[ uncredited ]

I have a daughter who is 15 years old. She has a got severe intellectual disability. She was born in Australia, but I am from Malaysia.

I was a young mum. I was about 25 years old when I had her. She was my first child. We thought we were prepared for the world. You know after you've graduated you'e got your degree and you think you are prepared and you got the world at your feet! But when this child came along, because she is my first child, I had never had any children before, it was quite a shock.

It was a real shock and our life just changed so drastically. Everything had to be [planned] around her. The first few years were very, very difficult for both myself and my husband. We both have to give up things that we liked doing when we were young before we got married. Also giving up our career.

We changed our career to suit this child. She was constantly going into hospital and seeing doctors, we had five appointments every week until she started crying. When she was young, between the ages of one to about eight years old she was constantly, constantly seeing doctors. Five appointments a week until she herself cried when she went into a doctors surgery.

So things were very, very, very difficult. The second child came along, and of course it was harder, too -- you've got two little babies to look after. And the second child had it very hard too because he didn't have the attention that our daughter had. And I had to try and balance out between the two children. Instead of spending too much time on her I had to spend some time on my son. Luckily, because my case was so difficult, and I was really at crisis point, I had social workers visiting me, say, for the last 10 years.

I was lucky in that sense because my case was so difficult, she was so difficult. She had challenging behaviour, extremely challenging behaviour, so DSS started sending in social workers to counsel me. I have heard of a lot of cases where the mother doesn't get any counselling, but I had a lot of counselling and that helped me. And the social workers helped me with how to handle my son. They teach me how to give more time to him. So actually my son grew up basically very, very balanced. He is not extremely resentful of his sister. I learned to give time to him, we learned to spend time with him. We make a sure every year we go away with our son for a holiday and that is a priority in our family. Three weeks out of the whole year we go away [with him,] out of the country, somewhere, Malaysia or whatever.

So he travel with us and we make him feel special. We learn to do things like that, and all this is through the help of the social worker teaching us. Because you basically don't know what to do when you've got a child like this. You've just got no idea.

11.