Springtime in the House of Aspie

Just for giggles, y'all, I took a little trip down memory lane in the "Asperger's" category to see if I was somehow deluding myself.  (I delude myself on a fairly regular basis.)  But, no, I found it there in black and white:  Springtime makes my boy crazy.  Cra.  Zy.  I think it's a few things:

1. His allergies make him want to claw his own nose off.  He walks around in a sort of daze of itching and you can tell he's miserable and distracted all the time.
2. His winter haircut has grown out and the little hairs are tickling his ears and making him want to claw his own ears off.
3. Not only has the angle of light changed, but the hours of sunlight have, too.  I think they should give Aspie families a Daylight Savings Time exemption.  Or an island.  OMFC, an Aspie Island.  With, like, lots of bounce houses and bubble wrap and books about insects.  I totally need to buy an island.
4. He is so sick of school that he wants to barf on it.  (And, with the exception of last year, I am totally right there with him.)
5. His birthday comes with cool presents and candy.  And CAKE!!  And BALLOONS!!  And...MORE PRESENTS!!!

Anyway, suffice to say that I am gritting my teeth and groping my way through tantrum-choked mornings and loud car rides and a child so vague and spacey that the other day he honestly forgotten that I had put his medicine in his mouth THIRTY SECONDS beforehand.  Whew.

Also, can I just say that this school year is just over?  Honestly, just stick a fork in the NotHannah family, because we are done.  Doooone.  I fantasize every day about pulling Jeffrey out of school early and all of us spending our mornings peacefully toodling around in the yard or going on errands and NOT going back to the place where the legally binding interventions keep getting pushed aside, ignored, or modified without rhyme or reason.  I could go on and on about it, just fill up blogs with the asinine, careless, illegal mess that keeps happening, but I just...don't want to.

Like...when a teacher emails me and tells me that Jeffrey said something inappropriate in class and I ask him what it was and he says they were doing a Word Scramble (in Math/Science/Social Studies...but it's testing week, so whatever) of "April Showers" and there was a clue to "find the dirty word" (I'm assuming "showers," but seriously, isn't that inane?) and he found "ass" and said it out loud--I mean, I know it's WRONG to laugh my "ass" off over it, but that didn't stop me.  Are you seriously going to spend however long it takes you to type up this relation of evilness in my child and on the same day, NOT give him a schedule by which to organize his day?  Seriously?

I say this every year this time of year, and it finally occurs to me that I just need to suck it up and bite the bullet and do whatever else I need to do to get it through my skull, but public schools just don't seem to get Aspergers.  It's as if they look at my boy (and boys like him) and say, "Well, they SAY he has autism, but he's really smart and he can talk, so let's fling him to the wolves and hope for the best."  And then "best" is not really so much "best."  It's more like "pitifully not enough."  I get that the public schools have in their minds that we want to mainstream these kids and make them like everybody else, but I am finally at the point where I want to say, "WHY?"  Why do I want to mainstream my kid?  He isn't mainstream.  He is beautifully, weirdly, rainbowifically NOT swimming in the mainstream.  He did so well last year in his contained classroom, venturing out to do fun stuff with the mainstream kids.  He felt secure.  In place.

This year?  He has no friends.  He is constantly confused about what it is he's doing wrong.  (He shot a bird the other day at a girl.  He had no idea what he was doing.  The other kids made a big deal out of it and embarrassed and pleased him at the same time.  Where were the teachers?  Goodness knows.  Perhaps coming up with more phrases for Word Scrambles.)  The teachers and parapros and administration seem absolutely clueless as to how to handle him.  Shall I tell you about the AP who told Jeffrey he was breaking the law the other day by touching another child?

I'm just sick of it.  Sick.  Barfingly, tiredly, dragging my feetedly sick of it.  (Adverbs are my friends today.  Better than chugging vodka straight from the bottle, yes?)

I just did a quick read through again.  Every.  Year.  Every year I've felt this way except for the one year that Jeffrey was in an environment designed to bring out the best in him.  Why in the world the system chose to change that for him is beyond me.  But...

I almost can't even write this.  We're changing schools again.  We're pulling the plug on the disorganized, chaotic mess that Jeffrey's school was this year.  We're hoping that the school he's zoned for will work.  They have new procedures in place, better than when he was there.  He and River will be able to go to the same school. 

Can I say, "Blahblahblah?"  Because I am not only not hopeful anymore, I'm back to the "Keep on messing with my kid" place.  The place where I want to homeschool him.  Where I want to keep him away from the grudging guidance he gets in the public sector.

And I HATE being here on a beautiful Spring day when the bees are buzzing and the greening is happening and we should be skipping around being hopeful.  I'm tired of being here.  I want to be happy in the Spring.

And I'm not.  Springtime in the House of Aspie is blechy again and it pisses me off.

I'm Becoming a Wereferret

When I was a teacher, I used to hate to find a special ed kid on my roster.  It wasn't the kid, though, that made me groan.  I could handle the preferential seating needs, the talking out in class, the tics, the meds, the struggles through vocabulary words.

What drove me nuts were the parents.

GAWD at the special ed parents of my tenth and twelfth graders.  They were pushy.  They were never satisfied.  They acted like I didn't know what I was doing.  They expected me to fail and were on top of every single mistake I made.  I wanted to eat my own face so many times dealing with these parents...they were like rabid little ferrets biting at my ankles every time I turned around.

And now?

Now I'm a rabid ferret. A wereferret, if you will.

Or at least, I understand how one becomes a wereferret.  It has finally started to dawn on me that by the time a special ed student makes it to high school, the parents have become old hat at what's going to happen:

There's going to be a meeting.  The parents will say, "My kid needs X, Y, and Z.  He needs X, Y, and Z because of 1, 2, and 3.  Our experience--you know, the experience that comes with living with a child for, say, fourteen years--has been that if the kid doesn't get X, then 1 will come into play, which will make it impossible for Y to happen because of 2.  Don't get us started on what heinous, awful 3-type behavior will occur if you don't do Z.  DO Z!!  For the love of all that is holy, DOOOOOO ZZZZZZ."

The parents will produce the documentation, the recommendations, the helpful website links, the therapists' phone numbers.  They will smile and shake hands and talk about how they just know this school year is going to be a success.

And so, the teachers do Z.  At least, MOST of them do Z.  The PE teacher won't, because she can't figure out how to make it work in her class, but that's okay, because it's the last period of the day and if 3-type behavior happens, the kid can just go home early, right?

Most of the time Y gets done.  I mean, if it doesn't get done, of course the kid falls into the habits that are caused by 2, but the teachers can work around those.  And the other kids aren't really worried by them.  They just ignore the kid when he does weird stuff, but that's okay, because kids affected by 2 don't really always get along with other kids, anyway, so he's used to being ignored.

X is just so tedious, really.  Doing it every day is just so hard and if it gets forgotten every once in a while, it isn't really a big deal, because the kid is making good grades.  He passed his latest standardized test, didn't he?  Oh, and by the way, the school is going to use 1 as a way to get more funding.

Meanwhile, the parents are at home, listening to their kid talk about how he can't make friends or find his homework list or understand a concept in math or concentrate on what his teachers are saying.  He comes home with wrinkled papers (if he comes home with papers at all.)  He THINKS he has a test on Wednesday, but he isn't sure.  And so the parents email the teacher and they ask about the isolation and the list and math class and his organizational strategies and THE TEACHERS DON'T WRITE BACK.  They don't write back because they are exhausted by teaching the other kids who don't have 1, 2, or 3 and who don't need X, Y, and Z.  They are worn out from dealing with the kids who have 6, 8, and 32 and who need a strange combination of P and lower case J.  They have children at home or a party to go to or a class to take after work and, frankly, they don't really care that for the last ten years, the kid's parents have been writing unanswered emails because teachers have not done X, Y, and Z.  

I know that they don't care, because there were plenty of times that I didn't respond to the emails.  Or I responded to them a day or two later.  Or I responded to them with a lofty, icy tone.  After all, I had been teaching for FOUR years, so surely to every god in the pantheon I knew what I was doing better than a kid's parent.  I would go over those emails with a heavy dose of snark with my friends, outlining the several ways that the kid in question was an ass or an idiot or just so dang difficult.  And the mothers?   They were simply RUINING their children with their over-parenting.  Those kids would be so lucky to graduate and get away from them.  What, did they have nothing better to do with their days than write lengthy emails about how their little shmoopy just couldn't find his English paper?

This dang petard I just got hoisted up by chaffs, y'all.

To the parents of the special ed kids I taught:  I'm sorry I was an ass.  You were asses, too, but I understand  why now.  There was no reason for you to expect that I would do the job you paid me to do, and all too often, I didn't do it.  You were right to call me on it, and I hope your kid did well despite me being an ass. 

To the teachers of the special ed kids who work so hard to do it right:  bless you.  I know how hard it is and the fact that you do it right despite being emailed and called and hounded by frightened wereferrets is a testament to your awesomeness.

To all my fellow wereferrets:  keep up the good fight.  Write those emails, make those phone calls, bite every damn ankle you have to for your kids.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go write an email and find some ointment for my petard rash.

Here's who I'll be writing emails for:

Lest you think he's too angelic: