ups & downs

Watching a kids' show with a lot of pretty flowers.

P - I like that flower the best
(Me: he never comments on stuff like this! Wonderful!)
S - I would like it better if it was black and instead of a happy face it had a cross face.
(!)

Dismantling

I haven't posted for a while. There have been various upheavals of late, too varied, & too sensitive even for my diary here, my very public but totally unseen diary (apart from a few Rumanian on-line gamers, or some such).

But I found myself musing earlier in the day about the ongoing conundrum of how to advocate for my son for his next dozen or so years in the education system when he "appears" to be doing so well. How do I convince them not to wait for cracks in the plaster? We know where the weaknesses are, why not take them seriously now? It took me back to the ongoing difficulty of convincing people who have never had to go through the intense re-orientation that we went through, who have never stood for the first time in a room full of little boys as I did, and feel like they'd come home. How before that we, like the people we now deal with, thought that all was more or less Ok, despite how depleted caring for him left us. Maybe they blame us for worrying so much; I'm sure we blamed ourselves back then too.

So in short, they have not spent years un-learning many intuitive, unquestioned beliefs and practices associated with rearing children, because those practices do not work. The punishment I have put myself through for allowing so much TV, for using so many objects to break through melt-downs, the breaking down & limiting of my communications ... the list goes on, & it was not arrived at easily. And so we send him out into an education system that has no idea about any of this ...