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.
Comments