scribblechic

Yesterday a note from my son’s aide raised concerns over an observed detachment from academics. The lines of worry were repetitive, missing content and wasting time. I’m not surprised, it is a well-rehearsed slight of hand. My son is disappearing from his classrooms; escaping into distraction.

Instinctively, I began to identify pieces of my son’s diagnoses that would inform the familiar complications that accompany each school year. I could identify the absence of sensory opportunities or itemize the need for particular modifications that might ease specific challenges unique to my son’s needs; offer incentives or suggest consequences. Instead my attention was drawn to the landscape of his support and wondering where he might connect; less concerned with the machinery of his accommodations, but unsettled by the absence of connectivity to the interpersonal experience of his days.

I realized with haunting clarity my son isn’t looking for a reason to try, he is looking for someone who cares.

You can follow his path to invisibility in the relationships he could not cultivate across years of broken school day experiences. Teachers, secure in his ability and knowledge, would allow my son to sit at his desk left to his own interests. There were endless notebooks filled with ideas and curiosities; sketches of inventions and notes on topics to research in place of assignments. Classroom aides, without essential training, misunderstood challenges and innocently, without malice, failed to develop successful resources. A chorus of recycled compliments would glean over complicated pieces of struggle with generic statements of intelligence suffocating expressions of need with a weighted assumption of ability. Add to this repetitious activities without the richness of purpose undermining the value of effort and unkindnesses of peers overlooked by adults who were failed guardians of compassion and you inform a method of survival by way of invisibility.

Of course, I wear my blame in the tender places of guilt; consistently second guessing unspoken unhappiness with misplaced confidence. It is a community that erases a child’s spirit and I am my son’s first witness to fading. Hindsight is an unkind mirror, exaggerating previously overlooked details now obvious in their importance. I leaned too much against reassurances and danced around uncomfortable conflict, leaving my son stranded in a place of vulnerability painfully exposed. I could have done better. Instead, I modeled a quieter place of invisibility and acquiescence.

Motherhood has made me humble, more honest in my fallibility. On the best days it also makes me brave.

Worries and guilt are poor motivators, but hope is a contagion for possibility. Last night I conjured the little boy who used to shadow my days, creating a safe place to talk about his days without the markers of success that sometimes eclipse the emotions of our experiences; setting aside academics for an opportunity to bear witness to my son’s joy. Filling in the shape of his days.

With a luxury of time I took him to the place we used to walk before our footsteps were rushed by outside commitments. I let him choose our dinner and we lingered over the table in conversation rather than bundling our food more hurriedly into take out containers. We perused book shelves for an anticipated title and curled up in companionable silence to enjoy our new books. More importantly, I apologized for looking the other way while pushing him into expectations that weighted his enthusiasm for learning against others’ assumptions.

It was a small offering, an imperfect beginning, but it drew a smile that gave form to something we can both believe in.