Raising Blaze (10 page)

Before Blaze’s appointment at the center for school problems, I received a packet of medical-history forms to fill out. In the interest of total accuracy, I answered each question meticulously. I described the length of my labor and how, at delivery, the umbilical cord was wrapped in two loops around Blaze’s neck. I listed his low Apgar scores. I knew when he got his first tooth (seven months), when he first crawled (never), when he started walking (twelve months), when he spoke his first word (“shoes,” two years old). I described his hospitalization for asthma and his thyroid function tests. Then there were
the questions about family history. I found some of these a little more difficult to answer. Had anyone been hospitalized, treated for, or suffered from depression, epilepsy, nervous-system disorders, alcoholism, drug dependency? Suicide? I could only answer for my own family, having almost no information about John’s. And what did they mean by
depression
? Didn’t everyone get depressed sometimes? Wasn’t depression, well, kind of normal? Better not check that one off, I thought, sure that my interpretation of feeling blue was nothing like theirs. When I was finished, the family-history section of the form was pristine, not one item checked. By the looks of it, we were clearly the happiest, healthiest, most well adjusted family on earth.

This was also the picture I tried to paint verbally for Dr. F. at the center for school problems when we arrived for our appointment. I told Dr. F., a clinical neuropsychologist, that, in my opinion, Blaze’s school difficulties were based on the fact that he’d had little interaction with other children and, had I known that there were so many rules and restrictions for kindergarten, I would surely have tried to prepare him better. Silly me, I told Dr. F., I thought kindergarten was a year to ease into school. Who knew that kindergartners had to meet high academic standards to prepare them for first grade? I shut up then, aware that I was starting to sound slightly bitter. Dr. F. asked me some more questions: how did I view Blaze? What, if anything, did I think were causing his school problems? What was my opinion of what was going on in the classroom? Was his behavior different at home than it was in school? I answered all of these in depth, never holding back on the fact that I thought there was a large gap between my view of Blaze and the school’s. After jotting down notes and listening to me carefully, Dr. F. took Blaze into his office.

“Shouldn’t I come with?” I asked, slightly alarmed.

“Probably better if you don’t,” Dr. F. said. “It’ll be easier to get valid results without you present. Don’t worry, we won’t be long.”

After I spent forty minutes staring at the closed door, Dr. F. summoned
me into his office. Blaze was sitting at a computer, randomly clicking the mouse and watching a series of geometric images on the screen.

“How’d he do?” I asked Dr. F.

“Oh, fine,” Dr. F. said, smiling. “Didn’t seem to miss you at all.”

Dr. F. was bearded and bearish, friendly and soft-spoken, but I felt vaguely uncomfortable around him. My parents’ misgivings about the medical profession paled in comparison to their skepticism of those in the psychiatric profession and I was raised to believe that psychotherapy was a lot of malarkey. For the most part, I shared their opinion, although I’d never explored the field in any depth. Of course, I’d never really
had
to before Blaze came along and it had always been easy to dismiss therapy from a slightly smug, superior position. Now I was forced to journey through this unfamiliar territory with Blaze, just as I had with his medical conditions and, once again, I felt out of my depth. What were the right things to say to these people and what could I say that would convince them that there was nothing wrong with Blaze? Was there a code, a language, a secret handshake?

“Blaze was a little reticent at first,” Dr. F. told me. “He didn’t really care for my tests.”

“They’ve had a terrible time trying to test him at school,” I said. “They can’t seem to get any results. That’s part of the reason we came today.”

“Well, it was certainly not impossible,” Dr. F. said, “but I did have to convince him. I made some jokes; we played a little. Once he got a little more comfortable, it was no problem. He liked the joking around quite a bit.”

“He’s got a great sense of humor,” I said, brightening.

Dr. F. told me that he wasn’t particularly concerned, that Blaze seemed very bright and certainly capable of performing kindergarten tasks. It was most likely his social immaturity that was hindering him, Dr. F. added, and that could be easily remedied.

“And he seems to be pretty strong-willed,” Dr. F. added. “Is that something you’ve noticed at home?”

“You have no idea,” I said, laughing. “
Strong-willed
is an understatement.”

Dr. F. told me that he would speak to Sally and then write up his evaluation. Was that all, I wanted to know? No other tests or interviews?

“Do you feel shortchanged?” Dr. F. asked, smiling. “I could probably come up with some other tests if you do.”

Dr. F.’s report was only three pages long, but I felt entirely vindicated once I read it and wasted no time making copies for Dr. Roberts and Sally.

Blaze is a young boy of above-average intelligence who is presently without any sign of neuropsychological dysfunction and is intellectually quite capable of grade-level work but who emotionally may have a difficult time,
he wrote.

See that, I wanted to scream,
above
-average intelligence! What did I tell you? Ha! The report went on:

Language based pre-academic skills are above both age and grade expectations and certainly within the parameters predicted by his general cognitive development. Blaze was able to recite, write and recognize his letters and numbers, write his own name, and has well mastered serial conversations, and can perform simple addition and subtraction.

These were all things that everybody at school swore Blaze could
not
do and I was sure they thought I was lying when I insisted that he could. Finally, I had proof. Dr. F. had concluded his report with what I felt were some very astute observations about Blaze, and I was highly impressed that he’d come to such a good understanding of my son in the limited amount of time they’d spent together.

Blaze is both timid and stubborn with a relatively strong perfectionistic streak
, he wrote.
If Blaze is in a large classroom in which the teacher is
unable to draw him out and build his confidence, or in unfamiliar settings, Blaze would likely withdraw and appear far less capable than he is…. Blaze can be a stubborn little boy who turns to silence when he doesn’t wish to comply with an environmental request or is unsure of himself. In a busy classroom, with a wide variety of developmental and emotional needs, this silence can unintentionally result in his being overlooked and/or assumed to not really understand the class material…. A smooth transition to the regular class for next year is paramount
.

Of course, this wasn’t all Dr. F. had written. He’d also mentioned that Blaze’s motor skills were “low average” and that “his visual-motor integrative skills were relatively weak.” He’d said that “Blaze’s medical history is worth noting and may bear upon the reasons for this referral,” but, in the report, he’d gotten most of the medical details wrong, and had entirely left out what, exactly, he thought was worth noting and why. Nowhere in the report did he mention the details of Blaze’s birth even though I had gone over them on paper and during the interview. But I had no quarrel with any of this, nor were the motor issues a big concern for me. Blaze simply hadn’t practiced with scissors, pencils, shoelaces, and buttons. I’d done all of those things for him. All he needed, I was sure, was training. What I chose to focus on—and what I pointed out to Sally and Dr. Roberts—was that Dr. F. had clearly seen evidence of Blaze’s intelligence and capabilities. Surely this opinion had merit, I thought.

The school staff wasn’t nearly as enthusiastic as I was about Dr. F.’s evaluation. While Blaze may have performed well for him in a one-on-one setting, they said, he hadn’t observed Blaze in the classroom and so hadn’t witnessed his odd behaviors. They felt the evaluation wasn’t very thorough and besides, Dr. F. hadn’t really delineated any concrete strategies for helping Blaze succeed in a school situation, had he?

My interpretation of their reaction was that they were simply pissed off because they couldn’t admit that they’d been wrong about Blaze. Yes, he was unusual, I would admit that, but nobody would be able to
convince me that there was anything wrong with him. Of that, I was sure.

By the time his first year of school drew to a close, Dr. F.’s report had been buried in the recesses of Blaze’s file and was not referred to at all when, at a year-end meeting, Sally and Dr. Roberts recommended that Blaze repeat kindergarten.

“Are you telling me that he’s failed kindergarten?” I asked. “He’s failed
special-ed
kindergarten?”

They assured me that this wasn’t the case. In their opinion, this first year had been the sort of practice run he would have gotten if he’d gone to preschool. Many kids repeated kindergarten, they hastened to tell me, especially boys. It was a question of social maturity, not intellectual capability. In addition, kindergarten was only three hours long and they didn’t feel that Blaze was ready yet for a full academic day. Reluctantly, because I still thought of this as a failure, I agreed with their decision. For kindergarten part two, they placed Blaze once again with Ice Princess. I thought this was a bad idea and I said so.

“Wouldn’t it be better if he had a fresh start?” I asked. “Maybe he’d work better if he were with somebody new?”

My question was followed by simultaneous head shaking. No, no, they said, Blaze finds comfort in familiarity. It would be disruptive to make him adapt to another teacher. We’ve seen this before, we know. It had been a long and confusing year of adjustment for me and I was tired of constantly being on the defensive. I allowed myself the hope that, perhaps, they were right this time. Maybe a redo of this year would be exactly what Blaze needed to pull himself together. Fine, I said, let’s try it again.

Blaze’s second year of kindergarten (or “K2,” as I liked to call it, since getting Blaze through school seemed very much like climbing that formidable peak) was less than stellar. Although he spent more time in her classroom than before, Blaze didn’t warm to the Ice Princess nor
she to him. There was the problem with the letter books, for one thing. All the kindergartners were given large, soft books wherein they could practice drawing things that started with
A, B, C
and so on and outlining the letters in capitals and lowercase. Blaze rejected the letter books out of hand. “I hate the stupid
F!
” he’d say and that was it. Ice Princess was not pleased. “In first grade, the children will need to know how to write their letters,” she said more than once.

Then there was the issue of coloring. Blaze would not even approximate staying inside the lines.

“Why do we have to have lines?” he’d ask.

“So you can make a picture that looks like something,” I told him.

“Why can’t I make a picture without lines?”

Ice Princess was really a stickler for staying in the lines and Blaze’s “drawings” messed up the neat symmetry of her classroom walls. Even I could see that. Blaze’s attempts at cutting and pasting were also still quite rudimentary. “He really needs help with this,” Ice Princess would say, holding up a tattered piece of construction paper that was supposed to be a house, bird or fish. “Unfortunately, I’m just not able to give him the kind of one-on-one attention he could use.”

There was also trouble with the monkey bars. Blaze couldn’t hold himself up on them, couldn’t swing from bar to bar and ended up dropping in a heap on the sand below. Other kids played on the monkey bars with no problem. Blaze needed assistance. “I wish I could help him,” Ice Princess said, “but I’m just not able to be out there all the time when he needs me.” The monkey-bar debate got so hot that an occupational therapist was added to the IEP team. Together, she and Blaze worked on eye tracking, walking a balance beam, outlining letters in the hated letter books, and holding on to the monkey bars.

Blaze still couldn’t tie his shoelaces, either. Almost every day, he’d come home with his shoes falling off, the laces straggling and dirtied from monkey-bar sand. “I do help him with his shoes,” Ice Princess said, “but, at this point, he should know how to tie his laces. Perhaps
you could work on this with him at home? Unfortunately, I can’t always be there to tie them for him and he could trip on them.”

What made all of these little failings worse was that Blaze was experiencing them for the second time. During the first part of the morning, Blaze still spent time with Sally and I knew that he was doing some work that was at the same academic level as what Ice Princess was doing with her class. Yet, when he had to perform with the regular kindergarten class, Blaze persisted in doing things his own way or not at all. Ice Princess was not optimistic about his chances in a regular first-grade classroom.

“First grade is so difficult,” she said. “The academic expectations are very high.”

“What are they studying, Sophocles?” I asked. “I mean, how hard can it be?”

Every time I protested that Blaze was capable of doing something Ice Princess said he couldn’t do, my son made a liar out of me by either mangling the project or flatly refusing to do it. I was convinced that Ice Princess—indeed, the whole school staff—thought I was a blindly incompetent mother.

This feeling came to a crescendo, appropriately enough, on Mother’s Day. Blaze brought home a yellow stapled booklet with his handprints stamped on the cover in blue paint. Inside, were all the children’s recollections of what their favorite meals were that their mothers made for them and how these dishes were prepared. For good measure, Ice Princess had also asked the kids how much they thought these meals cost. All the responses were copied and typed verbatim, Ice Princess said in her introduction. I flipped through the book, smiling. One little girl said spaghetti was her favorite food and her mother prepared it by putting it in a bucket. Another described her mother putting artichokes in a pot and then dipping them in mayonnaise. There was a complicated description of mom cooking “chicken with salad” complete with tomatoes, bread, and “little white things called
salt.” Most of the kids described June Cleaver–ish mothers whipping up sweets, whether these were brownies, cake, or cookies, but many of them went into detail about main dishes. They were adorable. Then I read Blaze’s entry and stopped smiling. He listed pizza as his favorite food that I made for him.