.’
I don’t know if it was meant to be pointed, you telling that story just then, sitting in earshot of parents unlikely to receive any congratulations that day.
When your wife takes the younger girl to get drinks from the cafe, you start to tell the older one about a BBC documentary you recently saw. I imagine you see it as your job to supplement her learning with conversation. Another day the topic might have been renewable energy or Ancient Rome. Today, ironically, it’s autism.
‘What surprised me most was how different autistic people are from each other,’ you say. ‘It can look a lot of different ways.’
From the far side of the aisle I think, yes, and sometimes it looks like this.
It looks like a different nervous system that puts our child on high alert in response to sounds and smells your children barely notice. It looks like nontypical ways of expressing distress: through wild laughter, and loudness, and constant movement. It looks like high anxiety: though our child wants to do holidays and family visits just like yours, the uncertainties of travel mean stressors are piled on stressors, accumulating through the day in an untidy pile that might at any moment tumble down.
What I really want to say is: you probably think your daughters’ good behaviour says something about your parenting. You probably think they are well-behaved because they’re well brought up. Perhaps you look at a family like ours and make the opposite assumption. I want to tell you that what you hear from the far side of the aisle that day is not a lack of care or love. It isn’t a lack of effort or thought.
We’re not authoritarian parents, but that doesn’t mean we’re permissive; there’s a whole world of possibilities between those two extremes. We can’t work on everything at once and so we let things go. We do this because it’s the best thing for our son.
The way we do things look nothing like what I imagined before he was born. If you had been the ones with an autistic child, you would have been forced to question your most cherished assumptions too. You would have learned from your child. You would have changed. Because you haven’t, you probably won’t.
You see bad behaviour over this side of the aisle. Probably you see bad parenting. What you don’t see is autism, because educating yourself about autism takes more than watching one documentary.
What you don’t see is how well my son is doing. In the face of all the hidden dangers on this journey, he’s here. We’re all still standing. He’s brave and he’s bright and he’s figuring it out. And I am also proud.
And to other families like ours – unconventional families, brave families, noisy families – I say: you’re doing great. All power to your arm. We can’t control how other people see us and that doesn’t have to matter. And what I learned last week when I saw that other stressed mum on the train is, not everybody is judging, even when it feels like everybody is.
And if any of this resonates with your own experience, I’d love to hear about it: