Why I Miss My Mom: Reason 1,432,689

So I was looking for a quote-unquote cultural artifact at my dad's house (school assignment, blabla), and nestled in with the bills were my old report cards. I noticed one that had a comment in the parent section: it was for my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Schwartz. I don't have particularly good memories of her, which this report card probably explains. The one thing I remember her saying the whole year was, "You're so irritating when you think you're right, especially when you're not." Which even then I realized meant that a good chunk of the time, I was.

Anyway, I was this very, very strong reader and writer as a kid, starting in early elementary school. So for years I'm getting hosannas on my report cards, and apparently Mrs. S. thought I needed cutting down to size. Because the report card had the following comments:

Emily reads but does not report on her reading.

The quality of Emily's written assignments is very poor--illegible and careless.

Emily needs help in organizing her work. She puts little effort into her written work and cannot find her work when she needs it.

So on the back, in my mother's handwriting, is a very, very excessively polite and grammatical note saying

I should very much like to discuss this report card with you. Will you kindly make an appointment for me to see you.

Thank you.

Another thing I'd love to laugh at with her.

We Shall Not Cease from Exploration

My friend MB, who is inexhaustively creative, is starting a new blog about traveling with her kids, two of whom have special needs. I've seen this topic come up incidentally in various disability mags and lists I'm on, and I think it would be great to have a real consideration of this topic: families of special needs kids often feel acutely limited in their lives by the disability--exploring travel is a great way to expand the boundaries.

My goodness. The Times is just full of interesting things today. So I click on some article about Larry Summers, and come across this little nugget:

Alongside numerous critiques of Mr. Summer's table manners - Mr. Bradley judges him a "sloppy eater" - the author speculates early on in the book that the Harvard president may have Asperger's syndrome, a condition that renders him socially autistic.

"I'm neutral on it," he said. "I'm not a doctor. I don't feel qualified to say. I do think the explanation has 'explanatory power,' as one of my Harvard professors used to say."

Erm. I'm uncomfortable with slinging Asperger's around as a synonym for "socially clueless" (and WTF does "socially autistic" mean? Eh, just a neurologically clueless writer, I suppose). OTOH, the bit about sloppy table manners is interesting, and academia is notorious/famous for being a safe haven for the brilliant and HFA.

[imagine a transition] Which is reminding me of this irritating passage in the education textbook I'm reading, which talks about the phenomenon of the hurried child, as if this is actually a documented trend. But anyway, it talks about how we're constantly driving our kids all over the place and trying to turn them into geniuses, and I went off about it mildly in class. It's a meme that's risen to the level of "fact." What about the kids who do much, much better on a schedule?

Really, really sickening story about deportees and families being broken up: a boy and his little sister being shipped off to Bangladesh by themselves because their mother didn't have the proper visa to get on the plane with them. It's reminding me of a story my uncle told me about his aunt, who couldn't immigrate to the U.S. with her family because she had some sort of facial palsy and she was advised that Ellis Island would send her back, so she had to stay on in Southampton by herself and sail over separately.

Not that this woman needs a shout-out, but there's a particularly great post on Chez Miscarriage re some new book by a Judith Warner. Manages to skewer all the kibitzing and mother-bashing in just a few lines, while being really, really funny.

Okay, back to my life. Prima's behavior chart, which we're not following to the letter, I confess, is working spectacularly, except when I'm not home. I'm the bad cop, hardass, Generalissima over here. Or, as Prima succinctly puts it, I'm kind of mean. So things will be going swimmingly, and then the spousal unit's parents come over, or for some other fool reason I decide I need to leave the house, like to earn money, and I come back and no homework's done and she's been eating Cheetos for the past four hours. We even have charts for outside the home, but it seems the maternal unit-in-law was just checking things off because she didn't want to get Prima in trouble with me. And of course I came in like the Red Queen: "Did she do her homework?" Now Sighs steal out/And Tears begin to flow. In general, though, I feel like we have better control in the house these days: we have to do less fighting than Before Chart, and she's happier too.

So but anyway, the mornings are usually good, and I don't have to launch into my Great Santini thing: today she happily did a bunch of math with me and read a book to the dog (she fancied some article on therapy dogs who come to a library in Salt Lake City and the kids read to them: the domestic pet over here isn't that well-trained and wanders off when she's reading him The Magic Unicorn or whatever shite she's reading this week). And then she played w/her Gameboy (deconstruct name when have spare moment) and then got onto the bus and waved goodbye, temporarily not regretting her lot in life as my daughter.

Once again Blogger's not working too well: I can get it with Mozilla but not IE today.

Since I seem to be mulling over identity and disability and identity of disability recently: I was talking to someone yesterday who has not one but two kids in the ABA class. And she knows that my kid is on the spectrum, and she was asking me to let her know if I see any movies that she thinks her kids would be able to see, that my kid could handle. And I felt fraudulent. She hasn't met my daughter, but she knows she's in the inclusion class. And I feel pretty sure that she doesn't know how well my daughter could "pass." My daughter's deficits seem so obvious to me, and I've fought to get services to remediate. OTOH, I can take my kid to the movies. I can go out to restaurants. We go shopping together, she's in school assemblies. For the most part, we lead normal lives, my kids and I (well, except for the not really sleeping and the omnipresent worries about depression, anxiety, and the future). But the day-to-day? I have no right to complain.

Especially not when I look back on the dark days, like when my kid was two and three, largely echolalic, not sleeping at night, not eating anything, paying little attention to anyone in the house except for me (she treated her younger brother pretty much like a lamp--invisible except when he got in her way). Tantrumming, unable to shop in the stores. I have a really vivid memory of when she was four and we went to Toys R Us at about 5:30 at night. Yeah, what were we thinking? It was the Arsenic Hour, she hadn't eaten, and we were in a fucking toy store. Um, she didn't handle it well. Any of it. I forget what she wanted: was it a toy bug? Something idiosyncratic. A hat? I'm thinking a ladybug hat, but I can't remember. Anyway, she wanted it. More than anything in the world, she wanted it, and I knew she was in the grip of that Thing, the unbelievable rigidity that takes over. And even then, I would get this feeling in my gut that giving into the Thing would make life harder the next time and the next time. And the spousal unit wanted to give in, because she's scary and unpleasant when she gets like that, and loud. And we love her. And I didn't want to give in (I won! Yay me!), and there was an emotionally fraught car ride home, during which the spousal unit and I didn't talk but Prima made plenty enough noise for both of us. It's about 15 minutes by car from that Toys R Us, and there was screaming the entire way home. You are locked in a box with a shrieking, unhappy child, and Time. Just. Stops.

How long could that stage have lasted, before we started with the behavior plans and the charts and things got under control? One to two years, maybe? During which time we joked about living like that Abbott and Costello routine, "Niagara Falls": "Slowly I turned, step by step."

She's still not compliant, but it's more willed, now, more amenable to reason, and I don't often have that feeling that she's in the grip of something she can't control (except sometimes, and I know it's the disability, and at those moments it seems less like an organic part of her--which autism usually does, like a French accent--and more like a separate thing that is stronger and smarter than either one of us).

And now, in my never-ending effort to class up this blog, I bring you the banana bunker, courtesy of my warped listmates.

Okay, got that out of my system.

There was a horrifying, scary-as-shit audiotape of a school bus aide and bus driver taunting an autistic boy as he traveled to and from school. The aide said things like, "I'm getting everyone a Christmas present. Except you," and you could hear the boy saying, "Why not?" and the aide saying, "Because I can't stand you," then laughing it up with the bus driver. From the same fun-loving sensibility that brought you Abu Ghraib and the banality of evil. Ach.

Couple of Thank-You's

To Dwight over at Wampum for his post on my post (there is no transcendental signifier!). In reflecting on it, I think I'm self-contradictory: on the one hand, the names are a medical construct and a mess; OTOH, I'm also insistent that Asperger's and HFA be claimed as autism. Do the categories have validity or not? But anyway, thanks, Dwight.

And also to the people who've stopped by and left (v. interesting) comments. Ah, the wonders of these Internets....

Things I Never Thought I'd Be Googling
The results of boxer Roman Greenberg's match on January 28. Oh, I'm sorry, but a Jewish boxer, who can resist? Who speaks three languages and whose manager won't let him fight the tough competition too early?