“But he’s never been in school before,” I say. “He has no idea what he’s supposed to do.”
“He’s never been in preschool?” Dr. Roberts asks, eyebrows raised.
“No, I’ve kept him home with me. I thought that was better for him.” My voice sounds squeaky and tight, betraying my state of mind. Keep control, I tell myself, keep it together.
“And you’re a single mom, is that right?”
“Yes, I’m a single mom.”
“And does Blaze see Dad at all?”
“No, Blaze does not see Dad. There is no Dad.”
Dr. Roberts makes several notes on the paper in front of her. Others shuffle papers of their own. Ice Princess maintains a glacial silence. This meeting is starting to feel less like a parole hearing and more like a trial. I still have no clue what Blaze has done to warrant such attention. Did he hit someone? Start a fire? Threaten the president of the United States? What?
“So we’re here because Blaze didn’t sit in the circle?” I ask.
“Well, no, there’s a little more to it than that,” Dr. Roberts says. “In my observation of him today, he didn’t initiate play with any other children.”
“He’s never been around any other children,” I tell her.
Ice Princess finally chimes in. “Blaze does not seem able to cut with scissors,” she says. “Is that something you’ve noticed at home?”
“No, it isn’t,” I say. “He’s never used a scissors at home. He’s never had to.”
But Ice Princess is not finished. “When I asked the children to form a line, Blaze could not take his place. He ran out the door without waiting for the rest of the group.”
“You know, he really doesn’t have any experience in a classroom environment,” I tell them. “He’s really not used to lining up and cutting and all those things. There are really a lot of things that he can do.”
“Really?” Dr. Roberts says, smiling. “Why don’t you tell us some of those?”
I’m wondering if it’s her tone that’s making me feel like jumping across the table and throttling her or if I’m just having a psychotic break. Surely, she’s said and done nothing that warrants the fury I’m starting to feel.
“He knows the names of all fifty states,” I say feebly.
“That’s wonderful,” Dr. Roberts says. “Does he have any other special talents?”
Her tone indicates that she doesn’t necessarily think “special talents” are such a good thing, but I answer her anyway, unable to stop myself. I am proud of the things Blaze knows, proud of the fact that he is special. I tell Dr. Roberts that Blaze loves jazz and that he can tell the difference between Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. I mention that I’ve been showing him a big illustrated book of Impressionist painters and he can now identify Degas and Monet. Dr. Roberts continues to take notes. I glance around the room at the impassive faces surrounding me and I want to cry. I must sound like a complete fool. I’m protesting too much. They must think I’m lying or at least exaggerating. Maybe they think I’m deranged. Anger creeps in again. These people probably don’t even know who Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday are, I think, especially Ice Princess who is now telling the group that she doesn’t think Blaze is mature enough to follow the rules of a kindergarten classroom. I respond, pointedly, that Blaze knows all his letters and numbers.
“Blaze seems uncomfortable making eye contact,” Dr. Roberts pipes in. “Have you noticed that at home? Does he dislike being touched?”
“No,” I tell her emphatically, “I’ve never noticed that, not ever. Blaze is a sweet, happy kid. He’s really very bright. He’s clean and neat…”
“Really?” Dr. Roberts asks. “Is he very neat? Does he like to have things ordered? Like his toys? Does he line his shoes or building blocks up in a row?”
“No,” I tell her through clenched teeth. I can see where she’s going with this. “He’s neat, he’s not obsessive.”
I tell the group at large that Blaze is a completely contented child, that he’d shown no signs of distress about going to school or leaving me this morning. I am practically begging them to believe me, and I hate the sound of it. I finish by saying I can’t understand how some confusion over what to do on his first ever day at school justifies being referred to special education.
Dr. Roberts, it seems, has been anticipating this and has saved the best for last.
“Blaze refused to come inside after recess was over,” she says. “The teacher was unable to persuade him and so I went out there. When I tried to coerce him, he became very agitated. He yelled at me to go away and pushed me. He pulled at my nylons when I tried to remove him from the slide.”
I look at her aghast. Pulled her nylons? Who is this child she is describing? A parallel universe version of Blaze? I can’t even fully bring myself to believe her, although after she delivers this proclamation (more like a sucker punch, I’m thinking), I feel like I want to pull her nylons and hit her myself. There isn’t much I can say now to dig Blaze out of the hole that he’s in. There’s no offensive strategy I can come up with. From now on, it’s all going to be about defense.
“Blaze is a very happy child,” I tell Dr. Roberts. “I’ve never seen him hit or push anyone. I really don’t know what could have happened to make him react that way.”
It seems that everybody has suddenly started talking at once. The speech therapist is saying Blaze might not have adequate communicative skills. Sally, the special-education teacher, offers the fact that her class is much smaller than the regular kindergarten class and, therefore, Blaze would be able to receive much more one-on-one attention. Dr. Roberts says that, of course, they’d want to do a thorough evaluation to determine “the best possible placement” for Blaze.
As a final trump card and as if to prove what an utter failure Blaze has been in her classroom, Ice Princess brings out some work samples. The assignment was to draw yourself and your family, she says. The first few she shows are typical kindergarten drawings, some stick figures, some bodies filled in. Blue skies, yellow suns. Then she brings out Blaze’s drawing, a formless swirl of color.
“He doesn’t like to draw,” I say, almost in a whisper. “I don’t make him draw at home.”
“Coloring is an important prewriting skill,” Dr. Roberts says. “Children need to be able to color appropriately at the kindergarten level to prepare them for first grade. First grade is very challenging academically.”
She assures me, again, that special education is the best placement for Blaze. I can’t help but feel that all of these people are implying, or at the very least trying to make me admit, that there is something wrong with Blaze. Nobody has mentioned what, exactly, but now I certainly am not lacking examples of what a catastrophe his first day has been. Tears start welling in my eyes and I struggle to keep them back. I begin to lose focus on the specifics of what is being said. I feel an unbridgeable chasm opening between how these people see my child and how I do and I am not sure that it is going to close anytime soon. I see nothing wrong with him and they see nothing right.
Dr. Roberts tells me that we will have to decide on a “handicapping condition.” The law requires that, to qualify for special education, a child has to meet certain criteria. Some of my choices here include specific learning disability, deaf/blind, multiple handicaps, autistic, mentally retarded, severely emotionally disturbed, and speech/language impaired. How can I possibly pick from one of these categories? I have gone from having a beautiful, bright child to a handicapped kindergartner in the space of a few minutes. I don’t know how this has happened or why I let it happen at all. It’s the evidence they pulled out, I think. The evidence was damning. Dr. Roberts suggests we go with speech and language impaired since Blaze seems to have trouble processing language and expressing himself. Fine, I tell her, speech and language. At least she hasn’t suggested that he’s mentally retarded. I suppose I should consider myself lucky. I debate protesting some more, telling them that this is a mistake, that the
re’s nothing wrong with Blaze, that he’s a special, wonderful kid and part of a special, different family, but I stop myself. The faces in this room show no signs of yielding. They’ve made up their minds. Ultimately, it is the implacable gaze of the Ice Princess that does it for me. I don’t know much about the special-ed class, but I sense that it will be better than what Blaze will get with her. Although I feel foolish for feeling it, in this moment, I hate her completely.
I sign papers to transfer Blaze into the special-education class where he will start tomorrow morning. Sally encourages me to come and see the classroom when I bring Blaze in so we can both feel “comfortable.” Fuck comfortable, I want to tell her. We left comfortable behind as soon as this meeting began. I agree to a full evaluation by the speech therapist, and Dr. Roberts and I make an appointment with the school nurse who will take a full medical history (part of me is convinced that in the course of these evaluations, Blaze’s native intelligence will shine through and they’ll all be able to see what a mistake this has been). Everybody seems happy with the results of the meeting. I am not smiling. I walk away from the building so fast, I am almost running. The tears have started now but I wipe them away. I will have to wait until I finish working to go home and get into bed. I can’t share the pain I am feeling now, it is too close to the bone. I want to be able to cry in private.
It took days for me to come to a full acceptance that Blaze was in a special-education class. Even after the description of his behavior on his first day of school, I still couldn’t figure out what he had done that was so bad. I kept looking at him, searching for clues to what they were talking about and what I could have missed in the five years since his birth. I had never so much as suspected that what I had considered “special” could be regarded as “wrong.” I was forced to sift through all his behaviors (and my own) to see if I could even vaguely reconcile my version of Blaze with the school’s. The first order of business was to figure out what I had done incorrectly as his mother.
I knew that I’d done everything I thought was right for my child. I’d kept him with me throughout his first five years because I thought it would give him a sense of security to know that I was always there. He should get the full benefit of the one parent he did have. Despite the fact that he had lots of attention from a big and loving family, I felt bad that he didn’t have a father and I wanted to make up for it by being both mother and father to him. I actually scoffed at mothers who put their kids in child care even when they didn’t have to work. Why have a kid at all, I’d always wondered, if you weren’t going to spend any time with him?
I’d disciplined Blaze but let him develop at his own pace. I wanted him to be whoever he wanted to be. I had never noticed behavior from him that seemed unacceptable to me. I had always assumed that when Blaze started school he would be able to follow the rules, adapt, find his way in the world just as I had. But it was clear from that very first day that Blaze was not going to fit this profile at all. He was operating from his own rule book and it had nothing to do with what the school thought was “normal” or “appropriate.”
Although I agreed to place Blaze in special ed, I didn’t think he would have to stay there. I thought if I just gave him enough time to figure out what was expected of him in school, he would pull it together and go back to the regular kindergarten world where he belonged. I suppose Dr. Roberts and company would have considered this deep denial. I thought he was brilliant and didn’t belong in special ed at all. But aside from this, I had a host of prejudices about special ed based on my own experiences.
Special-ed kids didn’t mix with the general population when I was in school. The remedial kids attended the “stupid class” but the real tough cases went to school in separate institutions far away from public view. These institutions were so removed that I wouldn’t have known they even existed as a child but for the fact that my father worked briefly in one of them when we lived in upstate New York. It had been an intense and draining experience for him. He became too emotionally attached to the kids, my mother informed me much later, and descended into a deep depression that manifested itself in physical illness.
Those who weren’t bad off enough to warrant placement outside public school in an institution such as my father worked in but who still needed “extra help” got the brunt of the teasing schoolchildren are famous for. These kids—the ones who needed remedial English or math—who had to attend summer school or vocational school, were “retards” or worse. The worst mark of failure was to have to ride the small school bus—a dead giveaway that you were a hopeless social write-off at best, functionally retarded at worst. Because the stigma was so severe, especially as we advanced through the grades, the kids who needed this extra help or who continued to fail in regular classes, merely dropped out of school early or joined a tough crowd, taking up smoking or drinking or delinquency. I had no intention of signing my child up for thirteen years of this kind of torment. My goal was to get him the hell out of special ed before he could realize that he was even in it.
Ironically, the ultimate goal of the special-ed class and the special-ed teacher, I was told, was quite similar. Their directive, Dr. Roberts told me, was to get the kids “mainstreamed.” That is, normal enough to fit into a regular classroom. Whatever time they could spend outside the special-ed classroom was to be encouraged. Therefore, Blaze would be spending some quality art and recess time with the Ice Princess and her class.
I liked Sally, the special-ed teacher. She seemed to me to have all the qualities that Ice Princess was missing. She smiled and laughed, for one thing. The tone of her voice changed, encompassing some highs and lows instead of remaining at a steady, hospice-worker level, and she actually seemed to like the children. She would be one of very few teachers in Blaze’s school career who wouldn’t look at him as if he were an alien life-form she’d never seen before. Sally was creative and she took a creative approach to solving problems in her class. When I came to pick Blaze up after his first day in her class, for example, she informed me that she felt the two of them were going to get along just fine. She had asked Blaze to do some work, she said, and Blaze had responded that he would work if she took her long blond hair out of its ponytail. Sally complied and Blaze performed whatever task it was that she was requesting. Sally wore her hair down for the rest of the year.
Because she was the special-ed teacher, I learned later, Sally was allowed to think outside the box. Teachers in regular ed are allowed very little creative latitude. Therefore, Ice Princess became “very concerned” when Blaze said something like “The floor hurts my feet”; no matter how much I explained that he was trying to tell her that his ankles hurt from sitting cross-legged on the hard floor, she was convinced that he was having delusions of the floor attacking him. Sally, on the other hand, was likelier to ask me what I thought Blaze meant if he used language in a metaphoric way. She’d tell me that he’d mentioned having “red lasers” in his stomach and I was able to tell her that he used that term whenever he was nervous about something. She’d think about this for a moment and then tell me that, yes, that nervousness did sort of feel like red lasers, didn’t it?
Above all, Sally was determinedly cheerful but not in the false, fabricated way I was starting to recognize from other school staffers. Sally’s cheerfulness was both positive and genuine. This was more than I could say for her class. Since there was only one special-ed class in the school, Sally had a mix of at least four grade levels in her classroom and what seemed to be an astonishing array of “issues.” There was one little girl in a wheelchair and one boy who had severe vision problems. There was an older, bigger boy who continuously shouted out a pattern of loud sounds in an unchanging loop. A couple of kids sat at the edge of the room, desperately working on computers as if their lives depended on it. The rest of the class merely looked tired and dispirited as if they had already had enough of the whole school experience. Despite Sally’s creativity and her innate warmth and compassion for her students, I don
’t remember them ever looking happy when I dropped Blaze off there every morning. They looked, to me, like prison inmates waiting for a reprieve. I liked Sally but I hated leaving Blaze there every day. It was depressing and I was depressed about the whole situation.
As the days wore on, I wondered how long it would take Blaze to come around to my father’s philosophy of “give your teachers what they want” or if that would ever even happen. Blaze’s placement in special ed right out of the gate underscored the feeling I’d always had that I’d never really fit in and that, although I’d been able to cover it well, whenever I went “out there,” I was merely visiting. Obviously, I now thought, the same applied to my son and he was apparently less able to camouflage his differences than I had been. Although I’d always tried to see Blaze as his own person, always listened to him when he spoke to me, and constantly defined my role as his mother, I still had his identity very much tied up with my own when he started school. I filtered his experiences through my own impressions, which was all I had to go on. Blaze was stingy with the details of his life at school. If I demanded information, I got nothing. If I waited a few hours after he got home, when he finished processing his day, I’d get some odds and ends, such as what book the teacher was reading or who cried on the playground, but never more than that. I had to rely solely on what the teachers told me and what I personally could observe and interpret. I was in the position of being both his defender and translator on a daily basis.
Sally, Dr. Roberts, and the speech therapist began the series of psycho-educational tests that I’d signed off on. Blaze was uncooperative in the extreme. For Dr. Roberts’s tests, he refused even to remain seated, let alone finish drawing triangles or squares.
“Blaze had great difficulty staying seated and attending to the directions of the standardized tests given,” she later wrote in her report. “During the testing session, the reinforcer offered was time to play in the playhouse outside the examiner’s door; this reinforcer was not powerful enough to motivate Blaze to cooperate. He threw the testing booklet on the floor and began to kick the filing cabinets, the door, and the examiner.”
Raising Blaze Page 5