The best thing about being on vacation, I think, is eating out. All the time. I never have to cook – not that I cook much at home anyway. Better yet, I don’t have to hear complaints about what is being served. So after 16 days on the road with no fast food, and including five – yes, five – all-you-can-eat Vegas buffets, I was saddened to remember that I would have to make dinner when I got home.
My parents, angels that they are, not only took care of our dog while we were gone but also supplied us with a slew of groceries. So we were all set.
As luck would have it, though, Dylan was invited to a friend’s house just before dinnertime. Immediately thereafter, Shane said, “Could we go to a movie while Dylan’s at his friend’s house?”
So Dylan ate at his friend’s house, Shane and I had peanut butter sandwiches on the way to the theater, and Bill fended for himself. (He probably ate out.)
A few hours later, I got a text from Dylan, who was still at his friend’s house: “Omg the food was so good.”
He sent this – did I mention – after 16 days of eating at relatively nice restaurants including five buffets.
So when he got home, I asked what he ate. He went on for ten minutes. “It was this, like, chicken with rice and beans, and the whole thing was in salsa and it was just really, really good.”
“You don’t like salsa. I’ve given you ten different kinds of salsa and you wouldn’t eat any of it.”
“Well apparently it has to be really good salsa.”
“And you hate rice. I’ve made rice 100,000 times and you won’t eat it – not brown rice, white rice, fried rice – no rice. You never eat rice!”
“Well it was okay when it was all mixed in with the other stuff.”
“Like the salsa.”
“Yeah, and the chicken. The chicken was so good, I could hardly stop eating it.”
The next day I went to the grocery store and bought a chicken. We had corn and sweet potato fries with it – but I bought the chicken (roasted from the store) because Dylan had made such a fuss about the chicken the night before.
When Dylan walked into the room, he saw the chicken, corn on the cob (thanks, Mom!) and sweet potato fries (thanks, Bill!). Dylan said, “Oh good, sweet potato fries so I don’t have to eat the chicken.”
“But I bought that chicken for you!” I wailed.
“What? Why? I don’t even like chicken.”
“Because yesterday you said you loved the chicken you ate! So I was trying to get you something you would love!”
“Well I don’t like this kind of chicken,” he said. “I’ve never liked this kind of chicken.”
“You have to eat this chicken anyway,” I moaned. “I bought it for you.”
“Well I don’t know why,” said Dylan. “I don’t even like chicken.”
In the middle of Monument Valley, on our vacation, the kids were acting … well, like kids. It was 115 degrees and the plan was to see Four Corners, Goosenecks State Park and Monument Valley – all in one day.
Dylan, who spins like a human top when he’s bored, had been in the car with very few breaks for nearly five hours. Monument Valley is a drive-through park, so he wasn’t able to release any of that energy. The human top was stuck in “vibrate” mode.
For the uninitiated, the vibrate mode of a human top sounds something like this: Blubbedy blub blub blub! Waaa woooo waaaa miggledy snip!
Because Dylan is musically gifted, though, sometimes he put this nonsense to music — loud, somewhat screechy music. And since there is no way to stop this unless one allows the human top to actually spin, we were all a bit cranky.
Except Shane, who is also a kid and thinks Dylan can do no wrong.
“Dylan!” a parent would shriek every four minutes. “Stop making those noises!”
Wild snickering would emanate from the back seat.
“Shane, stop laughing. Don’t encourage him!”
“That wasn’t me; it was Dylan!”
“It was Shane, too! Besides, what’s wrong with laughing? I thought you wanted us to be happy!” Dylan is always thinking abstractly and negotiating. Always.
“Happy, yes,” a parent would respond. “Totally insane is another thing entirely!”
“Bigglety bop balula-looooola!”
“Dylan!”
“Looola-looola-looola-LOP!”
“Dylan, seriously! Just STOP!”
“Stop the lop? Stop the lop, boppity bop….”
More wild snickering.
“Stop everything! Just for one minute, please!”
Suddenly, I spied something I had not seen before in Monument Valley: a guy on top of a rock. It was a huge rock, with four sleek, straight sides and no footholds. It was a rock that no sane human being would attempt to climb.
“Look guys!” I pointed to the guy on the rock. Both kids became silent. The rock climber was just about to jump down, so we pulled up next to him and I rolled down my window.
“I just want to know if it was hard!” I yelled to him. I forgot that nearly every tourist we’d met was from Europe.
The guy – who was about 20 – said in stilted (but very nice) English, “It is very difficult!”
Shane said, “I want to do it!” So we went to the rock and he tried – and tried – and tried. But he was way too short and could only climb up a tiny bit before he gave up.
The European guy said, “I could not do this two years ago, and now I can. Maybe he can in two years.” We all shrugged. Then the European and his family drove away.
Then Dylan jumped out of the car. He raced to the boulder, climbed almost to the top, then threw his leg over the top and sat up.
“You did it!” we all said in amazement. Dylan was only 14. The European had already said he couldn’t do it two years ago – and now Dylan had proven that it could be done.
After Dylan got down, Shane tried again. This time, with a few pushes, Shane got to the top, too. We took pictures galore of both boys, then got back into the car.
Dylan was like a new person – an adult person. He was calm and centered and, for the rest of the day, much more pleasant.
To stop the human top from spinning, we just had to let him climb a rock.
Shane and I were in the car on a glorious summer’s day. We stopped at a red light and heard thumping, blaring booms from the car next to us.
“I wonder what song that is,” Shane said. “Try 95.5.” I dialed the radio accordingly. It was not 95.5.
“Must be a CD,” Shane said.
I looked over to see who insisted on deafening their mobile neighbors with the subwoofer volume maxxed. Two young guys sat in the front seat, baseball caps turned backwards, jammin’ out. All the windows were down – explicit lyrics for all!
And in the back seat sat a girl, blond ponytail sticking straight out of the back of her head, somewhere between the ages of 15 and 25. Next to her sat a rear-facing infant seat. She glanced over and tugged at it for a second, so I know there was a baby inside.
I almost vomited right out my window.
If the baby wasn’t already been born deaf, it certainly was losing its hearing. No thought had been given to the baby’s safety or happiness. Heck, maybe the baby was sleeping. If those teenagers actually lived the way they drove down the street, the baby would have to sleep whenever it could.
I don’t know those people, so I literally can’t judge them. For all I know, they weren’t even the baby’s parents.
But I imagined….
That the young mom thought, I’m not going to let any dumb baby slow ME down! I’m going to live my life the way I want to live it! I’m only young once and I’m not gonna miss it!
I imagined her getting up in the morning (ignoring the cries in the middle of the night). I imagined her lighting up a cigarette and heating up the formula while the baby screamed from its cardboard box in the living room. I imagined her eating toast with jelly before bothering to pick up the baby, then moving it straight into a high chair, never making eye contact or even saying hello.
I jumped straight from that conclusion to the child starting kindergarten, not knowing the alphabet or how to count to ten – like so many of the kids I knew when I taught kindergarten. In an instant, I gave that infant zero chance for a future, other than prison or a career in fast food.
And then I thought, hey, there’s still hope!
That young mom could wake up anytime she wants, hold her baby close and start treating that baby the way all children deserve to be treated. She might start with a quiet moment in the early morning, watching the sunrise and realizing that there’s more to life than rebellion against society.
She might decide her baby deserves more than what she’s offered. She might just turn down the car’s CD player and sing to the baby instead. She might invest in a stroller and walk through a forest, pointing out trees and birds and squirrels to the baby. She might teach the baby to count, to read, to be a loving human.
Or that young mom might overdose on drugs and let the baby starve to death next to her corpse.
There’s a tremendous likelihood that I am utterly wrong, having only glanced at the car for 20 seconds.
Either way, I am trying hard to believe, today, that there is hope.
I am still taking my amino acid, as recommended by The Mood Cure. It’s been quite awhile now, and I take it every day. After Dylan’s continued success, I don’t want to take any chances.
Except one particular weekend, I forgot. I forgot to eat breakfast, so I also forgot to take my daily supplements – which I usually take with breakfast.
During the first day, I had no idea whether or not I’d forgotten to take it. I simply couldn’t remember if, before leaving the house, I had taken 30 seconds to get some water and take the caplet. And I didn’t want to take too many (although I can take up to four a day) so I just didn’t take one.
I mean, I think I didn’t. I didn’t feel much different that day, so who knows? Maybe I did take it.
Or maybe not.
Anyway, the next day, I went out to a really fun mall – nearly an hour’s drive away. I was planning a big day of shopping. (I don’t go to the mall very often, so when I go, it may as well be an all-day event.)
Halfway to the mall, I realized – for sure – that I’d forgotten to take my amino acid. I thought, If I really did forget yesterday, that’s two days without it! I am in trouble if THAT’s true!
But then I went shopping and forgot all about it.
The first time I took it, the difference was so glaringly obvious. I felt normal in less than 20 minutes. I didn’t feel so sad, or angry, or frustrated. I just felt a little more calm than I usually do.
But in spite of how I can’t feel it anymore, I have noticed something spectacular: I no longer bite off the heads of people close to me when I’m frustrated. I don’t scream at the other drivers. I don’t blow up at incredibly small things. Even when I’m really frustrated, I rarely show my frustration by raging at those who don’t deserve it.
(Well, no one ever deserves my rage, probably.)
And so I went a whole weekend without it, and I didn’t feel that much different. I felt relatively calm.
Until around 9:00 at night, when suddenly, I blew up. I directed all of my rage right at my husband, and I don’t even know what I was upset about. And in the back of my brain, I could hear that ever-familiar little voice saying, Stop it! Stop yelling! What’s wrong with you? While the front of my face was still blabbering like an idiot.
This is an occurrence that used to happen quite regularly – often directed at my kids, because they were there. I remembered it all very well.
The next morning I woke up, and went directly downstairs to take my amino acid. I surely hope I don’t forget again.
After living through it once, surviving Dylan’s years, and now enrolling my baby, I think I finally understand middle school.
In elementary school, the kids are both coddled and lectured with great consistency. Teachers tell them how to walk in the hallways, where to hang their coats, when and what to eat, with whom they should sit, and when to go to the bathroom. Teachers are also authority figures, to be treated with respect, and most of the elementary-aged kids do that.
In middle school, though, that familiar structure goes right out the window. Kids get their own lockers and are told, as a group, where to congregate – but not where to sit, or with whom. They have rules but, possibly due to the students’ larger sizes, these rules are not as strictly enforced – if they are enforced at all.
In middle school, the kids are left to fend for themselves in many ways. In concept, it’s a great opportunity: kids have the ability to choose their own identities at this point, to share who they are with their peers. They have a slew of after-school activities to choose from, and they can find friends with similar interests.
But that’s not the only thing that happens.
Many of these kids – some really kind, decent kids – don’t have a clue how to survive without a rigid structure. So they go hog wild. They swear constantly, just to see what will happen. They steal – even if it’s just taking someone’s pen – because they can. They cheat, they lie, they push the boundaries until the boundaries almost disappear. And their respect for authority figures goes right out the window.
But I don’t think the problem is middle school. I think the problem happens in elementary school.
There is no allowance for the fact that the kids in elementary school are growing up. They come into kindergarten with a desperate need for structure. They need to be told where to go, what to do, when to go to the bathroom. But by second grade, they’ve pretty much learned the ropes. And by fourth grade, they are busting at the seams to break free from all the restrictions.
For example, Shane once told me that the lunch ladies had given the fifth graders assigned seating – and that the fifth graders had hoped to be able to “earn back” the right to sit with their friends. When I asked what the fifth graders had done to deserve this punishment, Shane said, “I don’t know, but we’ve had assigned seating for like two weeks.”
When I talked to the principal later that day, he was just about to talk to the lunch ladies – and so the ban was lifted.
But the kids should be given more independence in fifth grade, not less. They need to become accustomed to being able to choose seats, talk in hallways and get around. Instead, they are roped down like cattle – and set loose on the middle school community, just as they start puberty with a vengeance.
And then they explode. They go wild, trying out all the new-found freedoms. Most of them – especially those without quality parental supervision (and there are lots of those) – have no internal monitor to remind them of that precious Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Instead, they push, fight, claw, cheat, lie, and steal – while other students (often the ones with internal monitors) cower in the corners, and try to stay unnoticed until the madness dies down.
And when it finally does, the next logical option is … high school.
In spite of my initial reaction to Dylan’s using electronics at 1 a.m., he seems to be doing quite well.
First, he sat with me and discussed what happened – and shared his thoughts. He decided – on his own – to remove the offending electronic devices from his room until he thought he could better control his behavior.
This reminded me of when I would hide the box of Ho-Ho’s from myself in the back of the closet, hoping that the children would get a Ho-Ho before I ate the whole box. Sadly, my children did not actually eat a Ho-Ho until they were nearly a decade old.
So I agreed to keep his electronics in my room – but he had to put them there at 10 p.m. And thus far, he has done exactly that, every day.
Second, while still being a typical teenager, he has been setting his alarm to get out of bed – meaning that he isn’t forcing himself to stay awake at night, just because it’s summer “and I can.” And he gets up and spends the day with us.
Third, Dylan didn’t turn into evil-demon kid, like he has been known to do in the past, especially when I would enforce a rule he didn’t like. Instead, he went right back to doing his best – and succeeding.
In other words, Dylan is – gosh – growing up! And he’s doing it very, very nicely.
I’m not sure if this is a temporary thing. I know he is just beginning the nightmarish teenage years. But Dylan has taken a pretty rough patch and turned it into a life-altering experience – on his own. He has been consistenly and optimistically doing things with his brother, with the family, and with his friends that are positive experiences.
And he’s acting like …
Like …
An adult.
Dylan is making decisions – not all the time, but most of the time – that are based on doing the right thing, rather than doing whatever he wants to do. He’s taking care of himself, eating well, taking his vitamins, getting enough (and not too much) sleep. Heck, he even has a job – a story for another day.
He’s still a teenager, and he wants way more sugar than he needs. (Don’t we all? It’s probably because of the Great Ho-Ho Denial in the early 2000’s.)
But Dylan is choosing, more often than not, to do better than he used to do. In fact, he’s doing better than I used to do.
And I could not be more proud.
When I was a teenager, Quinton married Nola. As I recall, they married outdoors, high on the red cliffs of a glorious mountain. Pachelbel’s Canon in D played as Nola glided forth in her gown, to finally wed the man of her – and my – dreams, in a wedding that will live in my mind for the rest of time.
That wedding is also on YouTube – because it’s completely fictitious, created for the now defunct soap opera, The Guiding Light. I watched it on YouTube, and it turns out that Nola and Quinton were married in a very traditional church ceremony, and she walked down the aisle to Here Comes the Bride. I was wrong about nearly everything.
But I remembered one thing correctly: Pachelbel’s Canon in D. The song was dubbed in by the show’s sound editors as the bride and groom kissed and glided out of the church. I’d never heard the song before that day, and didn’t know what it was called – but I remembered the tune, and got a little thrill every time I heard it thereafter.
I’m not one of those people who daydreamed about a perfect wedding day. I never even thought much about it until I got engaged. But I wanted that song in my wedding.
Fast forward 16 years: my now-husband and then-fiancé Bill, not only knew the song but recognized it immediately when I hummed a bit. Then he pulled out a CD from his eclectic collection and played it for me.
A few months later, Canon started our wedding ceremony.
Fast forward another 16 years: I went to the bank one day, and came home to a familiar tune. I walked in and saw my two angelic boys, side by side on the piano bench.
Together, they were playing Canon.
Dylan taught himself to play the song – and then taught Shane to play the melody for a derivative song called Christmas Canon. The song sounded perfect.
I stood there for a moment, listening. I thought about Nola and Quinton and the dream life I’d imagined only briefly, so many years ago. I remembered hearing that song over the years, long before I’d met Bill, when marriage seemed like it would never happen. And I remembered the song starting to play on a gorgeous summer’s day, as my bridesmaids strolled through the grass to stand near my groom under a huge oak tree, where we were married.
And here I was, listening to my two babies – my angels, created by God and formed through a deep, caring bond – playing this glorious love song on our piano, in our home, making beautiful music together, making an awesome memory for me.
And I cried the same tears of joy I cried back in 1983, before any of this was ever real.
After much research in attempting to discover what is wrong with Shane, I’ve once again learned that he’s … well, he’s just like that.
After the whole envelope debacle, and my sudden raging concern that Shane has an undiagnosed learning disability, I did some research. I read about left-right confusion, about doing things backwards, about being absurdly literal.
So I started with autism-spectrum disorders.
The tendency toward the literal is very much associated with Asperger’s Syndrome. For what is maybe the 40th time, I took quiz after quiz online, just to be sure that Shane doesn’t have Asperger’s.
I read about the various levels of Asperger’s – in case he is just incredibly high-functioning. There are five defined levels – and Shane doesn’t fit into any of those categories. He simply takes everything very, very literally.
So I moved to left-right confusion.
I studied the brain. I learned that most left-right confusion comes from disorders in the left parietal lobe. I learned a lot about disorders along the autism spectrum, including ADHD, since they are thought to originate in the parietal lobes. And there are a dozen or more incredibly rare disorders that are also associated with left parietal lobe dysfunction.
Those parietal lobes are pretty important things.
Shane does not have Gerstmann’s Syndrome, Balint’s Syndrome, Holmes-Adie Syndrome, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, Apraxia or a brain tumor. In fact, he doesn’t seem to have any kind of disorder at all.
This is great (and not unexpected) news. But it doesn’t explain why Shane threw a light bulb randomly across the room, instead of “tossing” it in the garbage. And it doesn’t explain why he can’t address an envelope while looking directly at a sample envelope.
The most helpful tip I got was from a blogger who suffers with severe left-right confusion – and has, for her entire life. Her post discussed the parietal lobes, too, but then suggested:
OR, as one more intriguing theory suggests, your left/right confusion may just be due to your SF or NT type personality!
Her blog went into detail, describing the various personality types – all based on the Myers-Briggs test, which Shane has never taken. But I have no doubt that Shane is an NT personality.
So I researched personality types.
Shane fits flawlessly into the INTJ category: introspective, analytical, determined, adaptable, open-minded and decisive. Reading about the personality types renewed my hope for Shane, who fit so nicely into this category that I don’t think he will even need to take the test.
INTJ personality types – and “NT” people in particular – are quite rare in our population. As adults, they are generally quite content with their work and their lives.
But it does mean that Shane’s personality is … unusual. And of course, I knew that all along.
So I will just go back to believing Shane is fine, just the way he is… and, as often as possible, I will try to see his oddities as learning opportunities.
Shane is perfect, just as he is. I really don’t want him to change.
But I don’t want him to suffer. And I think he is going to suffer, if we don’t figure out exactly what is going wrong in his head, and how he can work around it to successfully proceed through life.
Thinking about Shane’s “issue” is quite frustrating, because I’ve tried all the regular channels – and been told repeatedly that I shouldn’t worry about him.
But I do worry.
I asked the pediatrician about Shane during his annual physical. I told him the story of Shane literally tossing the light bulb and smashing it on the garage floor, when my husband said “just toss it” and meant for Shane to discard it. “There are other things, too,” I told the doctor.
The doctor laughed. “Quite honestly,” he said, “he’ll probably just outgrow most of that.”
I trust my pediatrician. He saved Dylan’s life, when Dylan had rocky mountain spotted fever. But if Shane is “tossing” a light bulb across the room at age 10, how long should we wait for him to outgrow his tendency toward the extreme literal?
I also spent some time with the special ed staff at school. We called a meeting to discuss Shane’s odd needs. He’d already been through vision therapy, but he couldn’t spell anything – and I thought we might need to alert his future teachers that he was, actually, quite brilliant. He simply can’t spell.
His teachers – and the special ed staff – didn’t need to be told that Shane was brilliant. They had his paperwork there as proof. They talked about how carefully he followed instructions. They talked about his high test scores, his good behavior, and his advanced-level thinking.
The reading resource specialist spent the entire meeting reading Shane’s journal, raving about its contents. “His writing is superb!” she said. “If only all the students could write like this!” She gushed over his writing until even I felt silly for holding that meeting.
But then I think about that crazily assembled envelope again, about him tossing the light bulb across the room. And I remember the many times I asked Shane something incredibly simple, but he had absolutely no idea what I was saying – and he tried so desperately to understand what I said.
And I wonder: how long before Shane’s problem affects his school work? Will it happen in middle school? Is it getting worse or better? Is he really going to outgrow something that feels so much like a part of his personality?
I wonder how much of my concern stems from Dylan, with his classic ADHD, his GT/LD profile, his extremely rare reactive airways disease and rocky mountain spotted fever. I think about how Dylan’s handwriting issues were so severe, Shane almost didn’t even get diagnosed with vision processing disorder because he wasn’t as bad as Dylan.
And then I wonder if Dylan has vision processing disorder, and not ADHD at all.
Then I think about my friend whose grown son was just diagnosed – at age 29 – with high-functioning Asperger’s Syndrome. Is it possible that all the times I took the Asperger’s quizzes online, the results just didn’t pick up Shane’s specific variation of Asperger’s?
What if he has something that hasn’t been defined yet? What if he suffers alone for decades, just because nobody knows why he can’t put an envelope together the right way?
Or what if his problem emerges as something physical, much later in life?
And what if there’s nothing wrong with him at all?
Some of Shane’s friends are at camp, so he wrote them letters. He likes to write; they like to get letters. It’s a win-win situation.
But then there’s the envelope.
Shane is 11 and has never addressed an envelope. Since Dylan is my first child, I taught him when he was 3 how to address an envelope and where to put the stamp and return address. But I figured Shane would just pick it up along the way.
He did not.
So I showed Shane a You Tube video, to peak his interest. Then I told him where to find the blank envelopes, return address labels and stamps, and left him alone with the instructions that if he did the stickers and stamps, I would write in the camp addresses.
When I came back, I found two envelopes on the table. They’d been flipped over, so that everything was stuck to the back of the envelope, with the open flap. The return address labels were in the upper right corner of the back of the envelope. And there were some flag stickers (not stamps) in the upper left corner of the back of the envelope.
While this was frustrating, I figured he just needed a little help, so I took his envelope to him and said, “Does this look right to you?”
He started to say yes – but then he looked, and realized he’d done the stickers backwards. Shane still didn’t notice that they were on the back of the envelope.
And that’s when I knew there was more to Shane’s vision processing disorder than just what he fixed through therapy.
When Shane was little, he couldn’t distinguish a lower-case ‘b’ from a ‘d.’ He wrote most of his numbers and letters backwards – but not always, and not always the same letters. He had tremendous difficulty reading because he wasn’t able to focus on the words. He’d rub his eyes, and strain, and try – but he just couldn’t do it.
Vision processing disorder meant that he could see fine – but he couldn’t properly translate what he saw to what he knew. But after his diagnosis and evaluation, and two years of twice-a-week therapy, he could read as well as anyone in his class.
Now his reading level is off the charts. He can’t spell – which is probably only partially attributed to vision processing disorder – but his writing and reading skills are exceptional.
But he can’t tell right from left, or back from front, on an envelope.
There have been other things, too – odd things, that just didn’t seem right. Shane is far from stupid, but I often find myself saying, “You need to actually use your brain.” And I am realizing, right here and now, that something is still going on in there, something that is making simple things difficult.
I just don’t know what it is.
