I got a call on Friday while I was at work. It was Kai’s vision therapist, telling me that she’d consulted with our eye doctor and Kai was done with his therapy.
I knew that we were going to be winding down. At Kai’s last appointment, I myself had watched as Kai went through his eyeball gymnastics—tracking an object using only his eyes, converging on an object, tracking letters across a page, reading a grade-appropriate passage in a book. He even did the written portion of the test in invisible ink (because Kai), which was a first for the doctor and doubly hard because Kai couldn’t even see what he was doing until we shined a blacklight on his work.
The therapist told me that we didn’t even need to come in for our regularly scheduled appointment that afternoon.
:::
Of all the therapies we do, this vision thing is the most soul-sucking. It’s a four-hour boondoggle, and only 45 minutes of that time is spent in therapy. The rest is spent in the car, stopping and going in Friday afternoon rush-hour traffic from downtown Chicago, out past O’Hare, turning right at the Schaumburg Ikea and then another 10 miles until you’re pretty much at the Wisconsin border. Our therapist was nice and seemed to really get Kai if the dinosaur-themed eye exercises were any indication, but there is nothing for Ryan to do except play with a couple of ancient, broken down puzzles or read some truly god-awful books, such as this one, for sale on Amazon for a penny.
Ryan had begun to deeply resent being dragged along to vision therapy, and complained bitterly the last few times. I had even begun to toss around the idea of hiring a sitter for her, not just because of her general burn-out but because I didn’t want to read Presents from Grandma (also a penny) one more time ever.
Still, the thought of being done with vision therapy made me feel sort of unmoored, not unlike when I took Kai home from the hospital after his NICU stay when he was born. One minute he was covered in wires and tubes, his vital statistics on constant display for us to watch and worry over, and the next minute he was…free. What would we worry about now? How would we know what his O2 levels were?
I was full of doubt. Is Kai really cured? Will he regress? How would I know? And, even more pressing, what would I do with my afternoon?
:::
My car was packed with the necessities for a four-hour car trip—iPads and popcorn, a craft for Ryan to keep her occupied so I could read InTouch instead of Presents from Grandma, and two cans of sparkling water. But, now that I was no longer a vision therapy Sherpa, I no longer had to race to school to pick the kids up early, pop popcorn in the cafeteria, hustle the kids into the car and point it north for Arlington Heights.
Instead I worked for an extra half-hour. I bought a pair of sunglasses. I ate my lunch.
On a whim, I stopped at the grocery store and bought Kai a balloon that said, “Congratulations,” and a bouquet of tulips for Ryan.
I hugged kai when I saw him and gave him the balloon. “We don’t have to go there anymore!” I told him. “I’m so proud of you.”
He grinned. I told him to think of something super-fun to do instead.
And that’s when Kai’s aide, Dalila, told me that we needed to talk about what had happened at school that day.
During library, the librarian read a book and the text contained the word, “fat.” Kai thought his best course of action would be to clarify for the rest of the students that fat was “like Michael.” Then he refused to work with the other kids on a group project, and THEN, when Dalila informed him that he was indeed going to be working on the project, suggested that Dalila should be fired.
I rounded on Kai.
“Do you even know what ‘fired’ means?” I asked, and proceeded to ream him out, loudly and with great gusto right there on the playground, for calling Michael fat again, for not doing his work, for his callous disrespect for the person who makes it possible for him to function with his dignity in tact much less pass the third grade. Other kids and parents quickly found other places to be, and even Dalila seemed to feel genuinely sorry that she’d had to tell me any of this.
He mumbled an apology to Dalila. I told him he’d lost his iPad privileges for the day. Again.
I looked at him for a few long moments. His eyes were down cast, his shoulders slumped. He was still holding a balloon that said, “Congratulations.”
:::
A good mother might have taken the kids home then, so they could spend a long afternoon staring at the ceiling in quiet reflection. I have never claimed to be thus, however, and instead took the kids for ice cream. Kai was being punished with the iPad, after all, and we suddenly had four free hours. I drew the line at going to the arcade, however.
On Saturday, Scott took Kai to the park, where he hit a ball with a bat two out of three times.
I couldn’t believe it.
Kai tracked a converging object with enough accuracy to hit it—a feat he wouldn’t have been capable of even a few months ago.
So maybe we really are done with vision therapy.
Just in time.
Now we have Friday afternoons free to figure out how to stop insulting Michael.
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