Same Old N

School started today. My first-born BABY started high school. I cannot say any more about that, or I will begin sobbing, and it's just unseemly to sob over your laptop keyboard when everyone's already asleep in the house. So yeah. High school, for the love of Pete. She's taking French, and modern dance, and a medical biology course that's somehow different from regular ninth grade biology, and is taught by a woman who works as a microbiologist on the weekend. She's taking algebra, and an English course in which she'll be reading Shakespeare, and a drama elective in which her TA is a guy who played Voldemort in a version of "A Very Potter Musical," which Em and her friends saw earlier this summer.

My baby's drama teacher is Voldemort. Can you tell we live in LA?

N started fifth grade today, which makes me much less likely to burst into tears. Especially since he got the same teacher he had in second grade, the teacher we all loved so very, very much. His assessment of the first day of school was that it was "perfect." Can't ask for more than that.

The story I want to tell about him, though, is really more about his friend A, a girl he's been more and more attached to as the years have gone by. She's the friendliest kid, sweet as pie. N had been worrying about her as school approached, because of a family situation he doesn't really understand enough to talk with me about, but which led him to believe she might not be returning to school this year. So, after we'd determined which class he was in (don't ask about the not-telling-until-the-morning-school-starts thing), and who his teacher was, the first thing we did was scan the class list (there's only one full fifth-grade class in our teensy little school of just over 400 kids) for this girl, and there she was. We all heaved a sigh of relief.

Which meant nothing when we arrived in front of the classroom and actually SAW her, of course. She was chatting with some of the other girls in their grade, but eventually saw us, and made her way over. N's response to her cheery, smiley, enthusiastic hello? He crossed his arms over his chest and turned his back to her.

I started to cringe, to apologize to this tiny 10-year-old. But before I could get even a whisper of a he's-just-nervous-because-of-the-first-day-of-school-but-he's-really-excited-to-see-you explanation out, she turned to Baroy and me, her smile not faltering one second. "Same old N!" she said, her grin possibly even widening some. And then she waited for him to collect himself, to peek around and smile back at her, if only for a second.

Would it be overly dramatic of me to say that I had a tiny little epiphany in that moment? It might be; but I did. And it was this: It's not all going to be about N learning to fit in with the other kids. It's also going to be about the other kids--not all of them probably, but some, enough--learning to appreciate N for who he is, quirks and all.

It was one of the first times ever that I saw in action what I often hear my special-needs-parenting peers talk about--advocating not for cures or the forcing of square pegs into round holes, but advocating for acceptance of our kids as they are. Making sure people see them as they are, as WHO they are, and hoping...no, EXPECTING...at least some of those people to smile and say, "Same old N," as if that were a good thing.

None of which is to say that I don't believe N needs to learn how to greet a person he hasn't seen in a long time, to figure out how to handle that rush of emotion--even positive emotion--and not need to shy away or shut down. I'm not implying that at all. But if he never quite gets all the way there? My hope for him is many, many more As in his life; people who will see that trait as something uniquely N, understand where it comes from, and simply accept it. Accept him. And perhaps, even, smile affectionately as they do it.

Fourteen

There were several times today, on my first baby's 14th birthday, that I almost burst open with the pride of being her mother. She knows how to be a friend...and when she falters, she's quick to listen to advice. She's almost freakishly mature for her age. She's almost freakishly mature for MY age.

The stories that really define my girl these days are generally not stories I can tell. Not for me to tell the stories about helping one friend, or soothing another's ruffled feathers, or chiding a third when she seems to be going astray.

So instead, let me tell you about this one day, the day after the day on which Baroy and I helped register her for high school, watched as she picked up her schedule and her ID and her books, and took much longer to get over the fact that she didn't make the soccer team than she did.

Today, Em's 14th birthday, started with her brother jumping atop her on her bed to give her his present...and then continued with him hiding under her covers while I sang Happy Birthday, a song that unaccountably freaks him out, and always has.

It continued, then, with a mother-daughter lunch at Tony Roma's, our special place. After lunch, we wandered around for a short while, then decided the heat was just more than we could bear, so headed home to await her girlfriends, who were finishing up their various color guard/cheerleading practices.

The original plan was for me to take the five girls to a local botanical gardens, where they were planning to a kind of photo shoot. (Em has a camera that's more expensive than the last three I've used put together...but she saved up for and bought it herself, and she uses it, so I have no complaints.) Mr. Sun had other plans, however--plans that included temperatures of over 100 at 5:30 this evening. So, instead, they asked to be chauffeured to the mall. Em wasn't too upset about it; she's been wanting to go to the gardens, sure, but she also had a Forever 21 gift card burning a hole in her pocket, so it was a perfect alternative.

Driving five 14-year-old girls around is something else. And that's all I'll say about that. At least until the ringing in my ears subsides.

Baroy picked them up a few hours later, dropped off the other girls, and returned Em home for her requested family dinner of chicken fricassee. Almost as soon as we finished chewing, the neighborhood kids began to arrive for the annual destroying of my backyard, also known as celebrating Em's birthday in their own traditional, if idiosyncratic, manner. (It involves me having both a cake for them to eat, and a cake for them to smash into Em's face...and then letting it all devolve into a complete free-for-all involving more cake, silly string, and the backyard hose. It's a mess, but it's worth it to watch them scream and giggle and enjoy the hell out of themselves once a year. Of course, I can say that, because it was Baroy who cleaned up after them.)

And now, Em and two of those friends are in a tent in the water-soaked backyard, having a sleepover. Except not so much on the sleep, at least not yet. But, you know, the night's still...well, not so much young as middle-aged.

Lest you think the festivities are coming to an end, there's a trip to the water park tomorrow, to celebrate a few other friends' August birthdays as a group.


Because, really. No matter how mature you may be, you're never too old for a smash cake and some water slides.

Happy birthday, Em. You make my heart sing. I love you.

One Liner

At the circus, sno-cone cup in hand, N looks into the plastic tiger's eyes, then over at Baroy and me. "I think I'll name him Newspaper," he says.

It takes us two or three full beats before we both start howling.

It's Not Possible

It's not possible that my first baby, the one who made me a mother--who literally made me who I am today--was promoted into high school this morning. (She's in that photo, somewhere....) These kids came walking in, looking for all the world like actual young adults, as if this was real, as if they were really growing up.

I refuse to accept it. It's just not possible.

It's also not possible that my baby baby was promoted into fifth grade today, too. With comments on his report card that are as different from last year's teacher's final words (even though in many ways they were similar in content) as his first day of school was different from the entire previous year's horrible experience.

N occasionally shares answers with the entire class. His comfort level with others continued to expand this trimester to include even more students and situations. He was able to work more independently more often than in the past. ...

The growth--personal, if not physical. It's incredible. How can he be so heading-toward-grown-up already? How is that possible?

Summer is on. That, too, seems impossible. And Southern California seems to agree with me, since it keeps producing winter-like weather--clouds, drizzle, temps in the 60s.

See? Time doesn't march on. It stays still. Still, I say. Be still, my babies. Stop moving so fast. Stop moving away from me so fast.

(I'm so proud of you, both. So proud.)

Whose Idea Was It To Have Dogs Again?

Really, Snug? A skunk? At 11:00 at night? You needed to kill it and get sprayed in the face by it (though probably not in that order) and then later come running into the house...you and your not-quite-as-stinky-but-still-plenty-smelly companion?

My house smells. Snug smells, despite the outdoor dousing in oatmeal shampoo we gave him. (Yes, next time we WILL have something a bit more up to skunk-busting at hand; oatmeal was way to wimpy for this job.) Dobby smells, because he stuck his nose into all the proceedings. And there's a dead skunk in a bag in my garbage, just in case the vet needs to see it. And also because we didn't know what else to do with it.

And once again, N slept through it all. He was pissed about the opossum; when he hears he missed a dead skunk, he's really going to be displeased.

Me? I'm over it. Not that I was ever under it.

Idiomic Reality

Dobby was outside barking his fool head off; he does this now and again. It was late. Well, lateish. I didn't want the neighbors bothered. So I went to the back door and called him.

This usually works. It almost always works. But tonight, he kept barking. Finally, when my calls turned to commands, he obeyed. But as Dobby was coming in the back door, Snug was exiting. Seconds later, he'd reappeared...with a large creature in his mouth. He dropped it at my feet. It was a not-an-infant-but-not-full-grown opossum. And it was dead.

"Baroy!" I yelled. "Snug just brought a dead possum into the house!"

Baroy came into the family room, Em trailing right behind.

"Em, get me a garbage bag," Baroy said finally, after staring at the lump o' possum for a few seconds.

"And an oven mitt," I added. Because right then, I'd noticed the opossum blink. "He's not dead."

In fact, as we were about to learn when Baroy reached to pick him up, he was very much not dead. So much not dead that he sprang to his feet and dashed toward Baroy's desk.

But Baroy was faster than he; he grabbed the creature by its tail, and held it susupended in the air.

"Put it outside, over the fence to the side of the house, so the dogs can't get at him again," I told Baroy, and he headed out the door.

"What was he doing?" Em asked then, pointing to the animal. (She'd cowered outside the room after she'd delivered the supplies, so had missed the events.)

It was then that I realized: "He was playing possum," I said.

* * * * *
Minutes later, as Baroy was putting Nature's Miracle on a wet spot we simply did not want to know the origin of (god, I hope that stuff works on possum pee), he looked up at Em and me. We were standing near each other, making frightened-and-grossed-out girl noises.

"Why did I have to do that?" he asked. It was a rhetorical question, but I chose to answer it anyway.

"Who has the penis in the family?"

"Not us!" said Em.

Baroy shook his head, disgusted.

Later (after an incident in which Baroy had gone outside to make sure there were no other half-dead young possums in our yard and stepped in some dog poop, but didn't discover it until he'd walked through the house and back out again...and the less said about that the better) the "why me?" conversation came up again.

"Well, would you prefer me to have picked up and possibly been attacked by a rabid possum?" I said, indignant.

"Hell, yeah," said Baroy. "But I knew it wasn't going to happen."

"Ach!" I said in mock disgust, gesturing toward him but looking at Em. "See? Chivalry is dead."

"No, chivalry is not dead," said Baroy. "I took care of it. I didn't make you do it."

"Fine then," I replied. "Chivalry isn't dead. It's just really reluctant."

At the Dog Park

I vacillate on the autism thing, and how it applies to N. I use it around the school, because it is a strap, a grabbing-on point, a way for people to understand my son and--very much more to the point--to justify putting forth time, effort, and especially money to help him. I use it because doctors and therapists have used it to describe him. I use it because it's the primary disability listed on his IEP. But there are so many ways in which he doesn't seem, to me, to fit on the spectrum part of the spectrum. I describe him, often, as the triangular peg who not only doesn't fit in the round hole, but doesn't look all that much like the square peg, either.

And yet.

And yet, professionals of all stripes see him on a regular basis, and talk to me about him with concern about his disabilities, or with delight over his abilities, or with awe over the way he turns the former into the latter.  They never say to me, "You're a fraud. He's fine. There's nothing wrong with this kid. Get out of my office and stop wasting the taxpayers' money."

And yet, other moms of kids on the spectrum see him and smile at him and recognize him. They never say to me, "Get out of here. This kid doesn't belong with my kid. This kid isn't autistic. You're no longer welcome in our club."

And yet, when a girl from the school's Special Day Class was mainstreamed into N's classroom for one period a day last year, she was the one and only friend he had in class. When we go to a school function together, he looks shyly and somewhat longingly at the other kids in his class or grade, but ends up sidling over to that same girl and the other kids in her class, who he's gotten to know on the playground. When we go to a birthday party, he finds the one other autistic child at the event to hang on the outskirts and not-talk with, until they discover that they both don't mind being bopped over the head with a balloon, and then they spend half an hour doing that while the other kids do, you know, the actual party stuff.

That's what's always confused me. N doesn't identify as autistic, or even as special needs. He doesn't ask me about why he's different; despite the number of pull-outs and therapists and various other accommodations that the other kids clearly do not get, he never mentions being in any way unlike the rest of the children he spends his days with. He's never asked me why learning is hard for him, or why he needs speech therapy. (I've tried to bring it up many times, but he deflects, and I'm not going to force him into a conversation about it if he's not ready.) He doesn't even seem to realize that some of his behaviors are odd or unusual or babyish or even gross...even if I point them out as such. (His general response to any attempt to modify such behaviors is, "But I like it!") And yet? The kids he so often identifies with are all those things: autistic, special needs, different.

I don't get. Or, rather, I didn't.

Today, I read this amazing post about John Robison over at PLoS Blogs. It's worth taking the time to read every single word of it, truly. But it was this part of Steve Silberman's interview with John that stopped me cold, made me gasp with recognition, made me stop--for today, at least--wondering and worrying so much about the "fitting in":

I talked to Temple Grandin about this. I told her, “I’m afraid that when I talk to groups of people with really serious autistic disability, they’re going to think I’m a fake autistic person, because I can talk so well.” Temple said, “No one with autism is ever going call you a fake autistic person. People with autism are like dogs in the park — they absolutely positively know what’s a dog and what’s a cat. A German shepherd can come up to a dachshund and he will never mistake a dachshund for a cat.” And that turned out to be true for me.

So many times, I’ve seen it in myself going the other way. All these people come up to me at booksignings and stuff and I say, “Ah, I see you’re a fellow Aspergian,” and they say, “How do you know?” And I say, “You know, I don’t know.” Sometimes they’re insulted, because they worked so hard in school, and they look so good, and they have friends and stuff. They’re almost insulted that I picked it out. But I don’t always know what it is about them.

Whether he's Asperger's or PDD or even something else along the spectrum--something not quite clearly articulated in any DSM or even in my own mind--my kid knows he's a dog, and can find the other dogs to play with.

Nobody is going to kick him out of the dog park for being a chihuahua even if most of the other pups around are terriers and retrievers. I need to stop worrying about it, and just let him play.