The whole world has been sick. It started in the fall, ran straight through the winter, and has continued into spring.
There wasn’t a lot of snow in our area, but the emergency rooms, clinics, and doctors’ offices were filled with people. Most people had a long-lasting virus that simply wouldn’t go away, even though they rested and did their best to stay home.
I was sick for weeks. I missed the entire Christmas holiday, all the way through New Year’s Eve – and still canceled work during the first two weeks of January. I felt like I would never recover. Two months after the onset, I realized I hadn’t coughed that day – for the first time in 60 days.
A month later, Bill had a fever and slept for days. Bill is the kind of person who doesn’t sit down unless it’s time to go to bed, so watching him sleep for three or four days was daunting. He still has a residual cough.
Shane and Dylan were both sick around Thanksgiving. Shane got one thing, then Dylan got another thing. Then Dylan got what Shane had, and Shane got what Dylan had.
For three months, someone was on the couch with a juice cup nearby.
But when play practice started, the boys were ready to go… until Shane got sick during the last week of play practice. His fever lasted for four days. It had barely broken when he climbed back up onto that stage, just in time for the show.
No one had pneumonia. No one had bronchitis. We all just had a flu with a fever and a cough that wouldn’t go away.
But Dylan made it through the play without getting sick. He survived weeks of rehearsal with only a small cold. He did an awesome job in all four performances, singing 11 songs and delivering a gazillion lines. He stood and smiled and shone.
Then he got to the end of the quarter – this week – and worked on all the things he could do to “catch up.” He talked to teachers, worked diligently on projects online, worked through lunches, finished tests after school, and did his 1.5-hour homework shifts every night. The quarter ends tomorrow, and he’s done a decent job.
He made it. Without getting sick, he survived the whole quarter, never missed a rehearsal, and sang like a star during all four spring musical performances.
Today, Dylan woke up with a fever.
After a glorious weekend of stardom, Dylan’s life has returned to normal today.
The end of the quarter is upon us and – just last week, during all of those dress rehearsals – three of his grades have dropped to C’s. To make matters worse, I inadvertently had him re-do an assignment that, I thought, would help him bring his grade up – but his teacher and I had some miscommunication about that. Dylan wasted an hour re-doing something that can’t get a new grade.
I’ve emailed his teachers and his case manager about homework assignments that, for whatever reason, simply never surfaced. I’ve had to explain the purpose of the signature sheet, which Dylan has been using quite regularly and has gotten signatures galore. But the teachers have only been focused on what’s due the next day – not on what’s due when he’s standing right in front of them. (Silly teachers; they think he knows what’s due, since it’s written down on the sheet he’s holding!)
I can’t tell you the number of times that, this weekend particularly, I thought about Dylan’s future. Most people who major in music end up as music teachers. I know this. But listening to Dylan sing, and knowing that he would be a pretty non-traditional teacher (to put it mildly), I can’t help but think that maybe he’s actually going to end up doing what he loves.
I don’t necessarily believe that Dylan will be a performer, although I wouldn’t rule it out. But I believe he can work in the music industry, in some capacity, and be incredibly happy with his job.
And I think he can be happy with his life.
School is Dylan’s albatross. Since first grade, he’s had to shoulder this great burden, just because it’s the law. He may have been happier if he’d been homeschooled. He may have been more fulfilled in a Montessori program. But I didn’t think I could provide him with the education he’s getting now, and we couldn’t afford the Montessori schools around here – so here he is, in public school, chugging along with his ADHD and all that comes with teen life.
And in spite of it all, in two days, he may end up on the honor roll again.
We shall see.
Dylan is playing Willy Wonka in Willy Wonka.
This means that he opens the show, sings a gazillion times, and helps close out the show, too.
We saw the show last night – opening night.
Let me backtrack for just … one … moment. Dylan has a few problems in school. He doesn’t sit still in class, and he is often doing something that he shouldn’t be doing, instead of doing what he should be doing. He sometimes remembers he has homework, and sometimes he does it. But he rarely turns it in. He’s incredibly intelligent, but there’s a lot of talk about potential and expectations when discussing Dylan’s school work.
Dylan can be a bit … um … challenging.
But he has the voice of an angel. When he sings, I vacillate between melting into a puddle and sobbing uncontrollably.
And in Willy Wonka, Dylan sings a lot. So I spent a lot of opening night in tears, then melting, and then crying again.
I am so proud to be the mother of this incredibly talented singer.
Interestingly, Dylan – who can’t remember to turn in his homework, or do whatever I just asked him to do – had absolutely no trouble rattling off about 117 perfectly timed lines, without missing so much as a word.
I do wonder about ADHD.
Long ago, I heard that babies and toddlers are born with those big, beautiful eyes – so that their frustrated parents won’t kill them.
I’m fairly certain that God has given Dylan this gift for a reason, too.
Thanks, God.
Last night, I went to bed last. I was up an hour after everyone else, doing important stuff like calculating Dylan’s possible GPA with or without his various C grades.
When I woke up, I forfeited my shower in order to make breakfast for the boys. At some point, Bill showed up in the kitchen.
“You know that really nice alarm you got me?” he asked. “It stopped making sounds!” Bill was truly shocked. I was not. The alarm is at least a decade old, and has enough buttons on it that something should have broken once a month. I’m impressed that it lasted as long as it did.
I started making lunches. Dylan came screaming down the stairs a few minutes later, late as always and racing out the door to catch the bus. I anticipated this, and had wrapped his breakfast in foil to keep it warm.
But Bill, since he was home, volunteered to take Dylan to school. I was able to leisurely finish making his lunch, and sent them both off with all the right stuff.
I can take a shower, I thought, AND I can wash my hair! The previous day, I had spilled half a bag of pine nuts all over the pantry floor, and spent half an hour pulling pine nuts out of iced tea boxes, so I hadn’t had time to wash my hair.
I finished making Shane’s lunch and raced upstairs. I had to be at work in an hour.
I passed Shane on the steps.
“I left your breakfast on the counter,” I said, kissing him on the head. I didn’t want the dog to get it. “See you in 15 minutes!”
“Okay,” he said.
I hopped in the shower, so excited to have a moment to get something done for myself.
The water was lukewarm. I took a very fast shower and jumped out, shivering.
Then I raced downstairs with a towel on my head and printed out seven pages of algebra for Shane to study while he finished his breakfast. Shane seemed oblivious to the fact that he had a quarterly assessment in a few hours.
“You were supposed to do this yesterday!” I declared, throwing the pages next to his plate and running back up the stairs.
We were ready to go, surprisingly, on time.
All I had to do was drop off Shane, go home, cook and eat a couple of eggs, and get to work on time. (As a substitute teacher, I have absolutely no idea how parents do this stuff every day.)
On the way to school, Shane said, very simply, “Do you know what I hate about cliffhangers?”
Then he didn’t say anything at all. He just turned his head, and looked out the window.
I love my life.
When I was in high school, I wasn’t all that interested in colleges. I wanted to go to college, and I certainly thought college would be fun, but I never thought about the variety of colleges available to me, or their programs, or the differently sized populations, or what college would best prepare me for my future.
From the time I was in kindergarten, my dad worked at colleges. By the time I graduated from high school, he worked at one of the most prestigious colleges in the country. And by the time he retired, he had consulted at colleges all over the world.
I grew up on college campuses. To say that information about colleges was readily available to me would be a gross understatement.
But did I use that information? No. Not really. I cared very little about the things that really mattered.
For example, I remember getting a brochure in the mail – along with dozens, if not hundreds of other brochures – since that was how it was done back in “my day.” But this one really stood out to me. It was big and square and was shaped like a matchbook (because that’s also how it was done in “my day”) and each of the “matchsticks” represented a different aspect of college life at Capital University.
That’s how I decided that Capital University was the college for me! I was sure of it!
But it turned out that Capital University was in Columbus, Ohio – a full three hours from home. That sounded like a long drive, at the time. I was afraid I would get homesick and wouldn’t be able to get home if I needed a quick respite.
So I never even visited Capital University. But wow, that was one cool brochure.
I ended up at Mount Union University, also in Ohio. What sold me? Two major things: (1) They had a powder puff football team (on which I never played) and (2) Mount Union’s colors were purple and white.
I loved purple. Oh, and it was only two hours from home.
Today, my husband drives three hours every day during his commute.
And also today, I am looking at colleges worldwide … for my kids.
Dylan’s current top-runner is ten hours from home, and we’ve already visited. Shane wants to work on movies, so we may end up on the other side of the country during his college search. And we’ve already seen every college in the state that’s worth seeing – and some that aren’t – and in most of the neighboring states.
And I am loving it. I know more about colleges now than I ever did when I was a student. I know about their acceptance rates, program specialties, populations (by number, sex and racial diversity), professors, and mascots. Oh, and I know plenty about their music programs, student satisfaction rates, what the food is like on campus, and if there’s a lot of drug and/or alcohol use.
In fact, I know substantially more about some colleges that I’ve never even seen than I ever knew about my own college.
And Dylan knows almost nothing about colleges, even though he’s visited nearly a hundred campuses.
Nor does he care. If he were to get a really cool matchbook brochure from Capital University, he might not even open the envelope.
But I sure am having fun.
A tragic event happened at Dylan’s school last week: two males sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl in the boys’ bathroom. This horrific event could have happened anywhere, since there are criminals wherever there are people. But it happened during school hours, at MY son’s school.
Unfortunately, the news media appeared the next day.
But the “news” didn’t stop. The two males happened to be illegal immigrants, so Dylan’s school became a platform for a national stance against immigration. Then, in case that wasn’t sufficient to cause uproar, the media broadcasted that our school was receiving threatening phone calls – people (lovely people) threatening to shoot all the immigrants in the school.
During a week of media glory, the school responded with added police protection, calming statements and letters, a huge meeting to address parents’ concerns, visits by the superintendent of schools, and – I’m sure – many, many staff meetings: What can we do to make sure this doesn’t happen again?
There’s nothing they can do. There’s a full-time security presence and 105 security cameras installed throughout the school. It’s the smallest school in the county. We just can’t be everywhere, all the time.
Still, the parents’ email list caught fire. Everyone panicked. Is the school safe? How can we send our kids there? Why isn’t the principal doing more? Why didn’t they warn us about the threatening phone calls? What if there’s a bomb?
One parent said, to explain why she isn’t sending her son to school: The “high school appears to be under siege.”
It APPEARS that way.
This appearance was not caused by a sexual assault, or by the school itself. This appearance is completely thanks to the media. They have taken what once was a very strong, safe school, and turned it into a media circus. They broadcast the horrors of one event, discredited the safety of our school, turned us into an immigration platform and then announced that our school is being attacked.
And once the media latched on, so did the parents.
The assault could have happened at any other school, or a grocery store, or a movie theater, or any number of places where people are. People did this – two very unkind people. And people are everywhere.
But if the media has shown us nothing in the last several years, it’s that we have to be very, very, afraid. They focus only on bad news: death, destruction, crime. Fifty years ago, the media did stories about how much money was raised by a local car wash to help a needy family. Now the car wash is forgotten – and the needy family is spotlighted.
Bad things happen. It is a horrible fact of life. But the news isn’t broadcasting anything good, and the media absolutely glorifies crime. This is not reality! This is an appearance that the media creates to get higher ratings.
I’ve been to the high school. My son’s school is one of the absolute best schools in the area. It is filled with teenagers, so it can’t be perfect. But we have caring, vigilant staff. And right now, they are doing everything they can – even though perfection is impossible.
But FEAR gets ratings. That doesn’t mean we have to play into it, to hide out until the “danger” is gone. The danger was always there – will always be there, as long as there are people. The media just spotlights it.
If we tune out the media – even social media – we might see what’s really happening. We are all – passively and/or passionately – doing the absolute best we can.
After a rather spectacular two weeks, in which Dylan did everything that he was expected to do, consistently and responsibly – including his 1.5-hour study shifts and getting 30 signatures on a signature sheet that holds a total of 30 signatures – he decided to take a break this week.
That’s the only explanation I have.
He is back to complaining about his homework time, that he has nothing to do. Meanwhile, his online zeros have multiplied – especially in Spanish and Foundations of Technology, for no apparent reason. He’s stopped working in Foundations of Technology altogether, and has waited almost three weeks to finish a test in his government class.
“I really need a break,” he texted me, explaining why he couldn’t make up even one test at lunch time. He has play practice after school every day except one – and he said he plans to take the test that day.
His teacher, however, won’t be available that day after school. His case manager, too, won’t be available that day.
It never occurred to Dylan to check their schedules. Dylan just assumed that, since he was available, everyone would be sitting on pins and needles waiting for him to show up and take the test.
They were not.
Luckily, he has me: the mom, the secretary, the scheduler who thinks of such things.
The teacher emailed me about the test, and I got started fixing the problem – with no help from Dylan. He will be taking the test that day, with supervision, thanks only to his case manager, who arranged the whole thing after my prodding.
Dylan’s case manager has saved him more times than he can count – and he doesn’t even know it. I spent a good hour of my day on making this happen, and I’m sure it’s nothing compared to what she did for him.
So now, we’ll see if he remembers to show up and finish that test after school.
It will probably take him five minutes.
Shane came home from school and told us that a friend of his “tested” everyone at lunch.
“Tested you for what?” I asked.
“It was a big word,” he said. “I don’t remember what it’s called. But I was the only one who had it.”
Shane looked a little concerned.
“What was the test?” I asked, suddenly feeling a little concerned myself.
“Well, he asked everybody if they could name colors with letters,” he said. “Like the letter ‘A’ is green, ‘B’ is blue, ‘C’ is red….” Shane listed a dozen letters and their respective colors.
My jaw dropped. I needed to know. “You see colors when you think about letters?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But I was the only one who could do it!”
I read a book a few years ago – a fascinating book called Born on a Blue Day. The man saw the days of the week as colors, and it so happened that the day he was born was a “blue” day in his mind.
It was written by Daniel Tammet – an autistic savant.
After some quick research, I discovered the word I was looking for: synesthesia. Neuroscience for Kids According to the website, “” (which is all the neuroscience I can handle):
Synesthesia can involve any of the senses. The most common form, colored letters and numbers, occurs when someone always sees a certain color in response to a certain letter of the alphabet or number. For example, a synesthete (a person with synesthesia) might see the word “plane” as mint green or the number “4” as dark brown.
I read Born on a Blue Day because ADHD is on the autism scale, and I thought I might get clues into the way Dylan’s brain works.
But I remember thinking that Shane had some things in common with the author, too. In fact, when Shane was younger, I took several online quizzes to see if he might have Asperger’s Syndrome – and at least one of those quizzes was triggered by my reading that book.
Synesthesia is, in fact, associated with various forms of autism. The study samples have been small (200 adults) but the results have been conclusive: this condition is found more often in people diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders. (In England, apparently, “synesthesia” is spelled with an extra “a.”)
The study found one in five adults with autism spectrum conditions – a range of related developmental disorders, including autism and Asperger’s syndrome – had synaesthesia compared with about 7% of people with no signs of the disorders.
Like the study I found about Dylan’s brain years before a larger study confirmed it, these results aren’t making the “big” U.S. headlines – yet. This study is at least three years old – but it’s not quite trendy or interesting enough yet to warrant further studies. Or maybe it’s warranted further studies, but we haven’t gotten the results yet. These studies take an absurd amount of time in our bureaucratic system.
I am testing Shane for synesthesia nonetheless.
There are two weeks left in the third quarter, and an amazing thing has happened.
Some background on this amazing thing:
- When Dylan was in fourth grade, he was in four different math groups. He started in the highest level, because he obviously understood the concepts. But he never finished his work, and seemed a bit spaced out in class. So they kept moving him around, trying to find a place where he could succeed. He could not.
- When Dylan was in fifth grade, he had a teacher who let the kids move at their own pace, as long as they finished the work. They had a chart with star stickers, representing what they had done. Dylan excelled at this, and got a ton of stars. Since fifth grade, we’ve been wishing all math teachers would institute this system.
- When Dylan was in sixth grade, he was at the top of his class. He did so well, in fact, that we all agreed that he could skip the “review” class, Investigations Into Mathematics, and go directly into Algebra 1.
- When Dylan was in seventh grade, he had a teacher who constantly reprimanded him for not paying attention. We invited her to every IEP meeting, but she didn’t seem to understand that he has a biological issue. There were no charts with stars in this classroom. Dylan eeked out a C in Algebra 1, and the school recommended that he take it again for a higher grade.
- When Dylan was in eighth grade, he retook Algebra 1 with a kind teacher in a class with seven kids at private school. He got a B.
- When Dylan was in ninth grade, he took “regular” Geometry. Most of his friends had completed Honors Geometry in 8th grade, but we were afraid, given his math struggles, that he wouldn’t be able to keep up with the pace of Honors math classes. If he had turned in his work on time, he would have gotten an A in Geometry. But he didn’t, so he got a B.
- Dylan is now in tenth grade, taking “regular” Algebra 2. He started the year with a tutor, because we weren’t taking any chances. He barely saw the tutor, and still got a B for his first semester grade.
In other words, math has been a challenge for Dylan. So when I checked his grades online this week, I literally screamed.
“DYL! COME SEE THIS!”
Bill came running into the room. “What?”
“Not you,” I said. (“Dyl” and “Bill” sound very much alike, so this is a continuous problem in our house.) “But look at this!”
Bill started over to the computer.
Shane, too, wanted to know what was going on – almost enough to look up from his video game. “What?” Shane asked.
“Look at Dylan’s grade,” I said to both of them. “DYLAN!”
“WHAT!” he yelled back.
“COME HERE!”
He grumbled all the way down the stairs. Finally, Dylan arrived in the office, where I pointed dramatically at the computer screen.
“Look at this!” I squealed. “LOOK!” And he did.
“Yeah,” he said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. “I know.”
Dylan has an A in Algebra.
Dylan has been writing a paper for two weeks.
When he was tested in fourth grade, his processing speed was in the 9th percentile. Unlike his height, which has always been above the 75th percentile because he is very tall, his processing speed has always been very, very low.
This means that writing for two weeks is an insufficient amount of time for him to finish a 1,000- to 1,500-word paper.
The key word for Dylan – whether or not he knows it – is tool. For 15 years, we’ve offered him tools to speed up his processing speed. Fidget toys, including his brand new fidget cube, have been great – although rubber bands are equally successful. Chewing gum, mints, lollipops and hard candies are also great motivators for the brain to process.
Unfortunately for the public schools, the most successful tools for Dylan are music and movement. Restraining his movement actually makes his brain process more slowly.
Now that we have the 1.5-hour supervised shifts, I am always sitting next to him when he works.
The music never stops playing. Dylan never stops singing, except to drum on the table. He taps his foot, bangs on his knees, drums his fingers on the desk. He knows every word to every song, and I’ve never heard any of them before.
He sits on a kneeling chair, so he is leaning forward most of the time – or sprawled completely backwards. He sings and sings and sings.
He scrolls through whatever is on the computer screen in front of him. He scrolls up. He scrolls down. He tosses a ball at the wall. It bounces three, four times. He puts the ball down. He sings and sings. He never stops singing. He scrolls up again. He scrolls down again. He clicks out of the scrolling document and goes into the paper he is writing.
He types maybe six words. He sings and sings. He sings while he is typing. He stops typing and drums along with the music. He goes back into the scroll-able document. He sings and sings. His feet move constantly. He goes back to his paper – the 1,000-word document he’s been working on for two weeks – and he stares at it.
To me, he is doing absolutely nothing. He is just singing and staring. He is staring and singing. There can’t possibly be anything going on inside his brain.
I explode regularly. I try not to, but I can’t seem to control myself. It bursts out of me like a comical word balloon.
“What have you actually done?!” I spurt. “How could you possibly be getting anything done at all?”
He explodes back. “I have done ALL of THIS!” he says, waving his arms at the screen. He points to three very short paragraphs. I find it difficult to believe that they aren’t the same three paragraphs he showed me yesterday.
“You aren’t typing anything!” I say. “You can’t possibly type and sing at the same time, and you haven’t stopped singing for one second!”
He continues to sing. He types an entire sentence.
“See?” he said. “Now will you please get off my back!”
“What did you type?” I ask. If I were singing and typing, I would be typing the song lyrics.
He reads me the sentence, which is not a song lyric at all.
I am surprised. Again.
And again, I have to back off, and let him do it his way, even if it makes no sense to me at all.
