the call

"The way to make yourself feel better when you are upset is to find out what made you sad and fix it somehow. Of course that doesn't work in all sad situations." - Truman

I finally got The Call from camp yesterday.

I have gotten The Call many times over T's life. I have gotten it from teachers, babysitters, camp counselors, school employees and just about any other adult in an overseeing position that he has encountered. I have come to expect The Call, and to be surprised when it doesn't come. No news is good news, but sometimes no news means that they have decided to just get through the week the best they can and not resolve whatever The Problem is. Sometimes that means that Truman just gets left to the side and ignored, or worse, gets in trouble.

My heart always grabs a little when I get The Call. You never know what the attitude on the other end will be. It could be that the person is accusatory; that somehow his behavior is my fault. Sometimes it's exasperated and at the end of its rope. Sometimes its friendly and open to suggestions, but ultimately would just like me to come and pick him up. The worst one is when I don't get The Call at all. When I hear at the end of the day about unresolved problems, or isolation, or punishments; where he's just shuffled with the crowd on to the next activity, sometimes miserable and confused, because it's easier than trying to solve the issue.

And I get it most times. I mean, initial assessments, especially if you don't know him, can really be deceiving. He always starts strong because he's excited and anxious. He looks completely typical. He talks like a kid-physicist. And the adult thinks, what trouble could this kid be? I've seen it all. And then I get The Call.

When I got The Call yesterday from Encore Camp, I settled back into my chair to see how this one would go. And I couldn't be more excited to say that I am now in love with all Encore teachers and would like to marry all of them in an unprecedented platonic group marriage. Truman had a truly Truman meltdown yesterday, full of sound and fury, and all about a topic that would seem to signify nothing to the average observer. But these people got him.

If he likes anything, he likes a good tabloid-size newspaper. Flyers, circulars, glossy ads, free newspapers - they all call to him for whatever reason, and we end up with millions in our house. And yesterday they were doing a project that involved digging through newspapers and advertisements. He found a Dick's flyer. And if you've been following along, you'll know that Dick's has played an important role in his summer. Dick's is the Holy Land from whence golf shoes come and where Spongebob golfballs are available and they give out Dick's reward cards that hold the prospect of discounts and points accruement (he has 5 of them so that they are readily available in any spot he might need one). And this Dick's flyer had golf things on it. GOLF THINGS ON IT. So if you've been following along, you'll be able to feel the Truman-ness of the situation when one sweet unsuspecting boy used the Dick's flyer for his own project. The world ended as we know it.

You are saying to yourself right now, good gosh it was just a flyer. Get over it and move on, kid. Or, for the love of goodness, it's just a meltdown. All kids have them. But when the kid's problem is in expressing and processing emotion, these scenes add up. They become a ball of unprocessed ickiness that will culminate in other, weirder, hard to untangle difficulties. I know. I've spent the time untangling  before.

The Call I got informed me of the meltdown, but it was just to inform me. It was friendly. It asked me if there was anything they should know, but mostly told me that they were on the case. The poor sweet kid who took the flyer tried his best to find another one. But Truman sat in the director's office - not because he was in trouble, but so he could have some help pulling himself together. Which he did eventually with help. And when he came out yesterday, he was energized. Empowered.  I saw 2 teachers hug him and speak privately to him, and even one fist bump, before he came out to my car.

When he got in he asked me if I had heard what happened (and since I always get The Call, and always seem to know when then these things happen, in his mind it would be perfectly normal that he would step into the car with me already knowing). When I said yes, he burst into chatter about what a great day it had been. He had overcome a meltdown without me, he found some comfort in some adults that understood him, he had peers that were more like him and were helpful. He even spent a few minutes waxing poetic (see pic caption above) about how you get over bumps in the emotional road. It's analytical waxing, but really, if you think about it, emotions are just so emotional. It would be quite a relief to me if I had the clarity to look at my emotions in such a rational way afterwards. We celebrated with a round of putting at the golf course.

You take that stuff for granted when you have a typical kid. They do get over it. They do process it. They do get the rules and the social hierarchy and what to do when something happens. So I get it when an adult expects this of a kid who looks like any other kid and can talk knowledgeably about things like binocular parallax. Who expects a meltdown over a Dick's flyer? Not many. And even less know what to do when it happens. But when they do, boy is it a thing of beauty to a mama.