While the kids are young, I think you’re both just going to have to ‘red line’ it most of the time, just barely getting what you need. After a day with toddlers, your wife could probably use some intelligent, thought-provoking conversation…which is probably NOT what you need after a day at work. So where can she get that while you get to go ‘brain-dead’. One night a week you do a movie with the kids while she goes to a book club meeting or something?

Hang in there… toodlerhood doesn’t last forever!

You make a very good point – If I got up early with the express purpose of working on something and then one of the kids woke up and I had to deal with them – well – that would throw me completely.

I’d be as grumpy as hell because my plan had been derailed. I’d probably spend the first ten minutes trying to keep on with the plan I’d worked out, and then ultimately admit defeat and look after the kids instead.

All of that is probably a good enough reason not to try it in the first place!

James

James, another thing we’ve recently started doing here is that my husband handles the morning routine (kids up, dressed, breakfasted, and off to school, aside from the toddler, who of course stays home) and I have until 9 AM to myself. Once our home addition is done and I thus have a study of my own, I plan to use 7 to 9 AM for those important-to-me things.

It works better for me, a dyed-in-the-wool night owl, than trying to get up at 5 AM before everyone else. Also, it guarantees my time alone, which just getting up before everyone else would not – say the toddler wakes early one day. That kind of thing can throw me off so badly (expectations not getting met, schedule suddenly changed) that it undoes the benefit I was going for in the first place.

I know you have to work during the week, and your wife already does the house-and-kids part of things the rest of the day, so this may not be feasible for you, but I thought I’d throw it out there.

Saja

You are right – I’ve had this suggested before by people from a simple productivity point of view, and not related to AS.

I do produce my best work in the morning, because, as you say, we are all at our freshest then.

It takes me a while to wake up in the morning though, which negates some benefit of early rising. Also, my wife is a very light sleeper, and if I arose earlier she would also end up getting up at that time, and cursing me for it.

It’s a great idea though, and given the right circumstances would work well. The problem is that real life circumstances often get in the way.

Maybe over time I can engineer my life in a direction that makes suggestions like this more practical. Once the kids are a little older, they’ll require less direct effort from both my wife and I, and that will help too, as we’ll be less tired over all. Hopefully. Fingers crossed.

Interestingly, I don’t find it a problem staying in someone elses home.

Not sure why. The first time is always a little awkward, but once I know where things are I tend not to find it stressful.

I just don’t get personal space. It’s that simple. Not on holiday, and indeed not really at home either.

But then again, neither does my NT wife, and she ends up feeling very drained too, completely understandably. The difference is that I just doggedly accept it, and my wife complains.

Over the years I’ve become so used to being wiped out at the end of the day and not getting true personal space to recharge that I’ve come to consider it as normal.

We’ve discussed that we need to try and arrange time without the kids. We’re on holiday again next week – this time at my parents house for the week. We are going to try and arrange for a couple of days and a night away, where my folks look after the kids and we’ll tour around and find a hotel to stay in for the night.

That won’t be true personal space either, but it will be time together, and without the constant energy drain of the kids.

Kids are hard work whether you are autistic or not. In a very real sense, you just have to get on with it, regardless of your neurological make up.

Oh yes – of course I’d support my wife if she was autistic. That, of course is a very autistic way to look at it, however.

Trying to look at this from a non-autistic point of view, there are a whole set of expectations laid upon me. It feels very taboo for me to discuss the fact that I find many of these expectations difficult to meet. There’s that old worry that I’ll be seen as just too difficult to live with (which of course has happened before – hasn’t it happened to all of us on the spectrum?).

I feel I have to tread carefully.

Then of course there is the fact that I find it difficult to put things like this into verbal words. It’s one thing writing about it – that’s easy – but quite another to speak about it, even with my wife. Discussion requires thought and input in both directions, and I rarely predict the questions I end up trying to answer. This means it takes a huge amount of brain power on my part and I rarely provide very satisfying answers at the time (although can usually do so later).

My wife and I are really just finding our feet in dealing with my AS. I understand a great deal now, but she doesn’t, because I haven’t discussed it very often.

You are right that ultimately allowances have to be made and new ways of working drawn up, at least to some extent.

It doesn’t feel like that is going to be an easy thing to do.

Ah. Planning. Not one of my strong points.

My wife has something of a scaled down version of your idea that she uses sometimes.
She’ll name five things that the kids might find around the house (a yellow toy car, a coin, a crayon, that sort of thing), and then see who can find all five first. The difficulty, of course is in thinking of the items to find. The first round is usually easy, but the kids then want to play it again and again…