the pea and the pinball

I teach a birth class. The longer I do it, the more that I realize that I am teaching less about the mechanics of the event, and more about the preparation for the massive shift in perspective that is about to take place. Sure, I'll teach them about dilation and where the perineum is located, but I also send little pep talks out each week. In the pep talk, I give them a phrase to focus on for the week. After the first class, when I see the "oh shit what have I gotten myself into" looks on their faces, I send out a a reassuring note with the focus phrase: "I have no idea what's going on, and that's perfectly fine." I explain what surrender that phrase can bring when you're feeling the control freak in you start to control freak right on out. When you get overwhelmed thinking about all of the details that go into a birth experience, what a relief it is to know that your body knows exactly what it's doing, and in fact would just do it without your thinking interference. In fact, it might do it even more efficiently if our brains weren't meddling in the process and nitpicking every detail. It's more or less the equivalent of Step 1 of the Twelve Steps: Admitting that you are powerless in the situation and that some system that's bigger than you and your worrying is at work. If you'd just shut up and give in, the system might just do what it's supposed to do.

I don't know why I haven't taken my own advice up to this point. After all of the back pats I have received from the large support net that has shown itself since I began this endeavor, at the end of the day, it's just me and Truman. Some days that feels like a crowd. This week it really felt like a crowd. Ever since he was a baby, we have likened him to the Princess and the Pea. If one tiny little thing is off, by gosh, the whole household is going to know about it. But the cause might remain a mystery until all of the mattresses are pulled off and the tiny pea is revealed.

The pea this week was a super bad summer cold. On Tuesday, he was off - noncompliant and exhibiting what I call the "pinball" behavior - just physically bouncing off of things very randomly without any direction. On Wednesday he was tired and out of it and grouchy and had no impulse control. By Thursday, I too had that "oh shit what have I gotten myself into" look on my face since we had gotten no work done and I felt like I had fought roadblock after roadblock with him with no result other than we made it to the next roadblock. But by that afternoon he was sick. And just like when he was little, the little lightbulb dinged over my head, and I knew we had found the pea.

At some point in the mattress removal, the phrase "I don't know what the hell I'm doing." popped into my head. At first it was a taunt: " You don't know what the hell you're doing." But after it echoed around in there for a while, I realized that it was very similar to the phrase I send my birth class couples. So I changed it slightly, tacked on the ending, and it became a buoy: "I don't know what the hell I'm doing, and that's perfectly fine."

We're bobbing along trying to figure it all out: how to help his executive function, how to bring him up to grade level in math and teach him to write a paragraph on his own, how to get him to control his body and to find things that pique his interest in learning. It's a lot of ground to cover, and when he's feeling the pea, there isn't a thing in the world you can do to get him to join you in learning those things. All of his senses go into the pea with not much left over. I don't know how school has done it all of these years. I have had phone calls and emails from teachers a million times to tell me that they had hit an impasse with him and he seemed completely unresponsive to any kind of learning. Almost always it ended up being a pea of some sort, and once it was uncovered, things moved back to (his version) of normal. I know that the pea will make him unable to function, and I still don't recognize that that's what's wrong most of the time until I actually see the pea. If you were a teacher trying to get him to produce work on a very tight schedule, you might get a little frustrated. And if you were Truman, you might spend a good deal of time with people feeling frustrated with you.

I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I founder. We founder - Truman and I. But something in me tells me that we are not doing the wrong thing. Something tells me that if I shut up and give in, it actually all might be perfectly fine.

a universal shoulder rub

While the last few weeks have been a universal ass-kicking to put me in the right place to be doing whatever it is I'm doing, this week has been the equivalent of a universal shoulder rub. A giant Hand reached down out of the clouds, patted my hand and squeezed my shoulder reassuringly. The Hand did not talk, nor did it tell me what to do next (because hands don't talk, silly), but it wiped my brow, and then it patted a few angels on the ass and sent them into the game.

I live in a very traditional Catholic neighborhood, that's full of large families, and many of them homeschool. Jim and I are not Catholic. No one here has ever looked down on us or left us out. To the contrary, our daughter's best friends are those families' kids, and they know us pretty well as a result. I'm sure we've always been (not disparagingly) "those people who park their Cadillac in the yard" and "those people with the daughter with the blue hair and the father with the braids" and "those people who sit outside and listen to their jukebox loudly." But now we're "those people who park their Cadillac in the yard, have the daughter with the blue hair and the father with the braids, sit outside and listen to their jukebox loudly and homeschool their son." As Truman and I took our daily walk around the 'hood this week, I literally had people coming out of their homes handing me math books that their kids had outgrown and offers of help. I had hugs and pep talks. I had angels that didn't even know they were on the field. (Or maybe they did. Their line to the Hand might be more direct.)

I have had Facebook messages, emails and blog comments. I have had texts, phone calls and conversations that left me teary with gratitude. I've had people reach out that I had no idea had homeschooled at one time or another. All of them had different things to say, but all of it was usually pretty well-timed to my most frustrating and vulnerable moments (the Hand likes to show off, I think).

Truman is participating in a really exciting study through Vanderbilt's TRIAD, its autism research department, about the effects of oxytocin in autism and how it might help social skills. This will be a year-long study and require lots of visits and interviews. This week we went in for our first appointment, and Truman was feeling nervous. Even though we had been sent a social story that explained every single thing that was going to happen at the interview, none of which was scary, hospitals are just generally scary places to a kid. But the Hand, who must've been feeling pretty smarty-pants that day, sent in an extra special player to be the first face we saw at the appointment. One that I have known since childhood, and one with an extra special gift for making kids feel comfortable. Truman spent the rest of our time at Vandy that day feeling like some kind of movie star. You see, it's tough to be "that kid" for most of the time. And when you're at a place where all of the kids are "that kid" and the people who run the place think that "those kids" are quite interesting and in fact they study them and know how to talk to them, well, it just makes you want to go back. And in fact, you might ask your mom over and over and over when you get to go back even though she already told you that it might be a month or so but you keep asking just in case the answer has changed to maybe something a bit sooner because it was such an awesome place. See? Show off.

The Hand is cutting me a break at the moment. The Hand is giving me a refueling time. I can see the Hand's hand, and I think I know it works. It can't all be shoulder rubs all the time. There will be plenty of times when I will yell at the Hand to send a shoulder rub down because my back can't take much more, but the Hand will say that I'll have to do some shoulder rubbing for someone else who could use it a little more right then. In fact, I may be rubbing a shoulder right now and not even realize it.

For now, I'm stockpiling my universal shoulder rubs.

The practically impractical

The word "homeschool" makes me itch. It's right up there with "hashtag" in the irritation department for me. I don't know why entirely, and the reasons I do know I will keep to myself. But the universe, in its unwavering ways of justice, will almost always kick your ass when you say "never", or apparently even dislike certain words.

I don't blame my kid's school. In fact, I'm a very vocal public school proponent. I still have a kid at that same school, and she loves it and would wither like a picked wildflower if you took her from it and made her stay at home. I have a commitment to be involved in whatever school my children attend, and have served on more PTO boards than I can honestly remember. But his transitional year to middle school was more than tough. It took its toll on him, on us, and the whole household by the end of the year, and we knew that something had to give.

We don't have means to send him to a private school that would (possibly) meet his needs. Hell, we don't really have the means to homeschool him. But homeschooling means are less than private school means when it comes to nuts and bolts, and so here we are. I have put aside every personal project that I have going, which is almost always a considerable amount, and I am devoting myself to this one very personal project. It kept calling to me over the last year to come and tend to it, but I am not an educator of children. In fact, I don't even like most children who are not mine. I'm not logical or linear. I'm one of those liberal right-brain big picture thinkers who would like really just to sit in a cafe all day smoking cloves and drinking coffee while I made up stories. But like I said, the universe is an ass kicker.

My friend, who is a career educator and a former Montessori teacher told me that in the Montessori world, they call what Truman and I are doing a "practical life year." That really resonates with me. I just want to help him find his place - whatever that is. The stress of the last year of school really threw off his executive function and also his desire to learn. His confidence was low and falling by the end of the school year. His stress level was growing. He would melt down at the slightest perceived slight, and our household was on eggshells. Over the summer we saw a dramatic improvement, and it was hard to think that we could send him to school again and endure another year of watching him crumble.

What I have come to find with him is that where you can teach "normal" kids life skills on the fly as you go about your day-to-day and run in and out of the door to school and activities, that's not how it works with our particular model. And he certainly doesn't learn with the throw-and-see-if-it-sticks way that public education almost has to be given the number of children and diverse population of needs it serves. It takes an almost constant one-on-one to engage my particular kid in learning and in just getting him to do small life skills. He seems quite average and normal, and so the expectations of him, no matter how many points you put into his IEP, end up being higher than what he can actually carry out. We don't qualify for an aide, so we have to rely on what is written in the IEP. And what school can really carry out an intricate IEP for every kid that has one? It seems an impossibility. And in our experience over the years, it was an impossibility with him, for he changes all the time. What worked one day or week might not work the next. And with the handed-down-to-Moses on a stone tablet nature of IEPs, it makes it tough to be flexible and accommodate a guy who doesn't fit in framework of paperwork very well.

Our family has never been, and never will be, practical, which makes it tough to call this a Practical Life Year in the true sense. But I do solemnly promise to do my best with my kid, through good and bad, teach him the ways of the world as I know them, and give him an education as best I can until he is at the point he can do it himself or I lose my mind, whichever comes first.

And so begins our Year of Impractical Life. Wish us luck.