Don’t ask me that right now.
“You taught me what love is,” I often say to RS, my firstborn. “I thought I knew what love was, but when you were born I realized I never really knew.”
What would you do if your child came home from school with one of these on each forearm (note: in real life, the white part is raised above the red by about half an inch)?
You’d ask your child what happened, of course.
But what if your child can’t talk, or communicate at all? Then you can’t ask what happened, see. So what do you do? Call the police? Go to the school and shoot first and ask questions later? Or just pray that when (when, not if) doctors and other mandated reporters see the welts, they won’t blame you and have your child taken away? Which they could.
“Oops, we’re so sorry, it appears we put her elbow braces on backwards. Hence the welts. Sorry about that, it’s never happened before and won’t happen again.” Ok, innocent mistake. Innocent mistake which left two of those welts on your child’s arms.
So what do you do the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that? Send her back to school, and hope she doesn’t come home with anything worse? And then do you do that again, every day, year after year after year? Or do you stop sending her to school, or to camp, or leaving her with a nanny, and instead keep her by your side forever?
“Oops, we’re so sorry, it appears we forgot to buckle her in to her wheelchair. Hence the fractured skull and facial lacerations.”
“Oops, we’re so sorry, there was a communication lapse between the two aides, and it appears she was left alone for half an hour and raped.”
“Oops, it appears she’s dead.”
Parenthood.
On a less terrorizing note, what if your child has an IEP, or a neuropsych report, or both, that says teachers need to do stuff like walk past your child’s desk numerous times, tap on it, say her name, and do other things throughout the day to refocus her and be sure she’s paying attention? What if they’re supposed to sit and read instructions out loud to her and then have her repeat them back to be sure she understands them? What do you do?
You meet with the teachers and discuss it, you send your child to school, and then… you hope the teachers do it. That’s all. You let your kid go, and you hope.
If the teachers do it, your kid might make the sort of progress the IEP is designed for. She might learn something. She might get somewhere.
If they don’t do it, or if they do it inconsistently, she’ll be nowhere. She’ll be where she’s been since her stroke last summer, which is… nowhere. Or somewhere? Maybe. But somewhere where?
Perhaps I could tell RS “You taught me what helplessness means. You taught me what fear means. You taught me that the phrase ‘worth it’ really doesn’t mean anything.”
It appears that I was a bad, bad teacher. Because I didn’t really do those things. Of course, I taught high school, not elementary school, and there were very few situations wherein I was supposed to do any of those things, but like I’ve said before, I don’t recall dedicating much of myself at all to the plights of students who needed modifications.
I have some choice words for myself right about now.
I’m sorry, parents. I swear, I am so, so sorry.
But that’s not really the point, is it. The point is all these forms we need to fill out. The point is all these phone calls we need to make. The point is the emails we need to write.
But that isn’t really the point either, is it. The point is the kids. The point is my kids. The point is all kids. Isn’t it?
What do you do when your child starts showing signs of severe emotional and psychological strain? Do you pour on the TLC, spend lots of extra one-on-one, have long conversations, patch on mommy band-aids wherever possible, and hope it goes away? What if you’re so sick from your pregnancy that you can only do a fraction of that before you need to curl up in a ball and continue puking? You do your best, of course, except it never feels like your best, and your kid isn’t getting better.
Then what about when the phone calls start coming from school?
“We’ve noticed some strange behavior….”
“She had a panic attack while waiting for carpool… crying… hyperventilating….”
You make more phone calls, that’s what. You have more meetings. You write more emails and you gather more forms.
Please describe your child’s social, emotional, and academic development during each of the following periods: Pre-school, Kindergarten, 1st-4th grade. Did you drink coffee when you were pregnant? How much and how often? At what age did your child sit up? Crawl? Walk? How active was your child as an infant? How social? Was there colic? If so, describe. Etc. Etc. This form will self-destruct after 8 pages. Oops, wrong, 9 pages. Please be sure to finish this form before you need to curl up puking again. Oops, too late, it’s still sitting on your night table. Get with it, mom, get with it.
“Hello, I’m your friendly child therapist. This is my hourly fee. This is what your insurance will cover. Allow me to meet with your kid. Ok, she has Emotional Disorder X. Twice weekly, please. Here, have a big stack o’ forms.”
This is not for R, by the way. And those of you who know my family, please don’t discuss any of this with my daughters unless they mention it first.
This all pays for itself, of course. Like everything else.
Dear Special Ed lady,
Can you tell me anything about the services R is supposed to be receiving? As you know, the IEP was completed almost two months ago, and the school year is almost over. We are very anxious for some progress to be made before the summer break. Please let me know what’s going on, and if there’s anything we can do to expedite the process. Such as shooting first and asking questions later.
Dear teachers/nurse/special ed lady,
As you know, R began a low dose of psychostimulants two weeks ago. It is critical that we keep track of any changes, small or large, in her classroom presentation. Have you noticed any changes, in any direction, in her focus/attention span/ability to get work done/anything else? As you know, the year is almost over, and our time is extremely limited if the dosage needs to be adjusted or if we need to try a different medication. Please answer this email. Please answer this email. You don’t understand the power you wield. You don’t understand how much we need you. Please answer this email.
You know what I think I need? Another child. 
Parenthood is the least rational phenomenon I’ve ever witnessed or experienced.
“Are you going to be a big brother?” I ask the Boy. He usually ignores this question, except when he’s very grouchy and in one of his yelling “NO” moods, in which case he yells “NO BUZZO!” (= “no brother”). I think his yelling “no” moods are very funny, so sometimes I provoke him. “Are you cute?” “NO CUTE!” “Are you my boy?” “NO BOY!” “Do I love you?” “NO LA-YOU!” Heeheehee. The Niece was the opposite at this age; she used to answer “yah” to everything. “Are you an elephant?” my non-baby brother would ask her. “Yah!”
“I’m very interested in learning about this book,” R tells me over Shavuot, when I suggested we read something together. She brings me this:
It’s one of the kids’ human body reference books that my mother bought, primarily for YS (little bookworm ), when R had the Psycho Evil Pneumonia From Hell. This book is way cool; it’s hard to explain, but it has a plastic model of the human body in the middle, and with each page you turn, the body parts that are being discussed are turned at the same time. You’d have to see it to understand, or else get someone else to describe it. Anyway, it’s quite cool.
So this is what R brought me to read together. We have a house full of Ramona, full of Little House, full of The Littles, and full of ALL sorts of level 1 and 2 I Can Read books, which come closest to her reading level, and she wants to read a book full of technical science terms, a book even YS has trouble understanding (though that doesn’t stop her from plowing through it. Heh). This book is way over R’s head.
“Ok, I’d love to read that with you!” I tell her. “The thing is though, it’s a pretty hard book. It might be too hard for you to read. Do you want to choose something else?”
“No, this book,” she insisted, “and you read.”
So I did. Did she follow any of it? I have no idea. Did she retain any of it? I have no idea. We stuck with it for over half an hour, until G got home from shul and it was time for other things, and she never gave any hint of her interest fading — whatever her interest was, anyway.
And what was it? Was she actually gathering information? Did she have even the very first clue what the words meant? I paused and explained and pointed to things whenever I could. We examined the different colored blood vessels on our arms. She asked questions; maybe one or two of them were on subject and made sense. One of them was an absolute classic pre-stroke R-type question, after we read about bones and bone marrow and how it produces blood cells and how bones heal themselves. “Ima, are bones, like — I mean, are they, you know, alive?” Heeheehee. So was she learning something? Did she actually enjoy the subject matter? Or was the time spent cuddled up one-on-one with me all she really wanted?
I will tell you this much. We got to the “respiratory system” pages and my blood managed not to run cold as I pointed to the pictures and explained how the lungs work. Even when we got to the part about the pleural cavity. At one point the book mentioned operating on a collapsed lung, and R was quite upset by the idea of doing something “so dangerous.” Dangerous?! Ha! This from a child who never once showed any modicum of fear during three weeks of hospitalization, no matter what was happening to her — and plenty of things happened to her, believe me — and seemed completely unconcerned when I told her, last July, that we were taking her to another part of the hospital so she could have a special operation where they put a tiny tube inside her brain so the doctors can look very carefully and try to figure out why she had a stroke. And the idea of operating on a collapsed lung now sounded too dangerous to her.
Of course, she was quite, quite out of it before the angiogram last July, it being only a day after the stroke; I doubt she registered most of what I was saying.
So as we discussed operating on a collapsed lung, I assured her that doctors are very smart and know exactly how to do things that sound very dangerous, and then I told her “When you had pneumonia, if the medicine didn’t work, they might have had to operate on your lung.” I was quite sure she wouldn’t find that scary, and I was right; she made one of her classic R raised-eyebrows faces that’s half surprised, half amused, and she said “Me??” and put her hands on her chest. Right over her heart, which of course, is tucked into the left lung. I learned that from reading the book with her, see. And I smiled and hugged her tighter, and then I said “That’s right. But baruch Hashem, the doctors knew what to do, and the medicine worked before they had to do anything like that.” Unless, of course, you count the pericardiocentesis as something “like that,” but that was her pericardium, not her pleural cavity.
You realize it’s been five months since she’s had an incident and been hospitalized? Not that we haven’t taken her to the ER since then; of course we have, since she complained a few weeks ago in school of blurred vision, and even though it was both eyes and there was no pain involved, the school was not at all interested in keeping her there, since you know, blurred vision can be a brain thing — and then Dr. SuperStroke decided to be completely unhelpful when G called her, and she agreed that R “should be seen.” Feh. Seen by me, perhaps; would that be enough? That was quite early in this pregnancy, when I felt absolutely awful and had just gotten off an anti-nausea medication that gave me the world’s most horrific side effect, and the only thing I was capable of thinking about was making it all go away. My baby siSter came over to help with the Boy while G took R to the hospital, and all I could do was sit curled up on the floor next to the couch, breathing slowly and taking sips of ice water, thinking to myself “She can’t have a stroke now. She just can’t. I can’t possibly go to the hospital like this. I can’t even stand up.”
Parenthood.
She was fine, by the way; Dr. SuperStroke and all others concurred that it’s allergy-related and not neurological. But we had to be sure, of course.
Oh look, it’s RS. She came home from school with a fever, and oddly, she wants some attention, from… me. Should I give her any? Let me think that over for a while, and then I’ll decide.
