We went out for ice cream.
A teenage boy stood behind the walk-up window. “May I help you?” he said, without enthusiasm.
“I’d like a cup of chocolate raspberry truffle with hot fudge,” I said. (This was before I started dieting again.)
“Okay,” said the boy. “Um, what size did you want?”
“The smallest one you have,” I said. (I was considering dieting soon.)
“Okay,” he said. He held up a cup. “Is this one okay?”
“Perfect,” I said.
“Okay,” the boy said. “What did you want again?”
“Chocolate raspberry truffle,” I said. “With hot fudge.”
“So chocolate raspberry,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
He went away. He came back.
“And what did you want on this?” he asked.
“Hot fudge,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. He went away again.
He came back. Some hot fudge had appeared.
“Do you want whipped cream?” he asked.
“Okay,” I said.
“You do want whipped cream?”
“Sure,” I said.
He went away. He came back.
He handed me my ice cream, with whipped cream. He even remembered a spoon.
“Thank you,” I said. Then I turned to Dylan, who was next in line. “Go ahead,” I said.
“May I help you?” said the boy behind the window.
“Yeah, I want one scoop of s’mores and one scoop of graham cracker,” Dylan said.
“Okay,” said the boy. “You want one scoop of …?”
“One scoop of s’mores and one of graham cracker,” Dylan said. “And can I get hot fudge on that?”
“So one scoop of s’mores?” the boy asked.
“Yeah,” said Dylan.
The boy went away. He came back with one scoop of s’mores in a cup.
“And what else did you want?” the teenager asked.
“Graham cracker,” said Dylan.
The boy went away.
Suddenly it hit me.
“He has ADHD!” I nearly shrieked to Dylan. “This is just like talking to you!”
“No it’s not,” said Dylan, who hasn’t agreed with anything I’ve said in two years.
“It is!” I said. “Watch! This is just like talking to you!”
“No,” Dylan said. “He’s just getting my ice cream.”
“But watch!” I said. “He has to ask you twice about every single thing!”
The boy came back. “What did you want on that?” the boy asked.
“Just some hot fudge,” Dylan said.
“Hot fudge?”
“Yeah.” The teenager went away again.
Dylan didn’t seem the least bit bothered by this. To him, it was completely normal.
When something is too painful to write about, I would rather write nothing at all. And when tragedy strikes, especially when it happens to one of your dear neighbors, the pain can be immobilizing.
This is my moment of silence for a boy who died this weekend – many, many, many years too soon.
Shane announced one day that I was lying in my blog. He had, apparently, taken some time to read it.
“I do care about college,” he said – with the same enthusiasm that one might use to announce that he likes pepperoni.
I had no idea what he was talking about, but I had never heard this sentiment before.
“You do care about college?” I asked him, incredulous. Then I realized: “That’s wonderful!” I shrieked, gave him a hug and started jumping up and down.
“Mom,” he said, but he smiled.
“Let’s dance! Let’s do a jig! You care about college!” I continued bouncing and jigging, grabbing Shane’s hands to do a bit of disco. He so rarely expresses any kind of interest.
When the moment ended, Shane said, “Yes, I care about college. Why do you think I got all those A’s?”
Shane’s second quarter report card had six A’s and one B. He started his high school transcript with two A’s – no small feat, and a spectacular accomplishment.
“And,” he told me, “I don’t even know what website you’re talking about, so I don’t care about an asterisk.”
He showed me the page on my blog that was “lying.”
“He wants straight A’s, but not because he cares about college. He wants straight A’s because he would get a little asterisk next to his name on the local “Honor Roll” website.”
“I didn’t know you cared, really,” I told him.
Shane and I had spoken late in the fall about how important his grades would be when he was trying to get into college. We talked about grade trending and hard work and studying and scholarships. It wasn’t a long talk; he’s only in 7th grade.
But Shane remembered it, and took it to heart. He never mentioned it again, but he cared enough to get his grades up. In fact, his name went up (with several other names) on the 7th grade bulletin board at school.
The category was “Most Improved.” Shane raised at least three letter grades from mid-quarter to the end of the quarter, and – the board said – he increased his GPA 0.43-0.53 points.
He didn’t know his name was on that bulletin board until his friend saw it. She told her mom, and her mom told me, and I told Shane. Then Shane and I went looking for it. Neither of us even knew there was a board!
It’s sad, when you have a great accomplishment and you don’t even know it. It’s sadder still when a mom doesn’t recognize that her son made a real, conscious effort to change – and succeeded.
But Shane knew he could get those A’s – and he knew it was important. And he wanted me to know that he understood the importance of grades and college.
So I am correcting my blog accordingly, by posting this.
And I am feeling so, so incredibly proud of Shane.
Five days a week, before he does anything upstairs (including locking himself in his room, playing keyboard for five hours, or Face-timing his friends), Dylan is required to do 1.5 hours of school work, supervised and downstairs in the office – so that we can actually see that he’s working.
Because of previous arguments over how long he actually works, we’ve started setting a timer to discern the time limit.
Every day goes something like this:
(Dylan is upstairs.)
“Dylan! You aren’t allowed to be upstairs until your work is done!”
“I’m just doing one thing! Geez!”
“Do your one thing downstairs! I am sitting here waiting for you to start working!”
“I’m coming! I can’t believe you still expect me to find an hour-and-a-half’s worth of things to do!” (Dylan storms downstairs and starts tossing things out of his backpack.) “I don’t know how you expect me to do, like, all this stuff when I literally have absolutely nothing that I can possibly do!”
“I got an email from your teacher today, who says you are missing three things. Did you get that email?”
“Yes, and I already did it! I turned all that stuff in at school. I literally do all of my homework at school, and have absolutely nothing I can work on for a whole hour and a half!” (He sets up his laptop on the desk in the office.) “And this mouse totally won’t work, ever! I can’t get it to do anything! It doesn’t matter if I use the wire or if … well, now it’s working.”
There’s a moment of silence while Dylan looks at something on the computer.
“But seriously, I literally have nothing to do! Not one single thing! This is all stuff I already did. I just have to turn it in!”
“You can study for the SATs,” I say. “Or do some Spanish quizzes online.” (I motion to the list of web links I’ve left, in case he actually, ever, has nothing to do.)
“Like those would even help,” Dylan mumbles. He turns on music. This is usually the most obnoxious, growling, slash metal music in the world. He starts scrolling through his assignment possibilities on the computer, singing to the awfulness.
Sometimes he takes a break, gets a snack. We stop the timer, then start it up again.
I have to sit with him and supervise, or he chats with friends. The 1.5-hour block takes about three hours to complete.
But when I look over, he’s got six blank pieces of paper in front of him, something halfway written on the computer screen, and he’s diligently writing on both the papers and the computer. He’s tossing a tennis ball from hand to hand, while one hand holds a pencil and pauses occasionally to write on a piece of paper. His lanky body is usually sprawled half on the desk, half on the floor.
He does his work in a rather unorthodox way – a way that helps me to remember why school is so challenging for him.
By the time the 1.5-hour shift is over, Dylan is sitting on the floor, or on the bottom step of a kneeling chair, with his giant foot on the desk. He’s been singing nonstop – while working, even while writing. His laptop is sometimes tilted so far to one side, it’s nearly vertical. A fidget toy or a tennis ball is always nearby, or he’s completely revamped a paper clip so that it’s become a fidget toy. Dylan practically stands on his head, while lying on the ground, to finish his work.
But it’s finished.
In addition to having ADHD, Dylan has a rare disorder called Reactive Airways Disease.
It’s much less harmful than it sounds. It means that, for most of his young life, when Dylan got a cold, he did not get a runny nose like the rest of the kids. Instead, he was plagued with a cough that wouldn’t go away.
The “disease” is so rare that most doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with Dylan. We started trying to figure out the problem when he was only a toddler.
He would start coughing at night – and he would cough, hard, all night long. It went on for hours and hours and hours, and he was so little. I was afraid he was damaging his lungs, or his throat, or both – or more.
Not only did he cough all night, though, he coughed for six months. He started in mid-autumn and coughed straight through until spring, every single night.
“It looks like allergies,” the doctor said. “Since he’s so young, let’s skip the painful allergy tests. Let’s give him a dose of allergy medication and see if it helps.”
Oddly, allergy medication did help. Sort of. Sometimes. Looking back, I have no idea why it we kept him on it.
When I took him off the allergy medication – after two years – Dylan seemed more agitated, less able to sit still.
The allergy medication had been sedating his ADHD behavior!
But we didn’t know he had ADHD yet. And we didn’t want him on medication when he didn’t actually have any allergies. So, since he was older, we had him tested for allergies and asthma. He tested negative for both.
I was actually the one who discovered the term “Reactive Airways Disease” on the internet, as Dylan coughed away at night. I took Dylan to see the doctor for the zillionth time. His pediatrician was out of the office and the substitute doctor – a woman I’d never met – said that she had Reactive Airways Disease, and she was pretty sure Dylan did, too.
They gave him an inhaler to be used at night when the cough started, and it miraculously stopped the cough before it went on for months. So we were sure that Dylan had Reactive Airways Disease.
Or at least … he did when he was younger.
As he got older, occasionally he would get a runny nose. It was very exciting at first, because Dylan seems to be outgrowing the disease that caused him so much havoc for so long.
Recently, when Dylan gets a cold, he sometimes gets a runny nose, just like the rest of us. And he doesn’t cough through the night anymore.
But one day, he woke up with chest pain. It hurt when he took deep breaths. He looked fine, and it was morning, so I told him to go on with his day. Then I called the doctor, just to be sure.
The office assistant answered my question. “Take him to the E.R.,” she said.
Dylan was just sitting with his phone, texting. He was fine. “The E.R.?!” I asked. “Why?”
“If he has chest pain and difficulty breathing, he needs to be seen right away.”
“It sounds worse than it is,” I said. “Why can’t I just bring him to you?”
“You can,” she said. “If his color is okay, and his breathing is okay, you can bring him to us.” So I did. Dylan got a thorough check-up.
The doctor, who knew Dylan has reactive airways disease, said, “He’s probably coming down with a cold.”
Sure enough, it was just a cold.
I left my children for a week.
Many parents find this time to be “restful” and “fun.” I found it to be anxiety-provoking and challenging. This doesn’t mean I had a bad time on my week-long excursion into the Virgin Islands. It just means I felt like I was doing the entire trip while missing a limb, or something like that.
Leaving the kids means leaving a part of me. It shouldn’t be that way; I know this, because every book I’ve read says that I should have a strong, solid life outside of raising my kids. So I do things – work, play ball, go places with my dog – but having a week away from the kids assured me that I do not do enough away from them.
I can’t count the number of times I thought, “I should work more when I get home.” I was thinking about substitute teaching, and how much more interesting my life has become since I started spending a day or two, every week, teaching a class – or several classes – full of curious elementary school kids. I like being there with them, doing things for them, being a “good sub,” as Shane calls it, and making some new friends. I’ve also learned a lot – about popcorn, and history, and people.
So I came home from my vacation and signed up for an additional four days of substitute teaching. I’m trying two new schools and a special education class, just to be bold.
But it is a life outside of my own kids, and one that I desperately need. Kicking around in foreign sands taught me that things can be incredibly beautiful and exciting on the outside, and my head would still be spinning around missing algebra assignments and course choices and extracurricular middle school activities. I even planned to attend an outdoor track meeting for parents – for a track team that Shane can’t join for another two years.
I have, since, decided to wait on the track meeting.
It worries me that, in a few short years, Dylan – my 24-hour-a-day job – will be doing something other than high school, and that I will be somewhat less necessary to him.
Today, though, thankfully, he wanted me to make his breakfast and lunch for him. And Shane enjoyed the same treatment.
So today, I am still needed here.
My faithful readers are probably rushing to their computers, desperate to find out if Dylan survived the first half of 10th grade, so I won’t keep the three of you in suspense.
Dylan survived. He did not fail the first half of 10th grade.
Somehow he pulled himself barely out of the gutter. He did work night and day for a few weeks to do it, and he did it. We think he had no failing grades, although we won’t know for sure until tomorrow, so I’ll alert the presses if it changes.
This is not a victory; it’s more of a “pass-fail” success.
Although the online system is not updated yet, we think he eked out two D’s instead of failures, along with a host of C’s and even a couple of B’s. This means he gets to keep his extracurricular schedule, including being Willy Wonka in the play. He also “gets” to stay in Ski Club, for which his parents paid hundreds of dollars.
This is a victory for his social life, but I hope he realizes how close he was to losing those things.
Dylan still had many, many missing assignments that will never be done. He simply didn’t do the work that was required of him, and he surely didn’t turn it in on time. For the past month, he’s been extremely stressed out, nearly unable to function under the workload that he created himself.
I’ve noticed with Dylan that, for most of the time, he is utterly panicked about the workload – so much so that he can’t do anything other than panic – instead of just doing the work. If he would do the work instead of worrying about how much work he has to do, his whole world would run smoothly. But he procrastinates, then panics, then struggles to catch up.
This quarter was substantially worse than any that has come before. Dylan missed three days of school because he was sick and, when he finally decided to buckle down, it was simply too late. A lot of his assignments got only half credit, and some remained “zero points” for the entire quarter.
I do not consider this a victory.
Dylan didn’t change his study habits, prioritize his homework, and act responsibly so that he could get good grades. Instead, he did the same thing he always does: change none of his behaviors until the end of the quarter, then pull out a miracle based solely on determination and luck.
Somehow, he’s come out with relatively reasonable semester grades, which will go on his transcript for college. I don’t know exactly what they are yet, but he won’t have anything less than a C. The majority of his semester grades will be B’s.
Still, this is not a victory.
This is merely a chance for an awakening.
Two. Days. Left.
Shane has two B’s and is retaking quizzes and tests, in science and algebra, to bring up his grades by the end of the day on Thursday.
I don’t care about science. Algebra goes onto his college transcript. I care about that.
Shane doesn’t really care about either one, but he does whatever his teachers or I ask him to do.
He wants straight A’s, but not because he cares about college. He wants straight A’s because he would get a little asterisk next to his name on the local “Honor Roll” website.
Perception is everything.
Meanwhile, Dylan is running on about four hours of sleep per day. He has so many zeros and missing assignments, he can no longer take a minute off. He’s been working hours and hours – even into the wee hours of Shane’s birthday. Then he’s getting up and going to school an hour early, to get things done before the day kicks into full gear.
He works through lunch. Every. Single. Day. He hasn’t had a free lunch period in a month.
On days when he doesn’t have play practice, he’s staying after school and working with his case manager to catch up. Then he comes home from school and, as is now required by his parents, spends an hour and a half sitting in the office with his laptop, under his parents’ watchful eye.
This is a new requirement, which will continue for the rest of his sophomore year. If it works, he might actually be caught up, instead of spending a month catching up.
Then, when Dylan is done with his hour and a half, sometimes he works for a few more hours.
As he is doing all the work he missed, more work is coming due. Some of it he knows about. Some of it, he doesn’t.
If he gets less than a 2.0, or he has an “E” (failing grade) on his report card, he will no longer be Willy Wonka in the play about Willy Wonka.
I am holding my breath until the quarter ends.
Dylan thinks he will have a 3.29 and that a “C” will be his lowest grade.
Perception is everything.
Shane has always been bright. He has a great imagination, and sometimes he thinks so far out of the box that it is difficult to understand him.
I found a video in the archives of Shane on his 5th birthday. He was talking about a place with a skeleton – not a place I recall – and how he wished “that it was all connected.” I have no idea what was supposed to be connected, or where the skeleton may have been. Even as the videographer then, my ignorance is obvious.
I’ve tried my best.
Shane’s oddball thoughts aren’t actually that odd, if he gets a chance to explain. They’re usually rooted in something imaginative, and then sometimes go off into the clouds and come back with magical powers.
For example, Shane might make a comment about someone’s clothing being triangular, or riding a blue whale, or hallucinating a genie standing on the side of the road. What makes these comments unusual is his conviction in them, his ability to make images so real that he can’t remember if he created them when he was awake or asleep. He just sees the world from a different angle than most people.
Over the years, somewhat surprisingly, I have discovered that Shane and I think out of the box in the same way. Or else we think in our own kind of box.
It’s been wonderful having an advocate in the family, given that there are two guys with ADHD who don’t stop long enough to consider the philosophical implications of a water slide from the moon. It’s also been wonderful to learn that I’m not the only one who thinks slightly off kilter.
When I was young, I believed I was the only one who saw the world from this kind of skewed perspective. I felt very alone. I often spent my time alone. I didn’t think that anyone understood me.
In fact, I’m pretty sure I am still often misunderstood.
Through Shane, as I’ve watched him grow, I have learned that I am not as bad as I thought I was. In fact, I have learned that being weird – even though some folks don’t understand – it’s just another way of being beautiful.
Shane is bright, imaginative, creative, funny, gorgeous, bizarre, witty, and spectacular. Today Shane turns 13.
Thanks to Shane, among other good fortunes, these have been the best 13 years of my life.
Happy birthday, Baby Boy. You are as spectacular a teenager as you were a spectacular child.
Public schools are closed today for Inauguration Day. So when I woke up this morning, I did so leisurely. The kids were still sleeping, and I rolled over half-heartedly remembering my dream of owning a pet ostrich.
Then I heard a noise. It was a rumbling, maybe a roaring noise, that I couldn’t identify.
It’s a bomb, I thought, without filtering my panic. It’s Inauguration Day and someone is already bombing us.
My eyes popped open. It’s Inauguration Day. The noise was just an abnormally loud plane. But that didn’t quell the fear.
Living just outside of Washington, D.C. is suddenly unnerving. Like most Americans, September 11, 2001 was an eye-opening, terrifying experience. Like anyone who remembers that day, we went from free to permanently terrified in minutes.
In this area, 9/11 was followed in 2002 by a sniper attack that ravaged the area for more than a month. With my toddler, I hunkered down in my house, afraid to walk out of my own front door.
Today feels like that. I am, once again, afraid to walk out of my own front door. I’m afraid that something will happen during the inauguration. I’m afraid that something will happen during the protests and marches that are scheduled all over the country. I’m afraid that China will believe this moronic character has actual power, and the bombs will be flying before summer. I’m afraid that the Russians will get angry at something he says and disperse nuclear weapons everywhere. I’m afraid that, no matter which country gets angry, my boys will end up either dead from an attack on Washington, D.C. or dead in a military uniform after a reinstated draft.
I am not simply scared. I am terrified.
The root of the word “terrify” is the Latin term, “terrificus.” “Terrificus” is also the root word for the word “terrific.” And terrific, contrary to popular belief, doesn’t mean “good.” It means “of great size, amount or intensity” – in which case, having this particular person in office is certainly something “of great intensity.”
So I try to skew my thinking to something “terrific” – something that, somehow, will be survivable for the next four years.
I’ve imagined that we could somehow get through these four years unscathed. I’ve put faith in our incredibly slow government, in all its bureaucracy, in things that take forever to get done. I’ve put faith in the idiocy I’ve seen for my entire adult life – and prayed that our country won’t be completely demolished in these next four years. I’ve imagined that, in two years, we’ll have a more even-keeled government, since there is another vote for Senators and Congressmen in 2018.
I’ve tried not to depend on an insane person assassinating our President. But it does repeatedly cross my mind.
Mostly, I have tried to ignore everything going on around me, so that I can stop the waves of nausea from settling in my stomach permanently, so that I can keep my little corner of the world happy, so that I can hang on with a death grip to the belief that people are good … people are good … people are good. I want to believe that this will not be the end of the world.
I stick my head in the sand. I am like an ostrich.
Like the pet I adopted last night, in my dream.
But … ostriches don’t stick their heads in the sand to hide. They bury their eggs, then turn them regularly. While they’re turning the eggs, their heads appear to be buried.
They’re just caring for their babies – which is, quite honestly, all I want to do.
