“Hi, Miss Debra,” she says through the space her front teeth have recently vacated. She grabs one of my hands and holds on to it tightly while I pat her softly on the back with the other. I have learned the power of touch this year. We are always in physical contact with our kids. We stroke their heads and their backs. We clean their faces and brush their cheeks with our fingers. We hold them on our laps, our arms creating a ring of safety around their bodies. We hug them tightly when they are sad. We squeeze their hands and dance with them. Touch is our primary form of communication in this classroom, a wordless language that everybody understands. When I look around now, I can see this language spoken clearly.
The magician, who looks somewhat daunted by the task ahead of him (I can hear him asking himself, What was I thinking?), introduces himself and performs a little physical comedy with a chair. He fakes falling down a few times and the kids, including our little ones, laugh uproariously. He asks for volunteers. These kids, who often won’t even acknowledge the presence of other humans, willingly and eagerly jump up to “help” him.
The magician does the old ring trick first, sliding large metal rings in and out of each other.
All the adults say, “How does he do that?” but the kids look back at us like we’re all crazy. Of course the rings disconnect, their glances seem to say. Why wouldn’t they?
The magician chooses Sam, a six-year-old diagnosed with autism, to hold a set of rings and tells him to try to pull them apart. Of course, Sam can’t do it and his face reddens with the strain of trying. Then the magician effortlessly separates his own rings. Sam doesn’t waste any time pondering how the magician is able to do this, promptly handing over his own rings with an expression that clearly says, Fix these. Sam doesn’t seem mystified, merely relieved, when the magician pulls the rings apart.
The other tricks follow suit. None of the children are surprised or amazed when the magician pulls brightly colored paper out of a little girl’s shoe or lifts a pair of red silk shorts from a previously empty bag, or wads up tissue in his hand and throws it back out as thin white streamers that cover the whole audience. As I watch their faces, I realize that none of these things are out of the natural order for these kids. This is not to say that they don’t like the magician—they love him and they love his brightly colored objects, his collapsible wand. They laugh, they applaud. They pay full attention. The real magic, it occurs to me, is in their understanding that there exists real magic. If not magic per se, then certainly belief of some kind. And pure belief or faith seems to defy the presence of rationality. Can one really explain why one believes? And isn’t there real magic in pure faith? This is what I see in the faces of the children and what makes me unsure, for a moment, if I have any right to be instructing them. They are so clearly providing lessons for me.
It is this magic, I know now, which often sustains Blaze. His ongoing fascination and belief in the tooth fairy is just one example. Blaze has always been tickled by the whole concept and has written her long notes explaining what has happened to his teeth, where they fell out, and so on. Once he stopped losing his teeth, he wrote her a note pleading with her to leave something anyway, explaining that he couldn’t do anything about the timing of this frustrating tooth business. He quizzed me repeatedly about the particulars of the tooth fairy. How did she get around? What did she do with all the teeth? How big was she? What did she look like? When these discussions started getting really involved, I tried to subtly imply that the tooth fairy might not actually exist. Blaze’s reaction was equally subtle.
“I know that, Mom,” he said. “But she does come.”
I could just as easily give him a few quarters or a packet of M&M’s (the usual tooth fairy treats), but he doesn’t want that—he wants the magic of a tooth vanishing in the middle of the night, replaced by sweet rewards.
I don’t blame him for believing. I too believed in the tooth fairy even after she “forgot” to take a tooth of mine one night and, after I complained bitterly the next day, left me a note (in my mother’s handwriting, oddly enough) about how busy she’d been. Still, I held fast to my illusions. I lost more teeth and they were traded for strange, magical gifts in deepest night. A silver tiepin with a diamond stud, a plastic ring, a miniature book.
When Blaze started losing his teeth, I was less creative about what I put under his pillow—mostly candy he liked and quarters he could use to play video games. I felt strangely guilty about removing the envelopes in which he’d carefully placed his teeth and his name (“So she knows who it’s from,” he said) and replacing them with treats, as if I were doing somebody else’s job.
I’ve kept almost all of Blaze’s teeth and all of the notes he’s written to the tooth fairy. I felt strange about this too. What if he found them? Would it rattle his faith? No, I think now as I watch the magician pull some other improbable item out of his bag. He would assume, I am sure, that the tooth fairy herself gave them to me for safekeeping.
I turn my attention back to the magician who, although sweating profusely, seems surprised and pleased at the warm reception he is getting and the high level of attention being fixed on him.
There are a few exceptions. Four-year-old Anna has an enormous fear of crowds and public events so she spends the entire session screaming at the top of her surprisingly capable lungs. A few of the kids turn to look at her with knowing looks on their faces. Each one of these children is intimately aware of the fact that, in some way, each is a square peg. When they look at Anna, they understand that whatever is behind her screaming defines her particular square shape. They don’t let it distract them in the least.
There is also Jonah, who doesn’t venture outside the confines of his own head very often and must have an aide assigned to him at all times. Jonah flails out and hits me first and then Sam, broadside, across his back.
“No, Jonah,” his aide says, in a tone that implies this is by no means the first time he’s spoken these words, “No hitting.” I change my seat, but Sam just flinches a little and doesn’t even turn around.
Anna’s sobbing increases in volume and her body starts to go rigid, so the preschool teacher lifts her up and pats her back soothingly until Anna quiets ever so slightly. Jill’s teacher, who is sitting next to me, sees this interchange and shakes her head. She clearly has other ideas as to how the Anna situation could be handled.
“See, if that were me,” she whispers, “I’d just ignore that behavior and remove her from the group.” She studies my expression and reads my reaction to this. “But I guess there’s a long history with her, isn’t there? You’ve probably tried a few things already, haven’t you?”
“Definitely,” I answer. “A few months ago, we couldn’t even have kept her in the same room. This is actually an improvement.”
“Right,” says Jill’s teacher. “You just can’t tell.”
A little later, when Jill laughs with unbridled glee, I turn back to her teacher and say, “I just love her, she’s so sweet.”
“You see, there it is,” the teacher responds. “She is a darling, but she has a problem with appropriate laughter. We’re working with her on that.”
Appropriate laughter. This phrase suddenly depresses me. I am struck again by how difficult it is to navigate a world where we have to be mindful of when laughter is appropriate. The mechanism that allows these kids to accept the magician’s tricks as natural and Blaze to continue believing in the tooth fairy is the same one that signals their need to be taught how to laugh appropriately. I sigh out loud. I wonder, as I have so many times before, how Blaze and all these children are going to survive with their own magic intact after going through the minefield of what is, today, normal and appropriate. The standards are always changing, it seems, and around here normal has become an arbitrary concept. Most days, the world seems completely mad to me anyway. Where is the line between normal and abnormal? Who is qualified to draw it?
The magician is a huge hit, much to his own delight. As he packs up, promising
to come again, he is besieged by applause and thanks. After he and the other classes leave our classroom, we gather in a circle to have story time before our kids go home.
Just before they leave, the teacher takes a poll. “What was your favorite part of the magic show?” she asks and goes around the circle. Every child has a distinct, relatable memory. What makes this so astonishing is that these kids sometimes can’t remember their own names and often have trouble answering yes or no questions, let alone those that ask why or what.
“The shoe,” says one child.
“The red shorts,” says another.
“The rings,” says a third.
From her spot on the carpet, Anna, her face and eyes red and puffy from crying, says, “Paper in the sky.”
This too is magic. And for a moment, it reinforces my own faith in magic, in these children, and my faith in Blaze. And, just now, a moment is all I need.
[ Chapter 12 ]
APPROACHING THE TOWER
I take the pill early in the morning and begin to feel the effects almost immediately. First comes a sort of electrical buzzing that starts in my chest, works its way into my jaw, and settles at the base of my neck. My breath starts to come quicker and shorter. My fingers tingle a little. My heart starts doing some annoying little flips as if it misses a beat and goes back to make up for the loss with a double. I cough. The buzzing sensation moves into my head and my eyes start to feel tight. After an hour, a ragged headache claims a band around my head where it will remain for a long time. There is no real “rush” that I can distinguish, but about twenty minutes after I take the drug, I am talking faster and getting organized. Sure, I think, I can write on this stuff. I could also probably be talked into cleaning the bathtub with a toothbrush or organizing thirty years of loose photographs. I could write a term paper. The term paper seems a particularly appropriate task because the feeling I am experiencing reminds me very much of my college days where I and dozens of other hapless students would drink thick, black coffee until our bladders threatened to burst and when that no longer did the trick, scrounge around for stimulants the chemistry majors had been cooking up that week. We took whatever would keep us awake. Once I even saw a hardy soul snorting lines of espresso in the library.
My chest feels constricted and my head is alive with noise. I’m not enjoying myself. Those college days are long gone, to be sure. Inexplicably, I decide to make myself some coffee. I drink two cups and go over the edge. My heart starts to pound, I begin to sweat, and my eyes feel stabbed with pain. I am now useless, irritable, and uncomfortable.
When the drug wears off a few hours later, I feel sapped, disoriented, and tired. Much later, when according to all the literature the drug should have metabolized and passed out of my system, I lie awake in bed staring at the unforgiving blackness of the ceiling.
I am not the only one in my house who can’t sleep. In the bent hours after midnight, the shape of my twelve-year-old son hovers next to my bed, outlined dimly in dark.
“I had another nightmare, Mom,” he says. His voice is tremulous and still soaked with sleep.
“What was it?” I ask him.
“I dreamed I was a cartoon character. There were black lines drawn around me. I couldn’t move off the paper.”
“It’s only a dream, honey,” I tell him and take his hand. “See? You’re not a cartoon. I couldn’t hold your hand if you were a cartoon.”
He doesn’t seem particularly comforted. He wants to know if I’ll walk him back to bed. Back in his bedroom, he puts on his headset and listens to music. He wants his door closed so that nothing can get in. Or out. I kiss him and assure him that he remains three-dimensional, but he’s drifting away, still troubled.
Now in my own sleepless bed again, the tears start. I know how Blaze feels and I know why he can’t sleep and why he’s having nightmares. After all, today we have both been on the same drug. It’s not speed, cocaine, or anything cooked up by college chemistry majors.
It’s Ritalin.
After years of resisting the attempts of doctors, teachers, and special-education administrators to convince me to give my child some kind (any kind!) of psychotropic medication, I have arrived here, like so many others before me, at the house of Ritalin. And I didn’t start Blaze on this course of drugs because I finally yielded to the pressure of all those professionals—in fact, they’ve backed off from the whole medication issue lately. No, I made this decision all by myself.
I toss around in my bed, imprisoning myself in the twisted sheets. It’s ironic, I think, as I sit up and stare at the clock for the tenth time. I held off for so long and now I’m giving Blaze Ritalin, not because he’s been failing at school or because his behavior has gotten worse, but because he’s been doing so well. So what’s wrong with this picture?
It took Blaze a couple of months to really settle into Mr. Davidson’s class, but after he did, the transformation was quite impressive. Suddenly, out of nowhere and with no particular reason, my son knew his multiplication tables. I had tried every kind of strategy to get him to learn and memorize these before to no avail. Grace, the math wiz, had tried even harder, but Blaze seemed stuck where he was, mathematically. Then, after only a few weeks in Mr. Davidson’s class, he knew all his math facts. What’s more, they were lodged in his brain forever. I couldn’t stump him.
Blaze was also reading, really reading, in class and answering comprehension questions about the material he’d read. Mr. Davidson’s class split into groups and read from novels every day. Rather than choosing a few long novels, Mr. Davidson opted to teach many, shorter books. Blaze (and I assumed the other students as well) didn’t have time to grow bored with any one particular novel and was exposed to many different styles and stories.
Blaze brought homework from school and we worked on it together. Every week, he carried home a packet of all his work from the week before, so I could see exactly what he’d been doing and the progress he’d been making. By the end of fifth grade, Blaze had jumped the academic equivalent of two grade levels.
But there were other, more important, signs of progress besides the academic gains. Blaze was starting to feel a measure of security at school—a sort of emotional safety—that had been lacking for so long. In Mr. Davidson’s class, the boundaries of acceptable behavior were always very clearly drawn. There were rules to be followed and standards to be adhered to. Blaze pushed and strained at these boundaries in a mighty effort to see how far he could go before someone would reach out and pull him back.
I observed this struggle from a distance. Blaze took a bus to school in the morning and I didn’t see him again until he returned home. Mr. Davidson communicated through notes and phone calls. Occasionally, we met for parent-teacher conferences. It was a far cry from my previous immersion in Blaze’s school day, but I never felt out of the loop.
“He’s been throwing his assignments away on his way out to recess,” Mr. Davidson told me. “We’ve been retrieving them from the trash. He’s discovering that just because he’s made them disappear, doesn’t mean they won’t be coming back. It’s only a temporary reprieve.”
Blaze also found that his old response to fire drills and trucks didn’t elicit the same response as it had before.
“He’s only allowed to get out of his seat once,” Mr. Davidson said. “After that, he starts losing privileges, like playing games during free time.”
At home, Blaze would complain, “I hate Mr. Davidson, he’s too strict. He’s mean.”
“You mean he won’t let you throw your homework away?” I said. “What a terrible man.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Blaze said indignantly and then stopped himself short. “Mom, are you being sarcastic?”
“Yes, Blaze. Yes, I am.”
There was more.
“Your son came up to me today and told me I was drunk,” Mr. Davidson said.
“What?” I was horrified.
“That’s right, walked right up to me, pointed in my face and sai
d, ‘You’re drunk!’”
“Why did he say that?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Mr. Davidson said, and laughed heartily, “because, you know, I hardly ever drink in front of the kids anymore.”
“Oh, ah, ha, ha…”
And Blaze kept pushing on.
“He told me he wanted to punch me in the nose,” Mr. Davidson said.
“That’s really unacceptable,” I said. “I don’t know why he would say such a thing. He’s never done that before.”
“He’s staking out his territory,” Mr. Davidson said. “He’s trying to figure out what it means to be a young man. This is how he’s trying to determine his role. This isn’t a bad thing.”
“You’re not worried about this?” I asked.
“Oh no. He’s coming out of himself, giving himself a context. He’ll figure it out. He’s a bright kid.”
Before this, Blaze had found no brick wall to butt up against. He had alarmed, cajoled, or simply worn down his teachers. In Mr. Davidson, Blaze had finally met his match, a person more obdurate than himself. Someone who would never give up.
Because it wasn’t in Blaze’s nature to concede willingly, he continued to grumble about the tyranny and injustice in Mr. Davidson’s class. He took advantage of every opportunity he got to avoid working and never ceased trying to use his considerable powers of manipulation to get what he wanted. Under all of this, though, he was happier and more content than I’d ever seen him at school. I understood the full measure of this when I read his dream journal. I’d encouraged Blaze to start writing his dreams down because he’d been talking about them to everyone who’d listen. While they were vivid and fanciful, I told Blaze, it would be better to keep them on paper. Some time in the spring of fifth grade, while he was still carping regularly about what a difficult teacher Mr. Davidson was, Blaze wrote:
Raising Blaze Page 22