Raising Blaze

by Debra Ginsberg

  Dr. Roberts sat next to me, emitting a sort of proud special-education glow, watching the proceedings with a small smile on her face. She was clearly in favor of this class. But I had my own glow going and that had to do with how well I felt Blaze had done in a regular class. I wasn’t sure that Dr. Roberts was giving him enough credit for that. I was also loathe to take him away from the classmates he’d just started getting to know.

  “I think I’ve seen enough,” I told Dr. Roberts. “Thanks for bringing me here.”

  Back in her office, I told Dr. Roberts that I wanted to keep Blaze at his “home” school in a regular fifth-grade class.

  “Will you think about Mr. Davidson’s class over the summer?” she asked. “You can always change your mind.”

  I assured her that I would, but also extracted a promise from her that Blaze would have help in the classroom from an aide come September. Dr. Roberts wrote this into her notes. And, as I was learning, once something was written down in the notes, it had to be done.

  As I made these arrangements with Dr. Roberts, I marveled at how my relationship with her had changed over the last five years. I had gone from a fearful hostility toward her to a warm respect. A good portion of this transition had taken place during fourth grade. My position as über-mom allowed me to drop by her office at various times during the day on an unofficial basis to let her know how things were going and I did this quite often. She had listened with interest when I told her about Dr. S. and his verdict of pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified, saying that she’d thought the same about Blaze. When I told her that Dr. S. had said that giving Blaze medication would only be an exercise in experimentation, she disagreed, but didn’t push the issue. Again, she recommended taking Blaze to the educational specialist she knew.

  “It’s something I might do at some point,” I told her, “but it’s too expensive for me at this point.” I told her that Dr. S. had recommended the same person and I was relaxed enough by then to tell her about the conversation my father and I had had with the good doctor. For reasons I couldn’t understand, I then told Dr. Roberts that I didn’t drive and that if anyone needed psychological counseling, it was probably me. I laughed a little at the end of this statement, but to my surprise, Dr. Roberts took it very seriously.

  “Yes,” she said. “That would be money well spent. You should see somebody first, before you think about getting Blaze evaluated. It’s just as important to take care of yourself, you know.”

  “Hmm, yes, well, maybe…,” I said.

  I didn’t give Dr. Roberts’s proposal much more thought as I became wrapped up in the year-end frenzy that seemed to consume the school staff and students alike. One of the last events of the school year was the much-lauded “authors’ tea.” For this effort, the entire student body was instructed to produce a piece of free writing and turn it in to the teacher. Of these submissions, every teacher would select two or three students from each class to read their work in front of parents, staff, and students at an evening tea. There was much scribbling and pencil chewing going on in our class as we prepared for the event. As usual, Blaze was quite lackadaisical about the whole thing, preferring to study the machinations of his classmates rather than produce something of his own, even though he’d recently been scratching out some poems and songs at home.

  I’d more or less given up on him submitting anything to Mr. B. and was busy helping his classmates with their work when he insisted on telling me about Breanna, one of his tablemates, and what had happened to her.

  “Breanna was crying yesterday, Mom,” he told me. “She was really upset.”

  “Oh, uh-huh?” I said, distractedly editing a poem about the color red.

  “Mom, really,” Blaze went on. “She cried and it was like a storm. Her face was all dark and light and quiet. She didn’t make any sound but there were all these clouds and rain in her face.”

  This I paid attention to. “Blaze,” I told him, “why don’t you write that down? Write down what happened to Breanna yesterday. Just like you told me.”

  “Oh, okay,” he said, as if this was a good idea that hadn’t occurred to him. Blaze’s difficulty with the physical act of writing inclined him toward brevity, so he was finished very soon after he started. He handed me his paper and when I read it, I had the same surge of joy that I felt whenever I read anything particularly good.

  When Breanna cried it looked like a storm

  She didn’t make any sound

  but there was rain

  and clouds

  and sun

  and darkness in her face

  Blaze hadn’t used any punctuation, so I added a couple of commas and periods. That was the extent of my edit.

  “That’s a great poem, Blaze,” I told him. “I love it.”

  “Really?” he said, disbelieving.

  “Yes,” I said. “The only thing it needs is a title. You have to call it something. What do you want to call your poem?” I waited for his answer while a few lofty titles floated through my head. “The Quiet Storm,” maybe? Or perhaps, “Raining Tears?”

  “‘Breanna Crying,’” Blaze said, simply. “That’s what it’s called.”

  Yes, I thought. Yes, indeed.

  Blaze turned in the Breanna poem after I scribbled down a copy to keep for myself. I didn’t think about it again until the next day when Mr. B. took me aside and said, “I love Blaze’s poem. It’s so different. I want to put him in the authors’ tea. What do you think? Do you think he’d mind reading it out loud?”

  Blaze didn’t mind the idea of the authors’ tea at all and seemed even a little excited at the prospect. We had a dry run in front of the class where Blaze and the other two children who Mr. B. had selected stood up and recited their work. Blaze had nary a problem. However, Breanna, the subject of Blaze’s poem, blushed several shades of carmine and crimson when he read it out loud. She had an amazingly expressive little face. Blaze had captured it perfectly.

  Mr. B. was possibly more excited than either me or Blaze. He got a tremendous kick out of Blaze, who always said exactly what was on his mind, even if this meant spouting less than politically correct statements about other teachers he didn’t particularly care for. For Mr. B., a first-year teacher looking for a permanent position, this must have been both amusing and enlightening. But Mr. B. also genuinely liked Blaze’s poem and wanted to share it. He wasn’t recommending Blaze out of what my mother would have called rachmones (which translates to something between pity and compassion, but since it’s a Yiddish word, there is a slightly ironic edge to it) because Blaze was a special-ed kid.

  I discovered, only later, that had it not been Mr. B.’s first year teaching, he would most likely not have chosen Blaze as one of his readers. It turned out that the authors’ tea was quite a political event. The teachers got to show off their kids here and show up their colleagues who may not have produced as great works of literature. The event was heavily choreographed with the earlier grades reading first and everybody sitting in a particular spot on the stage. There were rehearsals. Semiformal dress was required. The children were required to write brief introductions for their writing and a bound program was distributed to all the parents and staff. The last thing anyone needed was an awkward kid who needed extra prodding or who might screw up at the podium. In other words, a kid like Blaze.

  When I discovered all of this, I went into a bit of a panic. Blaze had never stood up in front of an audience in any capacity and he had certainly never displayed any desire to follow the kinds of directions and choreography required for this event. My unleashed imagination ran wild with possible scenarios. What if he walked onto the stage before he was supposed to? What if he got stagestruck, didn’t read his poem, talked out while someone else was reading? He hated loud noises. What if the clapping and cheering freaked him out and he ran screaming from the room? I began to think the whole thing was a terrible idea, and I struggled to keep these thoughts from Blaze, who seemed remarkably relaxed.
But despite my misgivings, it was a done deal. Blaze was in the program and that was it. My parents were attending. And as if all this wasn’t enough, Dr. Roberts informed me that she was planning to stay at school late so that she could see Blaze as well.

  When the evening of the authors’ tea finally arrived, I was too anxious to sit next to my parents in the audience. I cowered in the standing-room-only section of the library. From my vantage point, I could see the holding room where the kids waited for their turn to read. I noticed that Blaze was making a bit of a stir, walking around the room, not sitting perfectly quietly like he was supposed to. I broke out in a cold sweat, adrenaline pumping unchecked through my body. Never doing this again, I told myself. Never, never. Can’t take the stress.

  My nervousness precluded any enjoyment I might have gotten listening to the poems and stories from the lower grades, even though, from some far distant corner of my brain, I noticed how cute the little ones were as they stumbled through their rhyming couplets. When it was finally time for Blaze’s class, I was on the verge of hyperventilating and thought I might very well pass out where I stood. A thin little girl read a passage she had written comparing popularity at school to chasing butterflies. Then it was Blaze’s turn. I saw Dr. Roberts emerge from her office and stand quietly on the periphery.

  There seemed to be an almost unnatural silence in the room as Blaze walked up to the podium. He bumped into the microphone and it crackled. I swore I could hear the indrawn breaths of every staff member who had ever worked with my child in that school. Blaze cleared his throat.

  “Ahem, excuse me,” he said and smiled. He paused in front of the audience for a few seconds, just long enough to convince me that his performance was going to be an epic disaster. Finally, he spoke.

  “A girl in my class became upset and started crying,” he said. “When I looked at her, it reminded me of a storm so I wrote about it.”

  He read his poem then, in a perfectly assured cadence. He didn’t rush or go too slowly. He didn’t stumble or waver. He looked born to this, as if he’d been performing in front of crowds his entire life. It was over in a matter of seconds.

  “Thank you,” he said and the room erupted into a thunderous applause. He took his place next to his classmates with a huge grin on his face, wide enough to swallow my ocean of doubts forever.

  I was a mess—tears everywhere, throat closing up, hiccups. I could hardly breathe. I was so proud of him, so relieved, so drenched with emotion, that I thought I would suffocate. Through the blur, I wondered if I was alone or if other parents felt the same way I did—that everything involving our children was painful in some way. The emotions, whether they were joy, sorrow, love, or pride, were so deep and sharp that in the end they left you raw, exposed and, yes, in pain. The human heart was not designed to beat outside the human body and yet, each child represented just that—a parent’s heart bared, beating forever outside its chest.

  Blaze received much praise before I could even get to him. As he filed out with the rest of his class, several adults patted him on the back, gave him a high five, or told him what a great job he’d done. I only knew half of these people. Some of them were teachers, but as for the rest, I had no idea.

  “Are you Blaze’s mom?” I heard through my daze and turned to see one of the sixth-grade teachers I barely recognized.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What a wonderful poem that was,” the teacher said. “Totally original. I’m very impressed. Most of this stuff was cookie-cutter writing. Blaze has a real voice.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, he does.”

  Mr. B. came up from behind me and squeezed my shoulder.

  “He was great,” Mr. B. said. I didn’t trust my own voice to stay steady, so I nodded and moved away quickly, before I could embarrass myself by bursting into tears.

  A couple of days after Blaze’s performance, Mr. B. told me that Dr. Roberts would be resigning her position at the end of the school year. I felt an unexpected wave of disappointment. When I stopped by her office (which was always open to me) to chat, she was full of congratulations.

  “Blaze did such a fine job at the authors’ tea,” she said. “He has come such a long way. A couple of years ago, it wouldn’t have seemed possible.”

  “I had my doubts,” I confessed. “But Blaze always surprises me.”

  “Well, he has a wonderful support system,” Dr. Roberts said.

  “Yes,” I countered, “but I actually came here this morning to talk about you. I heard a rumor that you’re going to be leaving us.”

  “Yes, I’ll be leaving at the end of June,” she said. “I know the person who’ll be replacing me as administrator and she’s terrific. I’m sure everything will be fine in the transition.”

  “It’s not that so much,” I told her. “We’ll…we’ll miss you.” I couldn’t imagine having said such a thing to Dr. Roberts a few years earlier. I was frankly amazed that I was saying it now, but it was true, I would miss her. For all my internal raging and disagreements with her, she had remained a steady presence in Blaze’s school career. Although it had taken me a while to believe it, she cared about Blaze and wanted what was best for him.

  “And I’ll miss all of you too,” Dr. Roberts said and smiled. Never one to talk much about herself, she moved right along. “I was thinking about all that you’ve done in the classroom this year,” she said, “and I was wondering if you’d be interested in working in our preschool program as an aide.”

  “What?”

  Dr. Roberts went on to describe the class, which was an early-intervention program for severely handicapped three- and four-year-olds (“Sometimes a little older,” she said). The children had a wide range of disabilities, Dr. Roberts told me, and the program was designed to help them learn skills for use in the classroom. The idea was that, when these children reached kindergarten age, they would be able to spend some, if not all, of their time in a regular kindergarten class.

  “I really think you’d enjoy it,” Dr. Roberts said. “There’s such a wide range of modalities in that classroom. And you’d be wonderful with the children.”

  Before I had the chance to ask too many questions, Dr. Roberts whisked me off to the classroom in question to have a look. The class was in Sally’s old room, I noted, and was now filled with several very small children and a multitude of aides and teachers, none of whom looked older than high school age. The atmosphere was one of tightly controlled chaos. Everyone seemed to be moving and speaking at once, although there was clearly a method to the madness.

  “Show me blue, Vincent.”

  “Oops, no, try again!”

  “Do you need to go potty, Jake?”

  “Show me green.”

  “Good job!”

  “Jake, do you need to go potty?”

  “It’s circle time, Steven. Go to circle.”

  “Show me red. Nope, try again! Show me red.”

  “Circle time, Steven.”

  “Jake?”

  “Yay! Red! Good job!”

  “Everybody out of the way! Jake needs to go potty!”

  An aide rushed by, holding a tiny boy by the hand. His feet barely brushed the floor as they hustled into the bathroom.

  Dr. Roberts looked at me somewhat apologetically. “There would be a little toileting involved,” she said.

  “You mean taking kids to the bathroom?” I asked.

  “Well, yes, some of these little guys have a harder time with potty training, so we help them out with that.”

  “That doesn’t sound too bad,” I said like the novice I was.

  “Oh, good,” Dr. Roberts said.

  Back in her office, Dr. Roberts had me fill out the necessary forms for employment and rounded up the principal for an impromptu interview. Slightly baffled, the principal asked me a few perfunctory questions, stressed the need for confidentiality in special education, shook my hand and said, “Welcome aboard.”

  I felt slightly as if I was being rushed into the jo
b before I might have the chance to change my mind, but this trepidation was tempered by the thought that this was a job I ought to take. One didn’t get that many opportunities to perform real service, I thought, and here I was being offered the chance without even trying. It seemed like a sign of some sort.

  “When would you want me to start?” I asked Dr. Roberts.

  “Oh, we, um, need people for the summer session,” she said. “So that would be in about three weeks.”

  “Oh.”

  As if to sweeten the deal, Dr. Roberts added, “You’d be working next to Blaze’s classroom this summer and you’d have the same hours. And I’ve just found a summer school aide for Blaze. She’s a psychology intern and very bright. I think it will be a great match.” Dr. Roberts gave me a small, enigmatic smile. “She’s also quite lovely to look at.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, that will certainly appeal to Blaze.”

  During the last week of school, I gave Dr. Roberts an understated but elegant pin that reminded me of her and a letter thanking her for all she’d done for me and Blaze. A couple of weeks later, I received a card from her in the mail.

  It has been a real pleasure to know you and Blaze, she wrote. I have appreciated the benefits of the positive approach your entire family takes, as each person helps Blaze to grow while making it clear that he is well-loved. You have done a great job of supporting him this year. He is in good hands as a member of your family.

  Coming from Dr. Roberts, I thought, these words of praise meant more than the sum of their parts. I only wished it hadn’t taken quite so long for me to realize it.

  [ Chapter 10 ]

  LOST AT SEA