punchdrunkmom

In which we are plunged into two weeks of deep and utter despair

On Monday morning, I reminded Kai that he was not to call his classmate, Michael, fat.

He’d had a pretty good run, announcing that he hadn’t used the “F” word each day of the previous week, but then on Friday, he’d slipped up.

“What is going to happen to you if I find out that you’ve called Michael fat?” I asked.

“You are going to take away the iPad for two weeks,” he replied.

“That’s right.”

It wasn’t four hours later that I got a text from Dalila.

 

:::

When I picked him up at school, I asked him what had happened to him that day.

“I tripped over a rock,” he said.

“Oh?” I asked.

“Like 30 times,” he said.

“You tripped over a rock, and then tripped over the same rock 29  more times?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

I let that mystery slide into the ether, and changed my line of questioning.

“Did you get into any trouble?”

“Only because Sylas is a knob.” 

“A knob?” I asked.

“A Mincecraft knob*,” he said. “You know, he likes to kill the bushes.”

Well I don’t know, and I don’t care about Sylas’ Minecraft skills or lack thereof.

“Did you call Michael fat today?”

His shoulders slumped, but he wasn’t going to give it up without a fight.

“No,” he said.

“I already know that you did. Twice.”

He actually leaned against me then and put his head on my shoulder, the picture of misery. We both knew what was coming, and neither one of us were happy about it. I put my arm around him and gave him a squeeze.

“Do you remember what I said this morning? That if you did it again there would be no iPad for two weeks?”

Kai uttered a low and anguished moan full of hoplessness and aching dread.

:::

I got some details later from Dalila.

Kai had had a conflict with Sylas, who likes to tease Kai about whether there is such a thing as a pterodactyl, which there isn’t and which drives Kai nuts and which no doubt precipitated the Minecraft insult. This lead to some work in the peer mediation circle. Somehow the kids brought the subject around to Kai calling other kids names.

“Well,” Kai said, “Amelia is bossy and Michal is F-A-T,” he said, as though spelling it made it okay. Michael was right there.

Later, Michael gave a ukulele recital to the class during show-and-tell, strumming and singing a song. Apparently the song had a word in it like “cat” or “bat.”

“Rhymes with ‘fat,’” Kai said.

And now he has no iPad, computer or TV for two long weeks.

:::

Later that evening, at Scott’s urging, I wrote an e-mail to Michael’s mother, apologizing and telling her that we were working on this with Kai.

She didn’t write me back.

:::

This morning on the way to school, we saw a graffiti blaster truck working on a tagged building.

“What are they doing?” Ryan asked.

“They were taking off that paint,” I replied.

“That’s too bad,” Ryan said. “I think it’s pretty.”

"You do?" I asked.

It was a portrait of Satan.

“Who made it?” Ryan asked.

I sighed. “In Chicago, there are things called gangs, and those guys spray paint walls to mark their territory. They are bad people.”

“Bad like Kai?” Ryan asked.

I sighed.

“Oh, you guys. Kai’s not bad,” I said.

“I just get in trouble a lot,” Kai said.

“You sure do, honey,” I said.

You sure do.

 

*I think he meant "noob." Though "knob" does sound like a legitimate insult, doesn't it?

In which Kai graduates from vision therapy just in time

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.

In which we learn to celebrate our differences, or, at least, to shut up about them

On Tuesday, Kai’s aide, Dalila, told me that Kai called another kid, one I'll call Michael, fat.

This would not be the first time Kai had done this. He can’t remember his classmates' names, and one time he was told to line up behind a certain girl. The other kids pointed her out.

“Oh, the one with the belly that sticks out?” he asked.

That girl was sufficiently upset that her mother came to see Kai’s teacher with suggestions of bullying, and Kai’s teacher had to explain autism to her in halting Spanish.

In that circumstance, Kai wasn’t being intentionally mean, just pointing out a characteristic, though I would imagine that to be cold comfort to a girl sensitive about her weight.

This time, however, Kai wasn’t making a mistake.

He didn’t just tell the kid he was fat, he told the kid that he was, and I quote, “tired of his fatness.”

:::

“Kai,” I said, once we were in the car. “Did you say something mean to Michael?”

Kai gave a withering sigh. “I am just tired of his fatness.”

“KAI!” I said. “You may NOT call other people fat! It’s not nice and it hurts their feelings.”

“But I’m tired of his fatness!” Kai repeated.

“What does Michael’s body type have to do with you?” I asked.

“I’m tired of it.”

This was going nowhere, so I switched tack.

“What if someone said they hated boys who wear dinosaur hats?” I asked.

Kai sighed again.

“Fine,” he said. “New rule. I won’t ever say ‘fat.’”

“That’s an excellent rule,” I said.

Later, while Kai was in OT, I talked with his social worker, Sue, about it.

“Well, was it a black and white thing for Kai?” she asked. “Was he just making an observation?”

I told her that Michael’s “fatness” seemed to offend him in some way.

We talked for a while and she wrote some notes next to his name in her appointment book. We were still talking when Kai came back from his session with his OT, Emily, in tow.

“Kai told me he missed recess because he called some kid fat,” she said.

Emily said they talked about it, and while they were doing so, Andrea, Kai’s social skills group leader walked into the room. Andrea reminded Kai that there are some things we think but don’t say. Before we left, Sue asked him what he was going to do the next time he was tempted to call someone fat.

“I’m going to keep it in my mind,” Kai said.

:::

I wrote Kai’s teacher an e-mail later that night to share some of the language that we were using with Kai so that we could all be on the same page:  The “thought bubble” is where you put things you think but can’t say; “bucket fillers” are people who build others up, aka fill one’s bucket; “bucket dippers” are people who tear you down, aka take stuff out of your bucket.

I was feeling pretty good about how we’d handled this, as a team with the teachers and therapists coming together to deliver a consistent message, how Kai seemed to get it.

The next day, Kai’s teacher returned my e-mail, thanking me for sharing, and informing me that Kai had refused to sit next to Michael in group time because, as he said loudly, Michael was too fat.

:::

When I picked him up from school, I tore into him.

Hadn’t we talked about this? Didn’t we decide that Kai wasn’t going to call Michael fat anymore? I told him that I was disappointed, and that there was no way in hell that I was going to turn a bully loose into the world. I told him that he lost his iPad privileges for the day, and that he had to write a journal entry about why it’s not okay to call people fat. I told him that people come in all shapes, sizes and colors and that he should never, ever make fun of someone for being different. And I reminded him that he isn’t exactly free from some pretty hefty differences himself.

“Okay,” Kai said.

“Okay, what?” I asked, still slightly seething.

He didn’t reply.

“Kai,” I said, “what did I just say to you?”

He waited a few beats before answering.

“I wasn’t listening,” he said.

And my head exploded.

:::

Later, after I’d calmed down, I asked him what was up. I think my exact words were, “Kai, what is up with you?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Well, are you a nice kid or a mean kid? I guess you should probably decide.”

He thought for a minute. “Maybe I’m a little bit of both?”

:::

This morning, I reminded him that he was not, under any circumstances, to use the word “fat” around Michael.

“Just remember to keep it in your mind, and don’t say it.”

I told him that if he said it again, he would lose the iPad for a week.

“I’ll remember,” he said, and set about finding his shoes and his coat.

In the car, he was quiet, staring out the window. I reminded the kids of the schedule for the day and that I would see them after school.

“Mommy?” Kai asked after a while. “Can Michael read my mind?”

“No,” I said. “Whatever goes on in there is just for you.”

“Phew,” he said, and I laughed. 

Michael can't read your mind, kid, but I sure can.