I just don't know

Parents were invited into the classrooms this week to review the kids' work.  Today we looked through Secundo's workbooks, trying to make sense of what we saw there.  Not fragmented and aimless as his older brother's had been yesterday, but disturbing in many ways.  In one of the clearer exercises, he had to give examples of occurrences that would be chance, possible, likely or impossible.  His impossible example was that a giant bomb could be small.  Is this a deliberate undermining of the activity from a boy who is obsessed with weapons, or is the only way that he could grasp the point through his own private world of imaginary violence?

An example of something unlikely was having a knife pushed into him.  This was shocking to see. I asked him straight away if this had to do with an accident that had happened at home a few days earlier and was relieved that he said yes; at least I could relate this to something real.  I was in the kitchen, Primo was kneeling on the ground getting something from my bag, his father was standing next to him doing something else.  Our extremely demanding cat chose that moment to jump onto a bench upon which was a chopping board and a small sharp knife, not a place where I often prepare food, but it was a busy, crowded place on this day. The cat knocked the knife off so that it lodged tip-down into the floor inches away from Primo.  Both parents cried out as we saw it happen of course, but quickly switched to reassurance mode.  I thought Primo might carry it with him; I hadn't expected Secundo to, I admit, but there is was in front of me.  Should I have anticipated that more clearly?  Does he really feel so vulnerable in the world?  Or is this some kind of healthy processing of a moment of fright that I shouldn't really worry about?

What on earth am I doing?

We turned with relief to one long story he'd written.  It was a kind of sci-fi narrative that drew heavily on computer games.  From a cursory introduction, it quickly became a series of violent and destructive acts overlapping with each other, each attempting to be more extreme than the last.  There were few complete sentences, so the frenetic need (as I saw it) for relentless destruction tumbled out in fragmented thoughts and phrases, one not completed before the next spilled over it ...

The session finished with a performance.  He started having a physical fight with a boy who pushed into line next to him.  I could see he'd been wronged, but oh dear.  For the performance, I watched with a smile; he met my eyes, hesitated, then continued a little self-consciously but clearly proud, maintaining eye contact for most of the song.  This is not the first time he's done this, but I took it as a good sign, especially the recovery from the altercation he'd just had.  I remember acutely kinder concerts where he not only refused to participate, but became really agitated and disruptive whenever there were performances.  I felt like he was doing something today that much younger kids do, basking in his parents' attention.  It was that moment of hesitation, where I could see he was choosing between his old mode of deliberately messing things up, and being part of the activity, the way it was meant to be, that really reassured me.

I spend a lot of time clinging to advances like this.  There are others too; improved behaviour with other children, admitting to positive emotions (he used to feel compelled to say everything was terrible and nothing made him happy), and more. But I don't know how to weigh them up against the rest.

And Primo.  Yesterday we looked through his maths book; there was a statistical exercise.  The last question asked what method he used to calculate the results.  He wrote that he just guessed random numbers until he found one that fit.  I get the impression that that's how he gets by at school in general. He adores his friends, models himself on them, benefits from observing what they do and when.  He lives for breaktimes. He never talks about classwork.  After the devastating year I had with last year's teachers, I have not even tried to enage his current teacher.  He's flying blind, and so am I.

I can't shake the feeling of failure today.  At home, we feel like we've been successful parents if we can get through a weekend without a huge fight, successfully limit computer time, and manage some modest social interaction or catch up on an overdue task.  Walking into the classroom is a miserable reality check.

Found it!

Yesterday I wrote that I hadn't seen the usual physical changes that come with Primo's other developmental leaps.  Last night I went to his school concert. I went in numb; 4 previous concerts had left me feeling like an outsider to this process.  His parents can see the struggles he goes through, but as usual, for everyone else, it's just kids, it's fine ... This time our jaws literally dropped.  He was astounding.  He owned it.  The moves were coming from the inside, not from copying the child next to him half a beat behind.  And he was proud; he did say afterwards that when too many people told him how well he did he wanted to get away, but he sure got the point, felt the truth of it.

So the theory still holds!

More good news

A few weeks ago, I picked Primo up from school.  He saw the father of a friend, but the friend had been absent that day.  I reminded him that his friend's younger sister had started school this year, and the father must be there to pick her up.  He thought for a minute, then announced that he wanted to know where his friend had been.  He went back, asked the father (whom he does not know particularly well) that question, got the reason for the absence, and was satisfied.

That event stood out, really stood out.

Usually when Primo has developmental leaps, there are clear physical signs as well.  These periods of surging forward are generally preceded by difficult times where he is withdrawn and/or volatile.  That hasn't been quite so clear this time around, although he has been getting really high praise from the 2 sports coaches that he is involved with.  Maybe I just haven't been witnessing his gains so easily now that he's older; maybe they are not quite as clear.

However that may be, in the last 2 weeks or so, the quality of our interactions has become much richer and more sustained.  Passing, unsolicited comments are shared with me, much more eye contact from him, much more readiness from him to respond where I am accustomed to silence, much more striving on his part for joint attention, as if he's started to understand what it actually is to share a moment with someone.  It's intermittent, but he's really making an effort.

He lost his hat yesterday but told me he'd looked in lost property, that there was a box of hats and it wasn't in there.  An unusual amount of information freely volunteered to start with.  Today I went to double-check, and as I was turning to leave, saw a second box of hats tucked into a corner, and sure enough, his was there.  I brought it out to him and he did all the things you would expect; looked surprised, asked where I'd found it, looked confounded until I explained the second box, his face then finally resolving into a brief expression of closure, before turning back to the business of friends.

It was glorious!

Thinking back to my post yesterday; there are not many people to share these moments with, which is why I am happy to broadcast to the air.  I'm sure I read a version of the Midas myth when I was a child, where it was a housemaid who could not keep the secret of his ears and whispered it to a stream.  I know that's not the standard version, and secrecy is not he motivation here, but I can't shake the image.

Is it loneliness?

I've found my way to a remarkable book, The Boy Who Loved Windows by Patricia Stacey. When it was recommended to me, I was warned that many parents found the book emotionally overwhelming at times.  So I've been reading it with a sense of inevitable emotional breakdown, wondering exactly where, and why, my turn would come.

It has certainly been a compelling read. The little boy who is the subject of this book had fairly easily recognisable difficulties right from birth.  I make that point, because I have struggled painfully with the apparent invisibility of my own child's impairments, even though I recognise so many points of similarity, the main difference at times being in the degree rather than the type of challenge. I have wondered constantly as I read this book how I can make people understand that my own experience of motherhood to my oldest child is on the same paradigm as this woman's, if not as extreme, why it matters to have trodden this goat path instead of the developmental freeway, for parents and children alike.  And so I recognised so much of what this family went through.  A great many peaks and troughs resonated with me, but I guess I'm seasoned enough that they didn't overwhelm me.

My turn came, most unexpectedly, when Stacey describes a volunteer student who comes to work with her son.  Her gratitude to this young woman caused me to tear up.  Within pages, that helper, after her invaluable contributions, has to move on.  The struggle for assistance continues, and eventually, unexpectedly, the response to their pleas actually exceeds their expectations, when the public health system digs deep and not only increases the hours of the therapists they have, but adds a new one.  Tears progressed to full-scale crying. By the time her social worker has offered to come on Sundays with her teenage daughter as a kind of work experience project, I was a puddle.  There was nothing much left in me for the piece de resistance, when the family accepted organised offers of food, which, Stacey's narration makes clear, were inseparable from the care and generosity of the multitude of women who brought their home-cooked meals to her door.

This all hit me very hard.  Such a yearning for connection, help, and understanding. I've been desperate for it for so long that I'd stopped recognising it, until I saw it in someone else.

Something to think about.