But then she’s not aggressive stopped being true.

Daisy still had an unblemished record at school where that aspect of her behaviour was concerned; she’d never attacked another child, or her teaching assistant, or a teacher. But she would sometimes attack me, and the ferocity on her face at such times left me in no doubt that she really did intend to do me harm. The moment always passed, eventually – it was a violent squall that would ride itself out in the end. But while it was happening it was a crisis, and there was nothing I could do apart from trying to limit the damage, whether to me, the house, or herself. When the mood was on her, she was a vicious little dynamo; it was surprisingly difficult to contain her, given how small she still was.

The one thing that always made it worse was to get angry with her. I had to wait until she was calm again to try to speak to her, to describe what had happened, to tell her why it was wrong. Even then it was hard to know if any of what I said was going in… but it certainly wouldn’t have done if I had tried to talk to her while she was still in the throes of the storm. You couldn’t do that with a child who was raging. You couldn’t do it while you were raging yourself, either.

Because when we were in the middle of it, it was difficult – sometimes almost impossible – to contain my own fury.

It’s peculiarly enraging to have your small child launch herself at you, hellbent on clawing your face or yanking clumps of your hair out or ripping your favourite top that, as bad luck would have it, you just happened to have risked putting on that day. After all, it wasn’t as if I had all that many nice clothes – on the whole, after Daisy had been diagnosed and Mark had left me, I hadn’t bothered much with all of that. And it wasn’t as if I had masses of hair to start with, and my face, which was mostly grey with fatigue and puffy from comfort eating, really didn’t need the bonus downer of being adorned with scratches. Luckily I was still working from home, copy-editing and proofreading, so it didn’t matter how rough I looked from a professional, income-making point of view. And it wasn’t as if I was likely to go out on any hot dates any time soon.

The last thing I needed was some man complicating my life, and anyway, who’d want to take on a woman whose autistic daughter refused to be put to bed by anybody else, and still woke up every night and came in to her to share her bed?

I was resigned: my sex life was over. I had nothing to offer anyone, anyway. I had no reserves to draw on; everything was in play.

There was just no way it could be worth it. There were things I needed – sleep, food, money, the house not to fall down around my ears – and things I could very well do without, and sex and romance was definitely in the ‘maybe in the next life’ category. Daisy was challenging me to the max; some days, I felt stretched by her to the point where I’d never be able to go back to being someone who could live a normal life.