punchdrunkmom

In which we learn the punishment for bad teasing

Ryan had a playdate at the zoo on Sunday, so I packed the kids into the car. Neither child wore a coat, having declared the weather “warm” and “perfect,” while in reality it was neither.

I thought about packing up the stroller, and decided against it. I wanted to see how the kids did without it because I was thinking about selling it. I say “was” because we were no more than five feet from the car when Ryan asked to be carried, saying she was cold and tired and hungry, and when I refused because it was too long of a slog through the parking lot with a 38-pound pre-schooler, she started to cry. A trickle of tears that became a full-on tantrum.

“MOMMY. YOU. NEED. TO. CARRY. ME!” she screamed, between ugly, choking sobs.

Better mothers might have picked her up, but I’ve never claimed to be that. Plus, I couldn’t very well positively reinforce that kind of behavior by giving in.

I had no intention of carrying Ryan all over the Lincoln Park Zoo, so when I saw wagons and strollers for rent in a building marked “information,” I ducked inside to see about getting a wagon.

Whatever Kai said when we walked in the door was loud. Loud enough that the woman behind the counter winced and touched her ear, and then gave him a disapproving look.

Kai is frequently loud in this way. They’re working on it at school, we work on it in therapy. One therapist landed on a system we use in which we ask him to speak at Level 3, as though he’s a radio. Left to his own devices, he’s pretty much at Level 11 the rest of the time.

“CAN WE GET THIS WAGON?” Kai asked.

The woman tsk-tsked him. She was older, like retired older, like people who work in the information building at the zoo tend to be.

“How much are the wagons?” I asked her.

“They’re thirteen dollars,” she said.

I began to dig around in my purse.

Kai turned to her. “CAN WE GET A WAGON?”

The woman answered, “I DON’T KNOW CAN YOU?” in a voice raised to Kai’s volume level, a mocking tone coloring her words.

Kai grabbed her mechanical tally counter and gave it a few clicks.

“Mommy has one like this,” he said.

“Don’t touch that,” the woman said.

I handed her a twenty and she counted out change. By now, between the counter and the yelling, she was visibly irritated with us.

Kai grabbed her counter again and gave it several more rapid clicks.

The woman stopped counting my change and grabbed for her counter, momentarily engaging Kai in a tug of war over the counter, which was attached to a clipboard with a green ribbon.

Kai started laughing.

“It’s not funny,” the woman said snappishly.

I started to admonish him, and then stopped, because I wasn’t going to let this old biddy be the reason I yelled at my kids. I had plenty of other, better reasons to do that.

She went back to counting my change, placing the money passive-aggressively on the counter instead of handing it to me. She fixed me with a look I know well, the one that says, “What kind of people are you?”

I stared back at her, unsmiling, unapologetic. Because really, what kind of person was she? Whose weapon of choice against a little boy is mockery? He doesn't realize how loud he is. It's part of his particular brand of autism.

:::

On the ride home, the kids fought over some toy or other in the back seat, the tension escalating until Kai leaned over and bit Ryan on the hand.

“Kai,” I snapped from the front seat. “Why did you do that?”

“She was calling me names,” Kai sniffed.

“We don’t bite, even when people call us names,” I said.

“But she was teasing me. Not good-teasing, but bad-teasing. There’s good teasing and there’s bad teasing.”

Ryan was crying over her bitten hand. “Ryan, I gotta be honest here, if you tease Kai, you might get bitten, so, you know. Take your lumps.”

Ryan continued to whimper as we drove, and I thought about Kai’s explanation of good teasing vs. bad.

All afternoon I’d regretted not taking the wagon lady down for mocking Kai. I could have pulled the A-card, telling her that he has a disability that makes it hard for him to regulate the volume of his voice. I wished I had said something pithy that somehow left the woman forever changed. 

But I realized as I drove home, that I didn’t need to take her down, because Kai had. He understood that she was bad-teasing him, and, in the way only a seven-year-old can, he found her weakness and exploited it, blowing chaos into her orderly information booth, reducing her to his level. She was probably at that very moment at home with a case of the vapors.

I almost laughed out loud.

In fact, she was probably lucky Kai hadn’t bitten her. Because really, she kind of had it coming.

 

In which we are confronted with an imminent high-stakes parenting moment, and I cast about for the nearest fast food restaurant

I took my dog to the vet yesterday. He didn’t get out of bed until 1 pm, and even then it was because I made him.

Apparently, he either has a fungal infection in his lungs or metastatic cancer. The vet thinks cancer is the most likely. There are a host of expensive tests we can do to determine what exactly is wrong. A fungal infection isn’t fatal. Cancer is, though. Either way, the dog is almost fourteen years old, so it would seem that the inevitable is, you know, inevitable.

I don’t know how long the dog has. If history is a guide, I can count on any pet of ours string things along in the most lengthy and fantastically expensive way possible. But do I know I’m going to have to find a way to explain it to the kids when the time finally comes, and it is that, more than anything, that I am dreading—coming home with a dog collar and dog leash and no dog, and then breaking their hearts.

:::

When our cat died, I didn’t address it with Kai at all. He liked the cat very much, and I know I should have said something to him, but I just—didn’t. Kai never mentioned that the cat was missing, never asked me a single question, and I took the easy way out.

It was a cheat, though, and I know it. Kai had never asked me a single question at that point in his life. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about the cat. He just didn’t have the communication tools to find out the answer.

:::

When Henry Fish, and later Captain Fish, died, I did address it with him.

“Kai,” I said, “Henry Fish died, so I got us a new fish.”

“Where is Henry Fish now?” Kai asked.

“Daddy flushed him down the toilet,” I answered.

I told him that dying is when you’re not alive anymore, but after that, I was at a loss, not sure how to talk about souls or what may or may not happen next, or if fish have souls or what.

My own first idea about the concept death occurred during a visiting the Denver Natural History Museum to see the dinosaur exhibit. I was four or five. I understood that the dinosaurs were dead, and that they had no skin covering their bones, and decided that this is what happens when you die, that a traumatic event happened—drinking paint, say, or a giant meteor hitting the earth, and that your skin peeled off immediately and you were dead.

Obviously, I was terrified.

I wondered how Kai generalized this knowledge that Henry was dead, what he thought that meant, what he thought happened.

I had a chance to find out a couple of weeks ago when my mother came to town.

“Who’s this?” she asked of Norman, our new fish.

“That’s Norman,” Kai said. “We had Henry Fish, and he swam upside down and got dead. And then Captain Fish jumped out of his bowl and got dead, and now we have Norman.”

I listened to all this with wonder, hoping for just a moment that somehow, without so much help from me, he was able to understand.

But Kai wasn’t finished.

“Henry Fish went out in the pipes to the lake and he’s with his friends,” Kai said.

I opened my mouth to correct him and shut it again, once again, taking the easy road. Kai seemed to believe that Henry had found nirvana, though he meant it in the literal sense. And if he didn’t really get it, well, the question of what happens when we die has plagued mankind since there was mankind.

Who knows? Maybe we all end up in Lake Michigan with our friends?

:::

There are three vast cemeteries that we pass on the way to Kai’s therapy center. A few weeks ago he asked me what they were.

“Mommy,” he said, “What are all those statues?”

“Those are headstones,” I said. “That is a cemetery and a headstone marks the place where someone is buried after they die.”

“In the ground?”

“Yes, but they are dead so they don’t mind.”

I waited for a follow-up question and didn’t get one, and then Ryan spotted the McDonald’s on the other side of the street and asked for a Happy Meal, and the moment had passed.

We drove by the cemetery again on Tuesday.

“That’s a lot of kids who died,” Kai said.

“Oh, Kai. That cemetery isn’t full of kids.”

I wondered what to say, and landed on a lie.

“Kai, most people live for a long, long time and don’t die until they are very, very old.”

He was quiet for a while, as we drove past row after row of graves.

“I’m going to miss those kids,” he said.

I didn’t know what to say to that.

And we were both lost in thought until Ryan spotted the McDonald’s, and the conversation shifted, once again, to Chicken McNuggets.

You can't always get what you want

“Can you read those letters on the wall?” the tech asked Kai.

“O-W-O-R-E-F.”

“Wow,” the tech said, sounding less awed than alarmed.

I had been spacing out, enjoying someone else being responsible for my kid for a few moments. Kai seemed to be enjoying himself at the eye doctor. But the tone of the technician’s voice suggested I should check back in. I looked at the wall.

D-V-G-F-R-P

He’d gotten them all wrong.

:::

Scott and I both wear glasses, so it’s not outside the realm of possibility that Kai might need them, too. I need them for reading, Scott needs them for everything.

The doctor had asked me all kinds of questions about Kai’s reading, whether he had problems with comprehension or writing. He does, as a matter of fact. Just the other day we wrote writing and reading comprehension goals into his IEP.

I had an idea that maybe Kai just couldn’t see. Was it possible that Kai’s deficits in reading could be attributed to bad eyesight? Because I can fix that! I could get Kai a jaunty pair of specs that would suddenly solve his problems, somehow talk his left and right hemispheres into cooperating more fully. I wondered if he’d want those kinds of lenses that turn into sunglasses outside.

The doctor put me in mind of Mick Jagger. He was diminutive and spoke with a vaguely British accent, longish hair swept back from his face, his blue suit had a sort of rock-and-roll sheen to it.

“Kai has no problems with his vision,” he said.

I cleared my throat. “But he got all those answers wrong,” I argued.

“Yes, but if we separated the letters, he got them perfectly. It’s only when they’re in a group,” the doctor countered.

“Kai has problems with tracking and with visual processing. He can’t read a line of text, he loses his place, he substitutes words. The denser a text gets, the less data he can collect, the less what he reads imprints.”

Mick Jagger decided we needed some more tests.

I liked Mick. I thought he made sense. It was like he used a scalpel to quickly get to the heart of something that we all—his teachers and I—just realized was becoming a vast disconnect. But it meant more testing, more money, more therapy, more modifications at school.

“Kai has great analytical skills,” Mick said. “There are a lot of reasons to be hopeful.”

I’ve been told this before. Doctors use that word “hopeful.” I’m beginning to suspect it’s some kind of code, like “Hopefully he won’t live in your basement.”

:::

Though the doctor had offered hope that Kai's visual processing could be vastly improved, I drove home feeling frustrated and discouraged. I’d thought that Kai’s problems with reading comprehension stemmed from a communication problem. His teacher had given me his reading assessments ahead of his IEP meeting.

“Why to people go to the zoo?” one question asked.

“Because ‘zoo’ starts with ‘z’ and ends with ‘oo,’” he’d answered.

We’d all had a good chuckle around the IEP table over that one, but it’s really not that funny. Kai has trouble with abstract thought, will need to be taught how to do it in order to answer any question thrown at him. That his visual processing adds another layer to the problem makes it an even bigger challenge for everyone.

Mick Jagger suggested that this will be incredibly frustrating for Kai, that there are things that come so very easily for him, but not this. He will struggle with this. He needs something called ocular re-education therapy. He’ll need ongoing speech therapy, time with his special ed teacher, all to answer a question that any three-year-old can answer whether they read the story or not.

Why do people go to the zoo? To see the damn animals.

:::

Later that night, I was taking some time to feel sorry for myself, scrolling through Facebook. Someone’s blog just got picked up on a news outlet. Yippee for them. A friend of mine’s son won his first trophy at a chess tournament. He’s five.

I shook my head.

This kid had been a surprise to a bohemian artist couple who hadn’t planned on having kids at all. In fact, she was halfway through her pregnancy before she figured it out and hadn’t been careful with her behavior. I remember her confiding in me that she was worried she’d hurt the baby somehow, but instead he is perfect. He is in an accelerated program at school. Gifted is the word you might use.

“The randomness of it,” I said to Scott. Here is a tale of two children, one carefully planned, one not. One placed in an expensive Pottery Barn crib that exceeded all safety recommendations and one placed in a crib built by his artist father in a nursery next to a workshop full of saws and nails. I took Kai to their house once, and was advised to lift him over my head in the yard so the pit bulls couldn’t get at him.

Their kid wins the chess trophy and my kid wins years of therapy.

Scott shrugged. “Everyone gets the kid they can handle,” he said.

But I was jealous, if only for a few moments.

My friend is an amazing parent, raising an amazing kid. Mine’s just different from hers.

When the doctor said that Kai would perhaps find this new venture frustrating, that his skills are so splintered that things most children can do handily will be so utterly baffling, I wonder if he wasn’t really warning me of what I would feel. I thought I’d accepted it all, but maybe not.

“There’s a lot of reason to feel hopeful,” the doctor had said. I was suddenly sure it was a reminder, a ladder tossed into whatever pit I would need to wallow in before I made my peace with Kai’s complicated brain and once again charged forward with great gusto and armed with my insurance card.

And who knows? There are a lot of people in this world. Maybe one of them DOES go to the zoo because it starts with a ‘z’ and ends with an ‘oo.’

One can always hope.