Virginia Arcastle
The lighting in the girls’ restroom ceased. There were no footsteps, no click of a switch, no flicker as if the power had failed. No window to let in the light. Just darkness.
Abby sat perched on the toilet seat, gripping the rails. The terror on her face etched into the darkness. Sitting on the toilet was a challenge for Abby—her balance, or lack of it, a direct result of cerebral palsy. For her, to perch on a toilet seat meant the synchronization of many muscles determined not to coordinate. With no light to give her visual cues, the task was doubly difficult. Abby could only hope that the lights would be restored. She attempted to call out to her attendant, but speech did not come easily when fear had contracted every muscle in her body.
Kristen kept a steady pace, a straight face, held her head high, and smiled as she strolled past the opening to the girls’ restroom. She headed back to the fourth-grade classroom where she and Abby both belonged. She had smoothly extended her hand and, with one coordinated movement, flipped off the switch. She was proud of her stealth. There had been no whoosh of fabric, no squeal of a rubber sole. Ten seconds later, she slid into her seat in the classroom with an attentive look on her face and a smile that told the teacher that Kristen was back and ready to learn.
Diane, Abby’s personal attendant, returned to the restroom to find a cavern of darkness and a panic-stricken Abby. Instantly, she knew what had happened. It was not the first time that this had occurred. The last time, Kristen’s excuse had been, “Oh, I didn’t know anyone was in there,” and before that it was, “Oops, I slipped.” Diane knew that today it would be complete denial and, in truth, no one had any proof that Kristen was responsible for the incident.
Angry voices rose from the office as the paperwork was completed. Kristen was called into the office, interrogated, and assigned to in-school suspension, one of many for her. Diane was instructed to watch Abby more closely and prevent the two girls from coming together. Abby was a magnet for bullies and no match for Kristen.
The principal penned the dreaded note home to Abby’s mother. An “incident” has occurred—yet another “incident”— and the school staff would discipline the culprit. There was zero tolerance for bullying in this school. Abby’s mother, Sandra, read the report and visualized the outcome. Abby’s drive for independence would once again suffer a setback as adults rallied to hover around her with a protective wall. It sometimes seemed as though, in the end, Abby suffered consequences far greater than that of the bully.
Sandra sensed a long road. This was only the fourth grade. The “incidents” were likely to become more frequent and more creative. She strategized her own tactics. Sandra called and requested that the school lift the ban on interaction between the two girls. Like a coach, she sent Abby back to school the next day with the game plan.
“Hi, Kristen. I really like your shirt. That is such a cool color of blue. I wish I had a shirt like that,” chirped Abby as Kristen passed Abby’s desk. And at the lunch table, “Hey, does anyone want my bag of M&Ms? I don’t have time to eat them . . . Yeah, Kristen, you can have them.”
And later, “Bye, Kristen. Thanks for being my friend today.” Abby ended the day with a perfect execution of the coach’s play.
Returning to school the next day, Abby found Kristen taking off her coat in the hallway.
“Hi, Kristen. My mom is taking me to the store tonight to buy my secret-pal gift for tomorrow’s party, and I get to invite one friend. I was wondering if you would want to come along, and we could pick out some things.” The voice was small and hesitant. Abby was not at all certain that she wanted Kristen along that night, but her mom had assured her that it would be fun. “She gives us each five dollars, and we get to go in and pick out whatever we want. Then we go back to my house and wrap our gifts.”
Opportunities for Kristen came far and few between, and so the message Kristen heard from Abby brought a lightness to her heart. Could it be she would finally have the opportunity to be just like the other kids at tomorrow’s Christmas exchange? She envisioned herself placing her exchange gift under the tree that held all their ornaments. She would smile, knowing what was inside the package. It would have a red bow, and the wrapping paper would be creased perfectly. This year, she would have her own gift and not have to rely on the kindness of a teacher to provide a generic gift.
The match was made. Kristen took on the responsibility of pushing Abby’s wheelchair through the crowded aisles. She helped Abby pick up and examine items. Together, they made their final selections. Both girls left with a gift for the next day, wrapping paper, and ribbon. Back at Abby’s home, Kristen and Abby paired up to complete their project. Together, they laughed and giggled. Together, they made note cards and tied ribbons.
In school the next day, Kristen helped Abby tuck Abby’s gift in just the right spot under the tree. Proudly, Kristen placed her exchange gift under the tree. It had a bright red ribbon, neatly creased paper, and a card. Her contribution looked like all the rest of the packages.
Nothing was ever said about the past incidents, and the lights in the restroom always stayed lit for Abby. Sandra employed the tactic in several different forms throughout Abby’s elementary and high-school years. When incidents made her want to strike out in anger, to shield and protect Abby, she moved forward with kindness. It turned out to be protection of another kind.
Jeanne Schmidlin
Jeanne Appelhans Schmidlin lives in Kent, Ohio, with her husband and two daughters, and is coauthor of Thunder in the Heartland: A Chronicle of Outstanding Weather Events in Ohio. She serves as a parent mentor in her school district, helping parents of children with disabilities negotiate the special-education maze. Jeanne enjoys travel, gardening, books, and volunteer opportunities.
One Egg at a Time
A true friend is one who thinks you are a good egg even if you are half-cracked.
Author Unknown
Raising a child with autism is never easy, but as most parents can attest, it’s also never dull. Sometimes you just gotta laugh.
Max loves eggs, absolutely loves everything about them—the smooth, perfect whiteness of their shells, their shape, the way they feel in his hands (broken and unbroken). He loves rolling them, watching them spin on the table, or even better, cracking them and squeezing out all the goo until it coats his hands, clothes, and his mom’s carpet. Max loves just about everything about eggs— except eating them. Won’t touch the stuff.
Max loves to play with eggs. I can’t keep him away from them. He’s broken every fridge lock known to man, found every last egg hidden in there, gleefully, as if every day was a giant Easter egg hunt.
The first time I realized he had this unusual interest was right around the time of his autism diagnosis. That was back when I thought my child was extraordinarily creative because he played not with toys, but with everyday household items—a piece of string, a vacuum-cleaner hose.
Max sprung the egg fixation on me with what I like to call the “shock and awe campaign.” I walked into the kitchen one day and found him sitting on the floor, surrounded by crushed eggshells and the slime of egg yolks. He looked at me with a huge, joyous smile as he held up his yellow, slimy hands for me to see. It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing, and then figure out how exactly to clean it all up. I hoped to God my son didn’t come down with violent salmonella poisoning resulting from his new hobby.
That was the beginning. Then came the struggle—me against the eggs. Trying to outsmart my son was exhausting because, deep down, I know that my four-year-old is much smarter than I am. For instance, once in the summer while mowing the lawn, my husband found four or five eggs strategically hidden in the backyard. I guess Max had gotten his hands on a bunch of them and decided to put some away for later.
I tried buying him toy eggs, but he tossed them aside dismissively. I went a long time without buying eggs at all, tired of scrubbing goo out of my carpet and off my kid, and still frightened of whatever kind of nas
ty illness he could come down with.
After a few eggless weeks, I decided tentatively to bring another dozen into the house. In desperation, I came up with a compromise. I boiled an egg one day. I took a marker and drew eyes and a mouth on it.
“Max,” I said as I handed it to him, “here you go.” He looked up at me, disbelieving. Here was Mummy giving him an egg. Freely. It was almost too good to be true. He looked down at the egg. “Mike,” he decided. He reverently took Mike downstairs. This was working. Suddenly, after months of this unsolvable problem, I was the smartest mother in the universe.
I came downstairs a few minutes later, and Max was sitting on the couch quietly watching TV. Mike was sitting next to him. “Now remember, Max,” I said, “be gentle with Mike. No squishing Mike! Be gentle.”
“Gentle Mike,” he echoed. I figured Mike probably wouldn’t have a very long life, but at least a smashed hard-boiled egg was safer than a raw one (and easier to clean up).
But Mike made it all the way to bedtime intact. “Good night, Mike,” Max said, kissing the top of his pointy head and putting him “to bed” in the fridge. I truly was Mother of the Year.
The next day, I had a doctor’s appointment. It was with a great amount of anxiety that I arranged for someone to babysit Max and his twin sister, Olivia. Finding a babysitter for Max is not always easy. Actually, it’s never easy. My sister Jenn agreed to do it, assuring me that everything would be fine.
I was in the waiting room for twenty minutes when I called home the first time.
“How is he?” I asked nervously.
She ran down a rap sheet of only minor misdemeanors— nothing out of the ordinary, no bleeding, abrasions, broken bones, or major catastrophes to speak of.
“Oh, and by the way, the funniest thing happened. He got into the fridge and was running around the house with an egg. I chased him all over the place, but I finally got it away from him. Boy, you wouldn’t believe how he held on to that egg,” she said.
“Where’s the egg now?”
“I threw it in the garbage,” she said.
“You threw Mike in the garbage?” I shouted into my cell phone. I got some strange stares from the others in the waiting room.
Jenn felt really bad about it afterward. She did make a good point, though. “If you are going to let your children play with food, you really have to tell the babysitter,” she said, ruffling Max’s hair. As I boiled another egg, I realized how different my family is from other families. In my house, eggs and string are toys. If you take your eyes off your child for a second, he might jump into a tubful of water fully clothed, dunk his head in the toilet, or try to escape out the front door. (It’s happened!)
I started thinking about all the stuff I couldn’t do with Max that other “typical” families could do. Going down that line of thinking started to make me feel sad.
But then I looked at the egg cooling on a plate and saw a minor victory. As I drew another face on the new Mike and watched Max’s smiling eyes when I handed it to him, it occurred to me that no challenge is insurmountable if you just learn to take it one egg at a time.
Dawn Morrison
Dawn Morrison is a communications manager at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and mother to beautiful twins, Maxwell and Olivia. She received her bachelor of arts in community studies from Cape Breton University and a bachelor of journalism from the University of King’s College. She writes humorous and upbeat nonfiction about life with twins and caring for a child with autism. Maxwell, at five, remains as intelligent and curious as ever. Thanks to early intervention, Max’s vocabulary has grown greatly. To the delight of parents Dawn and Jason, he is interacting more than ever with his family and friends. “This egg makes me perfect,” he offered one day recently. Although Dawn’s not sure what that meant exactly, it reminds us of Max’s gift of finding joy and beauty in ordinary things. Please e-mail Dawn at
[email protected].
Out of the Mouths of Babes
One evening, I came home from work to find my son, Jonny, stark naked, sopping wet, and glistening from head to toe with clear deodorant. I said, “Jonathan, what on Earth are you doing?”
Jonny replied, “I just wanted to see if it worked, Mom.”
“If what worked?”
He picked up the deodorant, pointed to the label, and said, “Well, this says right here ‘provides protection against wetness,’ so I got in the tub to see if it worked! Well, as you can see it didn’t work!”
Karen Simmons
Karen L. Simmons is a mother of six, two with special needs, and the founder of Autism Today, an award-winning information and resource center shining a new light on autism worldwide. Karen’s first book, Little Rainman, was inspired by Jonathan, who has autism and is now sixteen years old and, as always, the life of the party!
“If it’s night that ‘falls’ why is it day that ‘breaks’?”
Reprinted by permission of Patrick Hardin and Cartoon Resources. ©2005 Cartoon Resources.
The Case of the Silent Kindergartner
Sometimes the best way to convince someone he is wrong is to let him have his way.
Author Unknown
I always imagined it like this: my mom would be sitting in a dim corner of a dusty room, arms folded across her chest, cigarette dangling from her mouth (though she’s never smoked in her life). “That kid can talk,” she’d say in a way not unlike a cocky detective. My mom would reach into the inside pocket of her trench coat and pull out an unmarked audiocassette tape with the proof. The school guidance counselor, my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Gonzales, and other elementary-school authorities would huddle over the tape recorder. “Not so fast!” they’d exclaim. “You ain’t proved nothin’ yet.”
But Mom would. The contents of the tape would reveal me, at age five, faithfully reproducing the songs I’d learned in class, as well as some of my favorites. Later in the tape, I discussed the nuances of each class play station and cite which three kids were my best friends that day. Ha! My mom would show them.
Such banter would normally come as no surprise to anyone who works in an elementary school. The only thing odd about the situation is that my mom secretly did exactly that: she recorded a car trip home from kindergarten. Even that could be rationalized as a bored housewife’s attempt at posterity, or re-creating a Columbo episode.
The guidance counselor and my teacher were shocked and embarrassed at the revelation. The two women had jumped to conclusions about my intelligence and abilities too soon. Since September, I hadn’t spoken one sentence in school. In a silent shell, I followed every instruction, colored every picture, and always maintained order in the lunch line. Often, I smiled and laughed. I was just very shy and missed my little sister, my big-kid friends, and mostly, my mom. At school, everyone was convinced I couldn’t speak.
My teacher, Mrs. Gonzales, had been nice at first, but her few squats down at my desk while I colored weren’t enough to build a close, trusting relationship. I still didn’t feel comfortable enough to speak to her, and she began to put bright red bear cards in my pocket on the behavior chart. The chart was at the front of the class, and the red bear was the worst card you could get. It was reserved for kids who started fights and said bad words, or in my case, said nothing at all.
Eventually, Mrs. Gonzales started to slip the red bear card in my pocket early in the day and send me to the guidance counselor. A battery of tests ensued. I liked the hearing test, where I had to indicate my detection of the world’s faintest beeps. I felt clever when I learned my hearing was perfect. My second-favorite test involved picture puzzles. But the worst one was when the counselor would sit in front of me for what seemed like hours at a time, point at her nose, and ask, “Amanda, do you know what this is?”
Of course I did, but the guidance counselor, with her too-soft voice and liver spots, was particularly frightening to me. I began to wish Mrs. Gonzales still liked me. Then I could return to the play stations, the songs, and my classmates. But now sh
e never smiled or even tried to have a conversation. Mrs. Gonzales had given up.
My mom apologized to my teacher each day when she picked me up, asserting that I really could be quite talkative at home. She said that she suspected I was bright. Perhaps I just liked observing the class. Mrs. Gonzales and the guidance counselor weren’t so sure. They announced they’d made up their minds that another year in kindergarten was the best thing for me. “Amanda is just not cognitively or emotionally ready for first grade,” they said.
The secret tape surfaced in National Enquirer fashion. Could the child’s voice be inauthentic? How could we have found out about this so late? The elementary school agreed to promote me to first grade, provided I was enrolled in the small English as a Second Language (ESL) class with Mrs. Edwards. My life was changed forever.
Mrs. Edwards never punished me for my shyness. Instead, she made me feel safe by providing personal attention, compassion, and warmth. She could hear what I wasn’t saying. Soon, I wanted to talk to Mrs. Edwards and anyone else who’d listen. She was the first person other than my parents who said, “I know you can do this,” when I attempted to read, write, add, jump rope, and more.
When I graduated from high school years later, I thanked Mrs. Edwards in my valedictory address. It was fortunate I hadn’t been held back a year. If I had, I might have been labeled a student to pass up, a student who wouldn’t amount to much anyway. Every child has needs—not all come with a label.
I strive to emulate Mrs. Edwards now that I’m a teacher by working under the idea that every student is unique and can be successful. Without a teacher like her, or cunning undercover detective work by my mom, where would I be? Probably booked long ago for a crime no one is ever guilty of—the inability to learn.