punchdrunkmom

Once upon a time, in a Montessori far, far away...

Kai’s teacher suggested months ago that I ask Kai to put on a play at home of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I’d like to say that I did exactly that, but it would be a lie. Usually, at the end of the day, whatever energy I have left is used up by dinner/bath/bed *crosses self, shudders* , and Goldilocks plays are the last thing on my mind.

But the kids have been reading different versions of the story, from Mo Willems’ Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs, to the tale of a grown-up Goldilocks encountering a bear in her Manattan apartment, Goldilocks and Just One Bear. Kai is, apparently, something of an expert on the subject.

And then word came that his kindergarten was going to put on a play, and that Kai would be cast as none other than Goldilocks herself.

One of the directors asked if we would have a problem with that.

And of course we don't, because:

 

Check out the dainty way he holds his dress as he runs away from me.

But part of me had some reservations. Scott articulated it best.

“Of course we don’t care,” he said. “But, you know, why Goldilocks?”

The answer became clear soon enough.

A script was handed to me last Friday with Kai’s part. He would share the Goldilocks role with several other kindergartners, kids with names like Ella and Mia and Megan. Kai’s was the bit about the temperature of the porridge

I was supposed to work with him over the long weekend on his lines. I plum forgot about this until Monday night, and so, on Tuesday morning, I chivvied him out of bed and sat him at the table, where I’d place three bowls of varying sizes.

“Kai,” I said, “we have to work on your lines for the play.”

Kai didn’t need any other direction.

He picked up the big wooden spoon I’d stuck in the largest bowl, and took a pretend bite.

“Oh!” he exclaimed, waving his hand in front of his mouth. “Hot! Too hot!”

I raised an eyebrow at him.

He took a pretend bite from the second bowl.

“Brrr!” he said, crossing his arms, and giving a little shiver. “Too cold! Too cold!”

Right.

He told me that he needed a smaller spoon for the last bowl. I assume that this was so he could stay in character, and I was reminded that Sean Penn insisted on being called Spiccoli by his friends and family while he was filming Fast Times at Ridgemont Hight.

“Aaaah,” he said, pretend-eating Baby Bear's porridge. “That’s better.”

It was total adlib, filled with an artist’s interpretation and no small amount of flair.

Goldilocks. It was a role he was born to play.

:::

The night before the play premiered at school, I was advised that he needed a costume. 

I had been thinking that we might want to reimagine the Goldilocks role. Who says she’s a girl? All that’s required is some blond hair, and he already has that. I thought we could do a sort of Grimm’s forest thing. I Googled “lederhosen.”

“Kai,” I said. “Come look.”

I showed him pictures of the green-short-suspsender-jaunty-cap look of a classic Oktoberfest.

Kai looked confused.

“Goldilocks wears a dress,” he said.

Indeed.

For this, we needed an array of sartorial choices suitable for dramatic performance.

So, of course, we raided Ryan’s closet.

I offered up all manner of princess dresses, gold lame tutus, wands, necklaces, white satin gloves.

Kai chose a lavender velveteen cloak.

Then he designed a t-shirt to wear under it. He specified that there should be three purple circles in small, medium and large.

To this I added some yellow yarn braids and a brooch for his cloak with a “G” on it, for Goldilocks.

“Why does it have a Packer’s logo on it?” Scott asked me when it was all said and done.

And of course the answer is because the Packer’s logo is the perfect shape for a brooch for Goldilocks’ cape. Packers fans, make what you want of that.

:::

On the day of the performance, parents, siblings, classmates and teachers filed into the room, squishing on benches, finding space on floors, negotiating baby carriers and bulky winter coats. It was approximately 156 degrees.

I wondered if Kai would freak out at the sheer number of faces, if he would refuse to perform because he’d already performed the day before, if he would poop in his pants, if he would do any number of things that he might do, and do in front of every single other parent that I would have to see again and again until our children are 14.

There were murmurs about him as the players filed in. I heard the word "boy" a couple of times from the kids in the audience.

“Goldilocks can be a boy,” I head a nearby mom say, in response to her daughter’s protest.

And, as it happens, she can.

If Kai was phased by the crowd, by the noise, by the heat, by the pressure, you would never know it. He delivered his lines just like he had at my kitchen table, pausing thoughtfully to contemplate each pretend taste of porridge.

And, when he was done, after scooping up every pretend drop of Bay Bear’s porridge, he rubbed his belly. “I’m ready for dessert,” he said.

The other kids on stage with him laughed and laughed.

But they weren’t laughing at him, never at him.

They laughed with him. They seemed to anticipate and relish his affectations.

After the play was over and before the actors filed out of the room, his eyes searched the crowd and found mine.

Never have I tried so hard to convey so much with just a smile. Pride. Encouragement. Amazement. Joy. Love. Pride again.

He smiled back at me, not just any grin, but the impish one he gives when he teases me, like when I say “Kai, don’t touch that burner,” and Kai sticks his finger toward the burner and says, “You mean like this?”

:::

When the play was over, we found Kai in the lunchroom, and took the following picture, which does little to capture what we were feeling:

And so I'll tell you what we were feeling. My son with autism was in a play. He pretended. He hammed it up with his friends. He did all of this without his paraprofessional or his teacher or special help of any kind.

Afterwards, we went out to dinner as a family.

And, you guys, my porridge was juuuuuuust right.

Three more conversations

 1.)    Spoken like a true big brother.

Kai’s teacher: Kai, why is Ryan crying?

Kai: (Shrugs, looks bored) She cries all day long.

:::

2.)    That's the first time I've ever been called that.

Me: Do you know who this is?

Kai: No.

Me: It’s Grandad.

Kai: Oh!

Me: And that’s Grandma.

Kai: And that’s you?

Me: Yeah. I think I was about three then.

Kai: Wow! And now you’re a lady!

:::

3.)    On second thought, maybe I’ll just stay home.

Me: Oh, hey. I need to book a flight to Vegas for the weekend of the 15^th.

Scott: No problem.

Me: Thanks. I thought I’d leave on Friday at like 6:30 and come back Sunday at about 3.

Scott: Sounds great. So…a ticket for you and one for each of the kids?

Me: --

Holding it

It took me a good six months to potty train Kai.

It was supposed to be a done deal by the time he started at the public Montessori, to which we’d had to apply in a lottery for the 36 available slots.  Nineteen hundred other families applied that year, and in a stroke of luck I will probably never see again, we got in.

The catch was that the boy had to be potty trained, and as the days passed that summer, I became more and more panicky. He simply didn’t care about using the potty. Not one bit.

He had, on occasion, used it. If he happened to be naked and near the potty when he had to go, he would. I’d told his teacher that we were still working on it a few days before school started.

“They’re supposed to be potty trained,” she said. She did not look sympathetic.

“It’s, uh, it’s in his IEP?” I said.

This was actually true. I’d seen this coming and sneaked “needs assistance with toileting” into that very first IEP.

His teacher sighed. “Send him with five changes of clothes,” she said. “We make them change their own clothes when they have accidents and sometimes that’s incentive enough.”

I thought it highly likely that Kai would spend the whole day just trying to change his shirt and miss all of the instruction and not care one iota, but it was a plan and it eased my anxiety a little to know that we weren’t going to be expelled. At least not right away, and not for that reason. We’ve got eight years left, so we’re not exactly out of the woods.

It was weeks before Kai came home in the same clothes I sent him to school in, and then, so gradually I didn’t even really notice, it just stopped being an issue.

During this time, a Facebook friend updated her status to say that she’d spent the weekend potty training her daughter and was happy that task was out of the way.

The weekend? I thought. Are you kidding me?

But I decided to chalk it up to the idea that girls are easier than boys. Besides, this friend has an uncanny ability to do things I’d never been able to do—get her kids to sleep through the night, or take a family photo where everyone, even the baby, is looking right at the camera.

My strengths lie elsewhere.

:::

Ryan, despite being a girl, and despite being neurotypical, and despite being well past three, never showed any interest in using the potty. She’d sit on it occasionally, but the only time I had her sit on it when I knew she had to go, she had a full-blown panic attack, squeezing her knees together and crying, “Diaper, diaper!”

I thought she was ready nonetheless.

She can hold it, she asks for a diaper change after she’s peed, she seems to get it.

Every time I’d tried to put her on the potty, though, it was like I was burning her with cigarettes or something.

“No, potty! No, potty!”

“What we did,” my friend Jayne said, “was to say that there weren’t any more diapers after the pack we were using. We counted it down, we took a picture of the last one. It took a few accidents and that was it.”

I decided that this was worth a try. And indeed, it seemed to be working pretty well.

“When these diapers are gone,” I said to Ryan, “There are no more. We’ll have to use the…”

“Potty!” she’d say, happily.

“That’s right. What are you going to put in the potty?”

“Pee and poop!”

That’s right. Pee and poop were going in the potty, you guys. We were going to crush this.

:::

Those remaining diapers seemed to last forever, with us counting them down. Ten more. Nine more. Eight more.

The morning of the last diaper dawned, and Ryan mentioned it before I did.

“Diapers are gone,” she said.

“They are indeed! What are we going to use instead?”

“The potty!”

Ryan had pooped in that last diaper before I even got her to pre-school. Her teacher was in on the plan, and had declared that day “Potty Friday.”

Ryan had one accident, but that was all. I thought that wasn’t too bad a start. And it wasn’t until hours later that I realized why she’d only had one accident.

She was holding it.

I understood at once why, thinking back to that panic on her face at the prospect of letting go on the potty. She was scared.

“I need diaper change,” she said to me, around 5 pm, after not having gone since 10 am that moring. We were, and as of this writing are still, hanging around the house near the potty, ready to go whenever she is.

“Honey, the diapers are gone,” I reminded her. “Let’s use the potty.”

She started to cry. “No potty,” she said, and peed right there in the kitchen.

:::

I remember being a kid, and being afraid of the toilet. Not of actually peeing on the toilet, but of things crawling out from the toilet to attack me.

My therapist has generously attributed my irrational fears, and we can add this one to the mix, to being creative.

I don’t know if that’s true, but I certainly didn’t love hanging out on the toilet when I was a little girl.

There was an urban legend about alligators in the New York sewer system, and I imagined that alligators roamed the pipes in all locales, waiting to bite unsuspecting girls in the nether regions, when they least expect it and are at their most vulnerable. And don’t even get me started about Pennywise, which will pretty much ruin you for any drain you ever encounter for the rest of your life.

You guys, I'm not the only one.

:::

On Sunday, I decided to try to ease Ryan's anxiety in my preferred way, by doing some shopping. I bought her an anatomically correct French doll that pees after you give her water in a bottle. Her name is Emma, which is so much classier than the American version, Betsy Wetsy. (And, incidentally, I highly recommend you Google images for Betsy Wetsy, which yields everything from a picture of Christina Aguilera to a picture of a guy promising to rape your Betsy Wetsy doll. I swear they let just about anyone on the Internet!)

We spent some time feeding Emma, watching her “pee” in her potty. We cheered, we pretend fed her gummy bears.

“It’s your turn!” I said to Ryan.

I held her hands.

“Let’s go on three,” I said.

Ryan looked at me, her eyes wide, and we counted together.

“One, two, three!”

“Wait!” she said. “Four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten!”

:::

She still hadn’t gone several hours later when I left to take Kai to a party.

As we were leaving the party, I was gathering coats and thought to check my phone.

There was a text from Scott.

“Ryan used the potty! She’s so proud!”

Big girl.

She did it again this morning, so maybe we’re on our way, you guys. 

Maybe one day, we'll even be able to leave the house.

 

Mr. X goes to court, part 2

“It doesn’t look good,” Erin said, as Andrea emerged from the meeting and approached us. Her eyes were on the floor.

“We got less,” she said, without preamble. She sounded exasperated. “Court supervision, no community service.”

I nodded. Because what else was I going to do? Andrea looked genuinely sorry.

“The judge we talked to wasn’t this particular judge, but a judge in training. He felt sympathy for Kai, but he didn’t want to do something that would ruin Mr. X’s career.”

I shook my head.

“But Andrea,” I said, “ruining his career was the whole point.”

:::

The clerk called Mr. X to the stand. He and the lawyers lined up in front of the judge, who glanced at me, seated on a bench a few rows back. Erin and I were the only others left in the room.

“The mother is here?” he asked.

Andrea motioned for me to line up, too.

My legs were stiff from sitting for so long. I wished I hadn't worn jeans.

“How are you today?” the judge asked me.

“Okay,” I whispered, realizing at once why everyone answered this question the same way, why no one inquired as to how the judge was on this particular day. He towered above us, behind 5 feet of raised desk, wearing his judge robe. He didn't exactly invite friendly overtures.

Mr. X was asked how he was going to plea.

“Guilty,” he said. My knees buckled a little.

I noticed that one of the many lawyers in court that day, a city attorney with red-tipped braids who had nothing to do with the proceedings, was sitting at a desk attached to the judge's. She was leafing through a People. I looked back at the judge, and for reasons I can’t explain, my eyes filled with tears.

The judge went through his questions—did the defendant understand that this waived his right to a trial? Yes. Had anyone forced his plea? No.

“In the conference, we discussed a year of court supervision,” the judge said, shuffling his papers around.

And then he did something that he hadn't done to a single defendant all day—not the guy who came in an hour and a half late, not the gangbanger with the gun, or Jonathon A's girlfriend who seemed to make a lot of bad decisions.

“I'm troubled by this case,” he said.

I stood up a little straighter, a football fan back in the game after a good call from a ref.

“You send your kid to school and you trust the administration to keep them safe, that people there will keep him safe.”

My heart began to hammer in my chest. I looked back at Erin, who was leaning forward, listening intently.

“This is battery a five-year-old,” the judge continued. “A five-year-old with a disability and I'm very troubled.”

The stenographer typed away. I sneaked a glance at Mr. X. All I could see was the back of his head, which was lowered in deference to the judge.

“This case is troubling,” he said again. “The State's Attorney argued strenuously that you deserve a stronger sentence. But the school board has a record of what happened, and your lawyer has convinced me that you're not working with children and that supervision is enough.”

I let out a breath.

Mr. X got one year of court supervision for physically and verbally abusing my boy. He has to pay $294 in court costs.

“Good luck,” the judge said to me as we filed out. He said it to everyone who came before him that day, Mr. X included.

I cleared my throat and looked him in the eye. “Thank you,” I said.

I was told that after the conference in chambers, the judge had kept Kai's picture.

:::

I called Scott on the way home. He hadn't gone with me, because the State's Attorney had advised us not to bother to go.

I told him the outcome.

“Nice job,” he said. “That was probably the best we were going to get.” Scott had been sure that Mr. X would skate completely.

And I supposed that it was the best we were going to do. Court supervision didn't involve anything other than staying out of trouble, but if Mr. X got so much as a misdemeanor traffic violation, he would end up back in court. His lawyer, who was obviously good enough to persuade the judge despite the judge's own distaste for Mr. X, must have cost him a lot of money. If the woman who was with him was visibly worried about what would happen to him, perhaps one can extrapolate that Mr. X was pretty worried, too. DCFS now has a record on him, as does the school district, as does the court. 

I had certainly made life difficult for him. I'd gotten to hear him admit guilt. I'd gotten to hear a judge scold him on the record. He was certainly going to think twice about laying hands on another kid.

There was part of me that had hoped that the judge would somehow decide that Mr. X was so reprehensible that he needed some jail time, or change the charge to aggravated battery, a felony.

“The judge looks at the broader perspective,” Andrea said after the hearing. “He takes into account what a conviction will do. It can ruin a life.”

There's probably a lesson in that somewhere, but don't ask me what it is for a few years.

:::

I drove home under a gray sky, down streets lined with bare trees. I was hungry and I wanted a Diet Coke.

Erin asked me if I was okay with the outcome.

“Yes,” I said. “I wish he’d gotten more, but no one can say we didn’t fight as hard as we possibly could.”

I find a lot of comfort in that.

I thought about the boy, at that very moment in his classroom with his teacher and his new paraprofessional, a woman that he loves. He has no idea that any of this was happening, that I flew guns blazing after the monster that hurt him, that I dragged Mr. X into court to face criminal charges, that I’d take up whatever fight I needed to take up for him, again and again and again if I have to, for as long as I draw breath.

I stopped at Walgreen’s to pick up a family picture that I’d sent in to be developed:

Kai’s teacher asked me for one several months ago. I also bought that Diet Coke.

And as I got back into the car, I realized that, if I wasn’t exactly overjoyed about the outcome of the case, I certainly felt lighter. And that, for the first time in five months, I was free of Mr. X.

And I found that I was happy to let him go.

Mr. X goes to court

I was late getting to court on Wednesday. Because our printer wasn’t working and Ryan wouldn’t put on her coat and I had to tell Scott what medicine Kai needed before school and I had to figure out another printer I could use so I could arm the State’s Attorney with the case against Mr. X. And then when I finally got there, security made me walk back out to the parking lot to leave my phone in the car.

The courtroom was filling with a steady stream of people, bailiffs and clerks, private attorneys in suits, public attorneys in business casual, defendants dressed like they would to run to 7-11.

There was not going to be a trial, so my presence was not strictly necessary, but I thought it couldn’t hurt. My lawyer friend Erin and I were there to make one more push to the State’s Attorney to get the most we could out of Mr. X’s plea deal.

:::

I’d gotten a message from the State’s Attorney the day before. Mr. X was considering the state’s offer: court supervision and 100 hours of community service.

I had no idea there’d been an offer. I’d never talked to this State’s Attorney before. Our original one had been promoted and was no longer working on our case, the one who knew DCFS had found Mr. X used excessive force. The one who knew about Kai’s autism. The one who had been reminded that because of Kai’s age and the fact that the attack took place at school, this should have been a felony and not a misdemeanor.

Erin and I called her back together. Mr. X and his lawyer wanted to know if we’d be willing to come down, maybe less supervision, maybe less community service.

We spent an hour on the phone with her.

We weren’t coming down, we told her. We wanted more.

Court supervision is kind of bullshit, like your mother yelling “I’m watching you,” while she’s doing the crossword. If he got court supervision, he didn’t have to do anything. There was no parole officer or court check-ins. The case is essentially dismissed after a year. I wanted him to be convicted of his crime. I wanted that crime to come up on background checks. I wanted to make damn sure he wasn’t going to be able to get a job working with children.

Erin and I outlined all of the reasons why Mr. X didn’t deserve our mercy.

The State’s Attorney, Andrea (An-DRAY-ah, BTW), reminded us that Mr. X had a clean record.

“After this guy physically assaulted Kai, after it was over, he continued to yell at Kai,” Erin said. “This wasn’t just a mistake. It was an aggressive and sustained attack. He was specifically told not to touch Kai. I don’t see how this goes to trial and he doesn’t get convicted.”

Andrea called Mr. X’s lawyer. We weren’t coming down, she said. In fact, we’re asking for more. His lawyer asked for a meeting with a judge to broker the deal.

Erin and I agreed to meet at court the next day to arm Andrea with everything she needed to know to talk to the judge about our case. I wrote about the attack and what the witnesses were going to say. Erin wrote about the law.

In court that morning, Andrea came out to introduce herself and talk about what was going to happen. Erin gave her the information we’d typed up.

Andrea turned back toward the bench.

“Oh, wait!” I called. I lunged for my handbag, pawing through the contents.

“Here,” I said, handing her this:

“That’s Kai.”

And we sat back to wait.

:::

The judge was respectful and kind to everyone, asking each defendant how they were doing.

“Fine,” they all said, even the ones in handcuffs who had spent at least one night in jail and were obviously pretty far from being fine.

I wondered why no one asked how the judge was doing, which is what I would have done in that situation. I would find out in time.

I had never really watched an actual trial before. I’ve always wanted jury duty, and the only time I was ever called was on Ryan’s due date. I got excused.

There was a lot of time for eyes to rove over the players in the room. Andrea was serious as hell. She had close-cropped hair and wore a plain black dress and a black blazer, with no jewelry—no adornment whatsoever. She never smiled. The bailiff, a woman who looked like you think a bailiff should look was stern, admonishing people in the courtroom who were talking or being disruptive. But she giggled and whispered with jail guards who brought in prisoners to answer charges. The public defender was the chic one, with an earth-toned scarf and naughty-librarian glasses. The effect was ruined, however, every time she walked. She wobbled dangerously in her high heels.

A girl sat down in front of Erin and me. She was with her mother, and had a tattoo on her neck that said, “Jonathon A,” as though there were a host of Jonathons that tattoo might refer to and she wanted to make sure there was no mistake. She was up for two Class A misdemeanors, battery and destruction of property. She had chosen to wear a hoodie and jeans to court.

“That girl’s trouble,” Erin whispered. That was for sure. You could kind of tell who was trouble and who wasn’t. The guy with the weapons charge, for example. That guy was scary. Then there was the guy who beat his case because the cop didn’t show up. He was so relieved and so happy that even the lawyers smiled at his obvious delight. He had a million dollar smile. That kid was all right.

The judge was pretty light-handed with his sentencing. There was a lot of time served. Jonathon A’s girlfriend got court supervision and 20 hours of community service—less for her two misdemeanors than the sentence we rejected for Mr. X’s one.

:::

After everyone else’s case had been heard, Andrea, Mr. X’s lawyer and the judge went into a room to talk about Kai.

Erin and I talked about school and our kids, the conversation wandering from birthday parties to discipline to sibling rivalry, a welcome place to land after two hours of public defenders and handcuffed defendants.

At one point I reached my arms overhead and stretched. As I did so I turned and looked over my shoulder.

Mr. X was sitting a couple of rows behind me, there with a woman who had come for the first hearing. She had her head in her hands, an image of anxiety bordering on anguish.

I turned quickly back around.

 

Continued tomorrow.