punchdrunkmom

Hickory dickory dock, the boy destroys a clock

 

When the babysitter calls, you answer. You answer because babysitters in 2014 text instead of call. Can Ryan have a popsicle? Where is Kai’s medicine? But when a babysitter calls, it’s the same feeling you get when your parents call you at 9:30 in the morning—like oh, crap, what’s wrong? Who died?

So I left the meeting and took the call. Because someone was having an allergic reaction. Or someone had projectile vomited. Or someone had climbed up on a grandfather clock, causing it to crash down onto the floor.

It turned out to be that last thing, the bit about the clock.

:::

The grandfather clock came into my possession because nobody wanted it. Even I was not a huge fan of it when I was growing up. It had belonged to my grandmother on my dad’s side—Grandma Garrett.

As a kid, my family would travel to Iowa every summer to visit the extended family, staying with my mother’s side for a while, then moving on to my father’s.

My mother’s side was boisterous and fun, the coterie of aunts and uncles gathered around family tables drinking beer, sharing stories and loud laughter, and engaging in low-level gambling involving a card game called “31-knock,” for which I would save dimes all year long. My dad’s side, by contrast, was quiet. My Grandma Garrett was no less warm, no less grandmotherly. On the contrary, she was probably more so. She used to make me toast with both butter AND peanut butter and then cut my toast into triangles (which to this day is my preferred toast methodology). She also used to buy special cereal for when I was there, whereas my maternal grandmother, Grandma Jones, once told me she baked me cookies as a care package, but ate them before she got around to mailing them.

We would visit Grandma Garrett in the oppressive heat of high summer in Iowa, a time that makes you savor the indoors. I remember seeing the Care Bears movie more than once one summer, not because it was good but because it was so deliciously cold inside the theater. To this day, every time the automatic doors swish open at Target, I’m taken back to those summers, when you would trod across the steamy blacktop of the parking lot, anticipating that your mother might be inclined to buy you something because you were on vacation and everyone was feeling pretty good, and the doors would slide open and a rush of cold air greeted you, air that smelled like new shoes and frying pans and popcorn and sweet relief from the relentless hot.

Grandma Garrett’s house was similarly cold, as was her Buick, a car made to be driven by senior citizens in Florida. But it was quiet, too. It was quiet because an old woman lived there, her house impeccably clean, her bathroom smelling of talcum powder. No one gathered around the kitchen table to tell boisterous stories, though when the grandchildren were old enough, and maybe a couple of years before we were, she always had beer.

And all the while, her grandfather clock ticked in the living room.

This clock drove my mother a little mad, in the way that a mother-in-law’s loud clock might. It ticked and tocked and occasionally chimed though the otherwise still house, beating out the slow rhythm of a dull torpor, counting each second of a hot day with nothing to really do. There was one summer that I was actively afraid of the clock, having been told one of those babysitter ghost stories from the 70s where the parents come home and can’t find the kid and the cops find him dismembered and stuffed inside the god damned grandfather clock.

:::

After she died, I took the clock home with me to Chicago. I don’t know why, exactly, except that I loved my grandmother and no one else wanted it.

And so it moved with me, from apartment I shared with no one to one I shared with Scott, to a home I purchased with Scott, to new home I purchased with Scott and my two children. I'd had it restored, though I didn't wind it, the moving parts too tempting for small hands.

“The clock is destroyed,” Scott said when I called on my way home from the meeting. He had beaten me home, had been the one to greet the terrified babysitter. “I’m sorry.”

:::

I asked Kai to tell me what happened.

“I wanted to change the time,” he said. He’d made a staircase out of blocks so he could reach the cabinet door, undo the hooks and swing the door open. He was standing on the ledge of the cabinet, manipulating the clock hands when it fell forward. It would have fallen on top of him, except that it hit the dining room table before it could smash him to smithereens.

It is one of those things that I was grateful not to have seen, because he actually could have been really hurt. The clock is heavy, the works made of metal, with heavy weights to wind the pendulum. How lucky we were that the table broke the fall, that Ryan wasn’t “helping.”

The babysitter, my friend Monica’s older son, was traumatized. It happened in flash, he told his mom.  But I’m not confused about what’s important. A clock is a clock. A kid can’t be replaced. And no one knows better than I what happens when you take your eyes of the boy for a second.

I cast about for a punishment for Kai. I was mad at him. I felt guilty about the clock, which is probably beyond repair. And I was frustrated, too, because this is one of those things you just have to take. Your kid with autism and ADHD destroys something and you just...radically accept it, because it can't be undone, because he can’t help himself, because if I duct taped him to his bed he’d still find a way to destroy everything in his wake, because anger won’t help. But still, I wanted to send a message. I had to.

“Kai, you can’t climb on furniture,” I said. “Just like the clock, it could tip over, it could crush you, hurt you. You could actually die. That would destroy me.”

“I’m sorry I knock over the clock,” he said. “We can get another one.”

“No, we can’t, Kai,” Scott said. “It was special in Mommy’s family.”

Kai looked genuinely contrite, but I lowered the boom anyway.

“No iPad for a month.”

And that’s when he started to cry.

“Kai, it’s my job to keep you safe. It’s not safe to climb on the furniture.”

“But I can jump and run really fast if it falls,” he said.

“But Ryan can’t,” I replied

Ryan chose that moment to chime in. “I’m scared,” she whispered, ever the drama queen.

“But I like the iPad,” Kai wailed, “A month is so long.”

He’s right. It’s a long time. He only got a week when he flooded the penthouse. But I needed to make an impression. Did I? I have no idea.

“You’re lucky I’m not cancelling your birthday,” I said. I said it out of anger, sounding so much like my own mother that I wanted to take it back immediately. But I didn't.

Kai continued to howl his protest, how sorry he was, how much he likes the iPad, until he forgot why he was crying in the first place.

“You have to buy me a butterfly yo-yo,” he sobbed. “A perfect one that is red.”

At that, Scott and I just stared at him.

Because we didn’t know what else to do.

 

In which a socially challenged kid schools me on how to act around another person

At the center where Kai gets occupational therapy, there are kids who are there for all manner of special needs—speech, behavior, physical therapies, even help eating. The parking lot has three times the usual number of handicapped spaces. They are always full. And not with the compact sedans you see when you go to the mall of the grocery store, either, but big conversion vans that have motorized ramps. Parents push high-tech-looking wheelchairs containing children with twisted limbs through the lobby and into therapy rooms.

I would like to say that I am good at acknowledging these children and their parents, that I smile and say, “hi,” like it were any other mother and any other kid, but that’s probably not true. I discovered recently that I actually needed a lesson in how to interact with someone with a profound disability. And that lesson was delivered brilliantly by my son.

:::

Kai bounds into the center like a rabid wolverine, running in front of strollers and past grown-ups, shedding coats and boots and snowpants in wet, slushy piles. He trips over other kids as he lunges for the bowl with the stickers. I run behind him. “Kai,” I say, more to have said it than because it does any good, “pay attention to where you’re going.”

Last week, he ran pell mell into a young man in a motorized wheel chair. He had a service dog with him, and before I could even get the word “Stop!” out of my mouth, Kai had both hands on this dog, tickling and scratching. The dog licked Kai’s face.

“Kai, you need to ask before you pet someone’s dog,” I said. I didn’t know this guy, had no idea if Kai was making him uncomfortable, if we were breaking taboo.

“What’s your dog’s name?” Kai asked.

I realized that the guy had a computer screen in front of him, and he was somehow typing on a keypad. I say “somehow,” because I actually don’t know how he was doing it. Certainly not with his fingers.

“What’s your dog’s name?” Kai repeated, louder.

“Kai, wait,” I said. “He’s typing.”

When the man was done, the computer speaker spat the name “Caleb.”

“His dog’s name is Caleb,” I said to Kai.

I was freaking out a little, to be honest. I didn’t want to disturb this guy, I didn’t want Kai to make him feel weird or call attention to his handicap or otherwise do something awkward. I realize that this isn’t Kai’s problem, it’s mine. It’s the way we (I) look past someone with a handicap thinking that we’re being polite, not staring or even acknowledging what makes someone different. Kai, however, has no such compunction.

“What kind of dog is he?” Kai asked.

The man started typing again, but apparently he was too slow for Kai.

“I SAID,” he shouted, aiming his voice in the man’s ear, “WHAT KIND OF DOG IS HE?”

I died a little inside.

“Kai,” I said, placing a hand on his arm, ready to yank him down the hallway if I had to, “this man’s typing on his computer.”

“Not sure,” were the words from the computer.

Just then, to my immense relief, Emily showed up.

“Is Sam showing you his dog?” she asked Kai. She was, of course, perfectly at ease around Sam. She sees kids like him all the time. “Caleb helps Sam turn on lights and all kinds of stuff.”

“My dog is Elliott,” Kai said to Sam, and before Sam could reply, Kai flipped the joystick on Sam’s chair and it started to roll away.

:::

Later that same visit, another kid in a chair, a kid named Brian, showed up in the sibling playroom. Brian is also non-verbal, but he has no computer. At least none that I could see. He gestured to get my attention, and then gestured to the TV. 

Assuming he wanted to watch a video, I jumped up and busied myself trying to find a tape to put in the VCR, rejecting Veggie Tales as being too religious and the Lion King as too traumatic, finally settling on “Animals of the Arctic.” I shoved the tape into the player, but it wouldn’t go in all the way. I pulled the tape out, and peered inside the VCR, as though anything I saw in there might somehow make sense to me. I tried to shove the tape in again, but it wouldn’t budge.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I think the TV’s broken.”

Brian turned to me and gestured once again to the TV. 

“I’m sorry, it’s not working,” I said, a note of panic in my voice.

Brian wheeled his chair around to face me, his expression expectant, and I realized that it was this that I feared—not being able to communicate or help, of not knowing what to do. Yes, I have a special needs child, but really, in the grand scheme, his needs aren’t that special. Eventually, Kai and I can have a mind meld and land on whatever it is that he needs from me. But Brian. I had no idea what to do. I couldn’t make the TV work. Brian faced me with an expression I couldn’t even read, unless it was amusement, because that’s what I saw in his eyes. 

A man appeared in the doorway.

“Brian,” he said. “What are you doing in here? Let’s go!”

Brian wheeled his chair around and followed his dad out of the room.

But before he turned the corner out of sight, he turned and gestured to me. It was a wave goodbye.

:::

It is probably little wonder that most of us have no real experience being around people who are profoundly disabled. Or maybe you do, and it’s just me. But when I was a kid, children with special needs were all shoved into one classroom called “special ed.” They walked or wheeled together to the lunchroom or to gym, and as I look back, I wonder if that’s where Kai would have been 25 years ago, lumped in with this band of children who looked different and walked different and learned differently than I do.

Today, the Least Restrictive Environment (LRE) mandate lets families put their kids in general ed classrooms if they can find a way, through supports, to do so. Kai is in a classroom with 26 neurotypical children. I worried about this, of course. These kids are so much more socially sophisticated than Kai, but it has somehow worked out. Kai comes home every day with a new one of those rubber band bracelets that someone has given him. He gets invitations to birthday parties and personalized valentines. He has kids that sit with him at lunch.

And maybe Kai is teaching them something, too.

:::

We saw Sam again yesterday. Kai went running up to him

“Look at my tooth,” he said, shoving a baggie into Sam’s face. Kai had lost a tooth right before we left for the center.

“Cool,” Sam typed.

Kai chatted at Sam, taking care this time not to move the chair. He asked Sam questions about his key screen. Sam never really had a chance to answer.

“Sam,” I said. “Kai just loves you.”

Kai threw his arms around Sam’s neck. “I love you, Sam,” Kai said.

“Kai!” I shouted, once again not wanting to do anything to hurt or upset Sam, not wanting to break a taboo.

But Sam leaned into the hug, the muscles in his face relaxing into a smile.

“Thank you, Sam,” I said, as Kai skipped down the hall for his appointment.

Later, while Ryan and I were in the playroom, Ryan announced she had to go potty and bolted out the door.

I shoved my phone into my purse and slung it over my shoulder, and by the time I rounded the corner after her, she was gone.

There were two directions she could have gone, two bathrooms down two different hallways. Sam sat in his chair in the lobby. He would have seen which way she went. I felt my eyes land on him and then, out of habit, out of some crazy notion that passes for politeness, quickly away. And then I took a breath and looked not past him but at him. He must be in his early 20s. I thought he might have cerebral palsy, but of course, I have no idea. He is nonverbal, his limbs too unreliable to type. He types some other way, probably by moving his head. He is handsome in an early 90s way, with longish hair brushed back from his face and a scraggly, hipster beard and a flannel shirt. Take away the chair and the computer and hand him a guitar, and he would look like a musician from Seattle.

Sam had looked away the same time I did, as though a lot of people see him and then see past him.

Or maybe that’s just my own interpretation, my own realization that sometimes I see, but I don’t really see.

When he realized that my eyes had come to rest on him for real, he jerked his head toward the right, pointing down the hallway.

“Thanks, Sam,” I said as I jogged past.

For that was indeed where I found Ryan.

And I found myself, as I often do, in awe of my son—my sweet, quirky, strange son who, for all that he as autism and is so socially challenged, is the first one to throw his arms around someone that I don’t know how to interact with.

I’m going to work on that. And I’m going to bring Caleb some milkbones. And the next time I see Sam, I’m going to say “hello,” and give him time to type his reply.

Hopefully, though, he won’t ask me to figure out how to work the TV.