punchdrunkmom

It's awful. I know.

I went for a run today and was listening to a podcast that had been recommended to me by a teacher. It’s called Nice White Parents. It’s about some, well, nice white parents seeking to integrate their children into a public school in Brooklyn full of mostly brown and black children. It’s incredibly compelling listening (Sarah Koenig of Serial fame is an executive producer). 

I had a knot of existential dread as I was running. It could have been the sheer number of people (masked and unmasked) on the trail. It could have been the morning spent reading about the Fyre Festival Republican Convention. It could have been all of the memories that popped up on Facebook of all the things I usually do this week, such as visit my mom and go to the Minnesota State Fair. It could have been the shame and discomfort listening to a story of classism and entitlement that I recognize in my own community.

All of that, yes. But I think it was mostly just the talk of school in general, which for us starts in a week. Listening to the stories of the (well-intentioned) parents and all of their passion and drive to make things better for their kids in the moment was actually reminding me that school was starting and I have done absolutely nothing to prepare for it.

As I wove past walkers and slower runners, I passed one woman who was standing off the path talking on her phone.

“It’s awful. I know,” she said into her phone.

I almost laughed. It doesn’t matter what they were talking about. Pick a topic.

It’s awful. I know. It’s a hashtag. It’s a mantra. It’s the truth. 2020—It’s awful. I know™

:::

I have been ignoring the start of school. Or “school,” as it were—we are remote until further notice.

Remote for Kai last year wasn’t great, but at least Kai can come to the table for a one-on-one lesson after all those years of therapy. It wasn’t clear that he was getting his IEP accommodations met, but with Scott acting as his aide, he was at least getting his work done. He also doesn't mind the solitude of it all. Ryan was less able than Kai to learn over zoom. She would get off the call and I would ask her about it and she would tell me that she hadn’t paid any attention, thanks in no small part to her raging case of newly-diagnosed ADHD. For Ryan, everything that made school tolerable—friends, social interaction, breakfast for lunch on Wednesdays, was gone.

For me there was a moment last spring where, between the teacher strike and COVID, I just decided to flush 4th and 7th grade down the toilet. I will admit 100% to phoning it in. I figured they’d be back in school in the fall and we could just fix it all then. As Kai would say, “That’s a problem for future me.”

And here we are.

:::

I did talk to some parents of Ryan’s classmates about a pod. We’ve done nothing apart from one zoom call a few weeks ago, however. I’d thought about hiring someone to assist the kids, but I’ve done nothing about that either, and now I’m seeing that people (probably those same nice white parents in the podcast) are giving such assistants $25 an hour with a $1000 signing bonus. No one has invited Kai into a pod and this makes me so sad that I can’t think about it. I feel guilty, like I’m just letting school happen to us without trying to control any part of the process.

The truth of it is that I have no idea what to do. I know some people are moving to cities that are in-person or hybrid, but that seems like a lot of effort for an uncertain outcome. I know some people decided to go to private schools, but a private school won’t address Kai’s IEP or Ryan’s 504 and will probably switch to remote after a week anyway and at the cost of a new mini-van per year per kid. I’ve heard of places that run camps in the summer that are charging $500 per kid per week to help them through their remote classes, but that’s a non-starter for Kai, who does not do well in camp settings. I know one family that advertised for a teacher to come to their home, with an offer to pay $2 more an hour than I make in my own job. This seems like maybe the best worst option, but I just…I don’t know. I don’t know what any of this is even going to look like.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

:::

The other day, I did come up with one idea while I was driving to work, and when I got home I asked Ryan if we could talk about school.

She pulled off her headphones with a heavy sigh of tween angst.

“I have an idea,” I said.

She groaned,  not wanting to talk about school at all.

“What if we made you lunches like you get at school?” Ryan had started exclusively eating school lunch last year.

She smiled a little.

“Like chicken patties, for example,” I offered.

“I also like the chicken nuggets they serve with breadsticks, the spaghetti and breakfast-for-lunch,” she said brightly.

“We can get some of those compartmentalized plates, maybe.”

Ryan put her headphones back on and went back to Roblox, only to take them back off again.

“That wasn’t the school discussion I was expecting,” she said. “That was much more fun.”

“Sometimes, lunch is the best part of the day,” I said, and put “sleeve of chicken patties” on the Costco list.

Chicken patties. This is the only thing I’ve done to prepare. It is the only thing I have in my bag of tricks.

Well, not the only thing.

:::

I wonder what our children will think of all of this in ten or twenty years. Or fifty. I have to think that they will somehow still be fine, that this, too, shall pass. All of them will miss some important thing and never circle back to it, like exponents or the definition of onomatopoeia, neither of which I use in my adult life anyway. Most children across history have faced far worse traumas than this particular one. My kids aren’t having nuclear weapons dropped on them, or the sun blocked by clouds of thick black dust and locusts, or the sea swallowing them up in a single devastating wave. It’s just a few zoom calls and a laundry list of things that break my heart.

 

It’s awful.

I know.

 

 

 

In which Kai does three mundane things beautifully, and all by himself

Kai’s teacher has been making references to the fact that Kai is “getting older,” by which she means he is beginning to make some changes, these changes being primarily a marked increase in sullen defiance and a tendency toward eye-rolling. He ripped up his paper in health class right in front of the teacher. He says the word, “Fine,” in response to being told what to do at school with as much passive-aggressive disgust as any teenager.

We haven’t seen this so much at home. Or maybe since he has fought me tooth-and-nail over Every. Little. Thing. for the whole of his life that a day his teacher calls him defiant is just a day I’d call Thursday. But there have been some developments around here that signal some of the changes she’s talking about, such as his not wanting me to see him naked, or giggling at the word, “underwear.” Just yesterday he was watching something on YouTube and exclaimed, “What the hell?” and then looked at me and apologized, which is the very beginnings of the possibility that one day he might actually have a filter.

But then there is, apparently, a flip-side to these changes. Some of them are good. Astonishing, really.

Last week I picked out the coat I wanted him to wear for his field trip.

“Not that one,” he said, reaching for a lighter one.

“Kai, you’re going to be outside all day. You need a warm coat.”

He zipped up the one he’d chosen and said, calmly as can be, “Mommy, you always make me wear that coat and I’m always too hot and it just goes in my backpack. This one is fine.”

The 1-2-3 count about to form on my tongue, the one he always obeys because he knows that I am serious. But with great effort I shook off the impulse, the muscle memory of doing all of the deciding for him, this boy who seemed to want to decide himself if he’s too hot in one coat vs. another. He seemed so reasonable, so capable in that moment that I didn’t press him, even if I was worried he’d be cold all day.

“Okay,” I said, putting the heavy coat back into the closet. “I like the way you used your words.”

Pictures from the field trip to the zoo that day show Kai clowning around with his friends, no longer even wearing the lighter jacket in the weak May sunshine. He had been completely right, and had made me understand that in tiny (very tiny), incremental steps, I am going to need to learn how to let him go.

:::

There are some ways in which Kai is like a toddler. His lack of impulse control makes him unpredictable. He disappears, wanders, damages things. I asked our neurologist if any of the ADHD medications had a component to address this, and he said no, that I would have to continue to watch Kai oh, so closely, that he still absolutely need his paraprofessional at school.

But the coat incident started the ball rolling for me to try to give him some more leeway. He’s been asking to do some chores to earn things he wants. Chores are problematic around the house partially because it makes Scott nuts when, say, the dishwasher is loaded incorrectly or there’s any water on the floor ever, and partially because anything that I trusted Kai to do (clean the nose-prints on the back door, for example) required effort on my part to remind him. Finally, I landed on the perfect chore.

“Kai,” I said, “you are now in charge of cleaning up the dog poop.”

He let out a moan of disgust. “Why can’t I mow the lawn?”

“Because you have to pick up the poop before you mow it anyway.”

He was quiet for a few moments.

“This is the chore I want you to do, Kai.”

He sighed.

“Fine.”

And so I went outside with him, armed with poop bags, and showed him how to hunt for dog turds, carefully folding the bags back on themselves so as not to get poop on his hands.

“This poop smells,” he said by way of complaint, but he stayed doggedly with it. (See what I did there?)

When we were done we had several bags filled with poop that I planned to take out to the alley next time I left the house.

“Would it be extra helpful for me to put these in the garbage?” Kai asked.

I stared at him. When in this life has he ever been extra helpful?

“Yes,” I said at last. “Take them out to the alley and put them in a black garbage can.”

I had the thought that I should go out there with him, and decided instead to see if he could do it without me micromanaging the entire process—opening the garage door, reminding him to look both ways in the alley, of where the proper garbage can was. I went inside and stood in the kitchen window, which faces the garage window, through which I could see first the door going up, then Kai’s baseball-capped head approaching the alley. I saw him look around. I saw him head toward the recycling bins. I started loading the dishwasher, thinking that I would just move the poop later, when Kai came bursting in.

“I did it!” he said, clearly pleased. “I wasn’t sure which black garbage can so I went across the alley and used that one.”

I praised him lavishly and checked off his chore chart with great flourish.

“Now can I mow the lawn?” he asked.

:::

Last night I advised kai that he needed a bath, noting the dirt under his fingernails.

“You also need your nails cut,” I said.

I asked him to start his bathwater, telling him I’d be up later for the nails, but got distracted by Ryan wanting a bedtime story and missed my window when Kai was captive in the bathtub.

I found the nail clippers and went downstairs, where Kai was watching YouTube videos on Minecraft.

“Let’s cut those nails,” I said to him, grabbing a hand.

And then I looked closer.

All of his nails were neatly trimmed.

“I already did it,” he said.

“You did?” I asked, incredulous. He usually fights me until I threaten to take away his iPad, but he’d cut his own nails, by himself and without any nagging or reminding.

Stunned, I resisted the urge to inspect the job he’d done, and instead told him that I was really, really proud of him.

“How’d you get to be so big?” I asked. He grinned at me.

And then he asked me to make him some popcorn, get him some ice water, things that, God help me, he could do himself.

And I reminded him as such, and retired to the living room with a glass of wine.

Two very special stories

Oh, hey, how’s it going? How was the start to your school year? Please pardon me while I have this wine IV set up so I can tell you about ours.

:::

I don’t write much about the special ed process. And by that I mean that I don’t write a lot of stuff that I publish about the special ed process. Partially this is because a lot of people who read my blog also have kids that go to Kai’s school and going public with my angst about it potentially villainizes people that the community needs to (and should) trust. But it’s also because the process of getting services for child is set up specifically to take a normally confident and reasonably intelligent woman (me) and emotionally abuse her until she is but a husk of her former self, and by the time she climbs back out of that abyss, she’s moved on to more mundane matters like her son escaping the house in the middle of the night.

Kai’s IEP (Individual Education Program for those who are lucky enough not to know what that is) is the plan the public school system creates for educating him. Every child with a disability is entitled to free and appropriate education. This is a law, so the district has to educate Kai and it’s their job to figure out how to do it. Awesome, right? Except…

Except that this costs the district a lot of money. It's way more expensive to educate a kid like Kai than a kid like Ryan. Ryan just goes to school, learns stuff from her general education teacher, puts on her backpack and comes home. Kai, however, in addition to getting time with a special ed teacher, speech and social work services, has a person whose job it is to be by his side all day helping him stay on task and keeping him from wandering away or whatever else. This is a salaried position with benefits dedicated entirely to a single student—Kai. (What’s up, Dalila? Shout out!)

On the second day of school, Dalila informed me that she was told that she wasn’t going to be with him for recess or lunch this year, this according to the person in charge of scheduling the aides, and I threw what could only be described as an obscenity-filled tantrum right there on the playground and had to be asked by a teacher to please calm down in front of the children, to which I huffily replied that these were urban children and had probably heard it all before, but left the playground anyway before someone called the authorities.

:::

Anyone in Chicago knows that the school district is broke and screwed, and in an effort to save $42 million, they devised a plan to “modify” services to 50,000 special ed students. Seems legit. I mean, why not balance the budget on the backs of those most vulnerable? And why worry that the district just moved to a new office and bought all new office furniture because their old office furniture didn’t fit in the new space quite right when we can just toss a spectrum kid on the playground to wander off or get bullied or abused by someone who doesn’t know how to work with him? Am I right?

(Head explodes, painting the kitchen walls with blood and bits of gray matter.)

Anyhoo.

Kai was okay because CPS has to implement his IEP, which includes his aide and special ed modifications. Or should I say, he was okay until he wasn’t. Dalila told me to check Kai’s IEP when I got home, and, with a pounding heart and sweaty palms, realized that lunch and recess aren’t specifically mentioned.

:::

I did the only thing I could do at that point, and fired off an angry e-mail to the case manager. He’d had his aide for lunch and recess last spring after the new IEP had been set up in February, so what had changed? And then I asked that we meet to change the IEP to include lunch and recess, that I never would have signed off on an IEP that didn’t include them.

And then I said that Kai wasn’t going to school until there was a plan in place, an option that is pretty close to nuclear.

And then I waited for a reply. And waited. And waited. And the sun set and day became night and I fed the kids dinner and tried to calm down enough to teach a yoga class and later tried to get some sleep but tossed and turned all night, running over every possible outcome and fearful that we would have to take this argument to a higher authority or get lawyers involved and then I began to doubt myself, like had I overreacted and gone all over-the-top with my outrage in threatening to pull Kai out of school? And then assuring myself that I’d done the right thing, but did they secretly think, oh here we go again with Mrs. Judy and her precious snowflake what makes her think they’re so damn special, and then I reminding myself that I wasn’t there to make friends but to fight for Kai, even though I secretly want everyone to like me and that’s where morning found me last Thursday—with dark circles under my eyes and hands shaking from too much compensatory coffee.

:::

Over the summer I’d heard whispers of this, that the case manager might try to decrease Kai’s aide minutes, and I’d told my mother.

“It’s smart of them to choose you to try that with,” she said.

I looked at her like she was nuts. “But they know I’d never let that happen,” I argued.

“Exactly. That way, they can go back to the district and say that they tried but couldn’t make it work. You don’t do a job like that without being somewhat political.”

I thought about that while I waited for the case manager to show up on Thursday morning. Did I go crazy on them, and in doing so behave exactly the way they predicted I would? Or is that very thought the sort of paranoid delusion of a crazy person? And when the case manager showed up and calmly explained that this was all just a Silly Misunderstanding and of COURSE Kai has recess coverage for his safety I still wasn’t any closer to an answer regarding my potential for psychosis or their potential for treachery, but Kai still had his aide so I just left it at that.

:::

We are okay until December, and after that, who knows. I mean, after that, no kid in Chicago is safe because the budget includes $500 million unicorn dollars—money that’s in the budget provided the Illinois government generously decides to give it to Satan’s handpuppet Rahm Emanuel. Considering that Early Intervention therapists aren’t getting paid to treat special needs toddlers and Illinois lottery winners aren’t getting their awards because the governor wants to burn the whole state to the ground, well, feel free to draw your own conclusions.

(Head explodes again.)

Anyhoo. That’s a story for another day.

And speaking of stories, Kai told his speech therapist the story of the day he and Stella met on Monday. It was the longest string of sentences he’s ever spoken, a true story with a beginning, middle and end, punctuated with funny and sweet observations (“We drove for many hours, saw some windmills, then drove for many more hours.”) It was so long that the therapist realized that Kai’s voice lilted up and down during the course of it because he has no practice putting so many words together and breathing at the same time.

We both stared at him, open mouthed, both of us rendered speechless.

So you know. Despite the school districts vast conspiracy to make me go insane, Kai’s sort of kicking ass right now.

With Dalila right there by his side.

In which I'm pissed off by doctors four times in the span of four days

The nurse was unimpressed.

“He has a virus,” she said, “but he seems to be tolerating it really well. His lungs sound great, his Spirograph is textbook.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“So….unless he as a real fever, like 103, I wouldn’t come back in.”

“I see.”

It was the word “real” that got me. Kai’s had been 100.3. She gave me a look then, one that said “You’re wasting my time.”

I thought about reminding her that coming here had been her idea. She told me on Friday that Kai would be significantly better by Monday, but he wasn’t, and on Tuesday he’d gotten a fever and I had to pick him up at school.

This same woman who was in the process of dismissing me had told me to call the office if he got worse, which he did, the office told me to come in, which we did, and now I was being condescended to and made to feel like a dope.

I thought about saying all of this to her.

But instead I just collected Kai and left. If we hurried, we could make it to the grocery store before we had to pick up Ryan.

:::

“It’s been a long week,” I told the nurse. “We haven’t gotten a lot of sleep because the Albuterol revs him up and keeps him awake.”

She cocked her head to the side and frowned slightly. “We should try Xopenex, then. It does the exact same thing in the exact same dose, but it doesn’t rev you up. It’s like a mirror image of Albuterol.”

I stared at her for several long seconds.

Kai’s had sleep problems from his first day on this earth. It was sleep problems that caused me to lose faith in the entire medical profession. I fired Kai’s doctor, I did an exhaustive search to find a new one that could help me. This office, the one that treats his allergies and asthma, knew all about it because I’d asked them to help me. One of the doctors there has a kid on the spectrum himself. They’ve been treating Kai for five years. Five years.

And in five years, no one suggested this other medicine, the rescue inhaler that wouldn’t cause his heart to race and his body to go a thousand miles a minute instead of his normal hundred-mile a minute pace.

I closed my eyes briefly.

Isn’t this their job? Shouldn’t they know? Oh, here’s a kid with ADHD and asthma and maybe we should find a medicine that won’t compound all of these problems so that this poor, exhausted woman with the bags under her eyes sitting in front of me can get a decent night sleep. Because I sure as shit don’t know these things. That’s why we go to the doctor.

“Yes,” I said evenly. “We should try that.”

:::

“Is it going to be much longer?” I asked the receptionist at the neurologist’s office.

“It shouldn’t be,” she said.

The doctor was, at this point, running 45 minutes late.

The last time we’d gone there, I myself was 30 minutes late. They told me that I was too late, asked me to reschedule the appointment and go home.

I considered pointing this out and leaving, but I didn’t want to haul the kids all the way up to Skokie again, and the doctor called for us shortly afterward, so I ushered the kids into the exam room so we could talk about Kai’s brain.

:::

The coordinator from an anesthetist’s office called me today. Kai has to have some teeth pulled and some cavities filled. The dentist and I decided this would all be way easier if we put him under anesthesia to do it, but before that can happen, some details need to be shored up.

She asked me about Kai’s medical history, which I gave her.

She asked me which insurance I had and I told her.

“Oh,” she said. “We don’t submit to them, because it’s too hard to collect the money.”

“So…”

“So you would need to pay us and submit the claim. Sometimes they pay it, but you have to really be on them about it.”

She started talking about making an appointment with my pediatrician and I stopped her.

“How much?” I asked.

“I’m sorry?”

“How much do I have to pay you?”

“Oh, for this service it will be $5,375.”

“Including the dentist or just for your guy?”

“Just for the anesthesia.”

“And I’m just supposed to pay you five grand and hope that United decides to pay me back?”

“We’ve found that your best bet is just to submit the claim after the surgery. Like I said, sometimes they pay and sometimes they don’t. You’ll have to be on them about it.”

“And they might not pay at all.”

“Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. We’ve found that they throw the words ‘medical necessity’ around a lot and use it as a reason not to pay.”

I knew this about them already, but for once, it wasn’t my insurance company I was irritated with.

“You understand that five thousand dollars is a lot of money, right?”

The receptionist hesitated. “But for his time and—”

“Do you have five thousand dollars to spend that you might never see again?”

“I understand that—”

“Would you spend five thousand dollars with the idea that it might be reimbursed, but then again it might not?”

The receptionist didn’t have anything to say to that.

“I’m going to have to get back to you about all of this after I’ve called the insurance company and the dentist,” I said.

She turned icy then, as though I had disappointed her, as though I was making the wrong decision for Kai. “You have a week,” she said.

“I won’t need a week,” I replied, and hung up the phone.

I sat at the counter for a few long seconds with my head in my hands and did what moms do. I blamed myself for not being more vigilant about his dental hygiene, because if I’d made him brush his teeth better and with more gusto, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

And then I grabbed my keys and left to pick the kids up, because, in addition to all of my failings as a mother and a human being, I was going to be late. 

In which I let it go

I resisted taking Ryan to see Frozen for a variety of reasons.

It’s not just the princess thing, though that’s definitely part of it.

Neither of my kids really like going to the movies, despite the movies having everything they love—screen time, popcorn, seats that move when you wiggle or kick. But the movies provide the kind of sensory overload that can absolutely crush a kid like Kai, who hears and sees absolutely everything even before you turn it all up to eleven. It bothers Ryan, too, and we had to leave the Lego Movie halfway through (much to my chagrin, because I was digging it pretty hard).

I’m not completely anti-princess. Ryan has all of the princess dresses that a four-year-old could want, plus several tiaras, at least one scepter. She as fairy princess wings. She has a pirate princess be-jeweled sword. But what she doesn’t have is an affinity for a specific princess.

That, to me, seemed like a good way to navigate the princess culture, a way of expanding the narrative beyond being rescued by a handsome prince.

I have always had a hard time buying presents for Ryan, wanting to walk that fine line between guiltily buying the things she’s naturally drawn to (sparkles, crowns, lace, pink satin) and the things I’m supposed to want her to be drawn to (chemistry, math, engineering). Of course, complicating this is that I, myself, dislike those things. Legos are, to me, the toy equivalent of reading Atlas Shrugged.

For me, with Ryan, everything is so fraught.

But on Saturday night, I suggested to Ryan we watch it.

This was partially because I’d run 9 miles that day and was unable to move from the couch. But it was also because I knew she’d already seen it at a friend’s house. Twice. The princess was out of the bag.

:::

When I was thirteen, Flashdance came out and my parents wouldn’t let me see it. So I did what every kid does, and watched it over at a friend’s house. Later, when my parents made a big deal about finally letting me see the movie when they rented it, I did a poor job of pretending not to know what was going on.

Just before Jennifer Beals’ big dance number, I leaned forward in my seat and murmured, “I love this part,” at which point my dad raised his eyebrows at me. “I mean, I think I’m going to love it,” I said.

I thought of that when Ryan tapped me on the shoulder just before Elsa’s big number. “This is the song, Mommy,” she said, leaning forward in the same anticipation I remembered feeling.

Ryan, of course, didn’t have to pretend she hadn’t seen it, but I wondered how she knew what a big deal the song was. I wondered, too, how she already knew most of the lyrics. And while I could have done without Elsa’s sexy makeover, I understood that she understood what a powerful moment in the movie the song really is, when Elsa embraces who she is and can, unfettered, literally build her own castle in the sky.

:::

Ryan wanted to go to bed halfway through the movie, and after I’d put her to bed, done the dishes and set the coffeemaker, I went to bed, too, and finished the rest of it.

The princess-sisters end up saving themselves.

I could get on board with this, I thought. The movie was charming, and I’ve seen plenty of movies with less sophisticated plots that I’ve also liked (I’m looking at you, Anchorman). But I wondered why the two girls had to be princesses? And why does Disney only make movies for girls? Or should I say at girls? And why is love always the answer, when, and let’s be honest here, it’s usually 99% of the problem?

All of these questions weighed on me the next day, as Ryan and I ran errands in the unseasonable cold. It didn’t help that Ryan carried around a Barbie everywhere we went.

“This is Elsa,” she said. “You can tell because she has white hair.”

As we were getting out of the car to go grocery shopping, I thought I'd test the waters to see if she identified with the princesses in the movie.

“Are you Princess Anna, or are you Princess Elsa?” I asked.

“Ryan!” she said.

“Princess Ryan?” I asked, because I would take that, really.

“No,” she said. “I’m not a princess. I’m Ryan.”

I gave her hand a squeeze. The hand that wasn’t holding Barbie Elsa.

“Ryan’s my favorite,” I said.

Ryan released my hand and skipped ahead of me, her purple jacket unzipped and flapping in the bitter wind.

The cold never bothered her, anyway.

 

In which we go back to school

Hey! Welcome to the very first day of kindergarten!

I know what you’re thinking. You’re all, “I know that child already started kindergarten because I read about it here.”

But then there was a teacher strike and we had some time off, and I figured that we could start fresh on the other side. You know, pretend that whole thing was all just a dream! 

 

A horrible, horrible dream. 

:::

So yesterday, I took the kids to get first-day-of-school haircuts. I washed their school clothes. I packed Kai’s Bento box with Sun-butter and jelly fixin’s and a little drawing that I made of Kai and me holding hands inside a heart. I tucked him sweetly into bed.

I wasn't convinced that we had been out of school long enough for it to feel like a true do-over. When we thought that the strike would be over last Sunday, I mentioned that we would go back to school the next day.

"No," Kai said. "School is yucky."

"That just breaks your heart, doesn't it?" my mother said. She was in town for the weekend.

And yes, it does. It breaks your heart. Because he's only in kindergarten, and there are so many, better opportunites for school to be yucky. Middle school comes to mind.

We got a reprieve for a couple of days, but in the end, we had to go back to school.

He got up this morning sometime before 4:30, stimmy and wired but cheerful. He ate his breakfast and got dressed, and didn’t protest until I got out his backpack.

“No!” he wailed. “I’m not ready!”

I shouldered the backpack and took out my phone.

“We need to take pictures for the first day of school,” I said.

That got him. It took us a while to negotiate the portrait. He wanted me to hold him upside-down and take the picture. But although I am strong and tough, I am not strong enough to do that.

This was the pose we finally settled on:

First day of kindergarten 2012

I got this gem on the way to the car:

:::

He rebelled when I tried to buckle him in.

“No school! I’m not ready!”

I kissed his nose. “We’re just going to try,” I said. “That’s all anyone can ever ask.”

Kai relaxed a little in his seat.

“Just try?”

“Just try.”

:::

And then we went to school on the back of a unicorn which followed a rainbow to a pot of gold. It was so awesome, you guys.

Of course, by “back of a unicorn” I mean my car, and “followed the rainbow” I mean drove through Bucktown, and by “pot of gold” I mean that Kai refused to get out of the car and tried to climb into the way-back, and the woman working the kiss-and-go line had to pry his hands off of the seat and haul him out of the car, where he kicked and hit, and I had to keep moving because I was holding up the line and the last I saw he was on all fours while his (new) paraprofessional was trying to coax him into the building, a vision that is now seared into my brain and will stay with me for the rest of my life.

So I did what any red-blooded American does when they feel helpless and angry. I called a lawyer. I went to boxing class.

:::

Later, my friend Annette told me she had an extra ticket to Madonna tonight, so I cancelled Kai’s speech therapy appointment and called Scott, who graciously agreed to come home early.

I guess there was a tiny pot of gold after all.

Stri-cation Day Two: Why we fight

Dawn on Tuesday came and went, and for once, Kai slept. Past 7 and then 8, and it was right around 9 when I finally heard his feet on the stairs. I’d hoped to take the kids to visit the striking teachers, who were supposed to be on the picket lines until 10:30.

Of course, I was woefully unprepared. I had no sign, I didn’t have time to stop at Dunkin’ Donuts and get them breakfast and coffee. I didn’t even have a red shirt to wear in solidarity.

Red isn’t really my color, you see, and I have only one article of red clothing in my entire closet: an off-the-shoulder mini-dress, questionable attire for hanging out with striking teachers and my two children.

I finally found a red t-shirt in Scott’s closet. It said “World’s Greatest Dad.” I ripped the tags off and threw it on. I had given it to him for his first Father’s Day five years ago. He doesn’t wear it because “World’s Greatest Dad” is not his official title, as you can see here.

I dashed off a quick sign and tossed the kids in the car, hoping to catch the teachers before they went off to the downtown rally, or home to watch their own kids.

:::

I know that you know one reason I’m all for this teacher strike. But I’m all for it for some real reasons, too.

This weekend, I spent several hours with a friend, a special education teacher in another district, going through Kai’s IEP line by line. This is the mythical, magical document that entitles Kai to whatever services he needs in order to get an education, things like speech therapy so he can talk to you and occupational therapy so he can use a pencil, special education services to help modify his work so that he has a chance of completing it ever.

 

In another district, a child with autism might get 90-120 minutes a week of speech therapy. Kai gets a grudging 30. Then the therapist spends 15 minutes telling Kai’s teacher what to work on.

In another district, Kai would have more time with a social worker to work on the social-emotional component to his education, creating social stories, working with peer groups. Ours spends 30 minutes with him, and then tells the teacher what to do for the rest of the week.

In another district, our teacher and our son would get a lot more help.

Our social worker is only at our school two days a week, the speech and occupational therapists are only there on Mondays. In our district, they just don’t have enough people. They can’t afford them.

There are 375 social workers in the whole of CPS, a student body of between 350,000 and 400,000. That’s one social worker for 1,000 kids, in a city where 80% of the student body qualifies for free and reduced price lunches, a city that saw one of the bloodiest summers we can remember.

How can someone be expected to teach, and also be a speech therapist and an occupational therapist and a social worker and child psychologist, and have a kid come to school hungry or traumatized, to a school in some cases with no air conditioning and no playground and no textbooks? How on earth can you educate a child that way and hope to compete on a global scale?

How?

And you know what else? Mayor Rahm Emanuel campaigned on the longer school day for CPS, and he did exactly as he said he would, lengthening the school day without any idea how to do it or how to fund it. In our school, it means that Kai’s teacher has to take a break in the middle of the day. It was during this break that Mr. X was able to hurt Kai. If his teacher had been there, it never, ever, ever would have happened.

Just sayin’.

This strike isn’t about money. No one goes into this profession expecting to get rich.

It’s about a district that’s failing the students and blaming the teachers for it.

It’s enough to make you long for the green grass, the extra-wide parking spaces, the pizza shooters and extreme fajitas of a land I like to call The Suburbs, which is exactly where we went afterwards, to a place where the floors are made of trampoline, and two frozen treats and a Diet Pepsi only costs $4.

A place I never thought I’d want to be.