Don favoured the notion that we allow our personal force of nature to be adopted, “and maybe, you know, we could visit him.” My own upbringing, though somewhat austere, had had at its core the primacy of family obligation, and even if the tie here was somewhat tangential, Boop was family. Anyway, chances were he wouldn’t be adopted, given that Kira was unlikely to consent — she often referred to him as “my keeper.” Instead, his fate would be bouncing from foster home to foster home, where even the kids without special needs have starkly poorer outcomes than those raised in conventional homes.
Most important, though, I adored this winsome terror. When he wasn’t smashing stuff and strewing cps, he would snuggle up for “a hug and a kiss and a pat.” He was fond of being carried, and I was happy to comply. As I murmured to him frequently, “I love you a million trillion.”
Keep a child or let him go: there’s not much room for compromise. We sold the one-bedroom house where I’d lived for seventeen years and bought something large enough for three.
By the time Andrew was five, he was an appealing-looking kid in a deshabille way, with an endearing smile and an outgoing nature, but it was increasingly clear he was not quite like other kids his age. Once he was revved up, it was nearly impossible to turn him off. As other parents would tactfully observe, “He’s very... active, isn’t he?” At the same time, he couldn’t tie his shoes or hop on one foot or ride a bike without training wheels, and he was physically clumsy. He had started compensating for his ungainliness with the heartbreaking explanation “I meant to do that.”
Andrew’s first full-bore assessment at SickKids resulted in a prescription for Ritalin, and plenty of physical activity to help with his poor motor skills. Soccer, swimming, basketball, volleyball, tennis, gymnastics, figure skating, softball, karate — over the next half-dozen years Andrew did them all, and I have the receipts to prove it. Meanwhile, the Ritalin brought his speed down under the limit, but he still wasn’t adept at following the gentle routines at his preschool, which was why the principal regretfully announced she couldn’t have him back the next year. It wasn’t that he was overtly obnoxious; in fact, he was rather a fave among the staff. They were greatly entertained by his vociferous insistence that a creature called a “hot beaver” existed. But even pets can drive you crazy. As the SickKids assessment had noted, “Andrew’s impulsive style and easily distractible nature will impact on his ability to participate optimally in a learning environment.”
Usually, when “exceptional” kids enter the Ontario public school system they are initially placed in regular classrooms. Only once it becomes blindingly apparent they need more support, which can take years, are they seen by the Identification, Placement, and Review Committee. I had seen the effects of this approach on a friend’s son with fas. He had spent the better part of grade one sitting in the principal’s office, unless his putative teacher was using him as a punishment: “You’d better be good, or you’ll have to sit with Michael.” He got worse, not better, and by the time he made it to the iprc the consensus was he should be placed in a behavioural class, for children prone to throwing chairs around — a bad choice for a kid who will imitate the conduct around him. The experience left my friend weeping into a martini at eleven in the morning.
So via a lot of phone harassment of school board officials, Don and I found ourselves scrunched into Baby Bear–size classroom chairs and inhaling chalk dust in a downtown school on a hot May afternoon in 1996. Everyone on the committee was whacked — they’d seen a succession of parents all day, and we were the last on the list — but one fellow, who had a Fu Manchu mien, appeared to be actually asleep. I had come prepared with information about an early-intervention kindergarten program for children who had “needs in the area of following classroom rules and routines and/or developing social skills and socially appropriate skills.” As backup, I’d brought along Andrew’s SickKids psychologist and his preschool principal.
Despite this arsenal, Fu Manchu suddenly roused himself at decision time and declared, “Behavioural.” The school rep, clearly anxious to get home, agreed. I was already fumbling for my cigarettes. Fortunately, the board psychologist suggested investigating the class I had proposed, which was how Andrew landed at the school he attended until the end of grade six, a place with an understanding principal and devoted special ed teachers.
Andrew’s first four years there were so successful I deluded myself into thinking he’d dodged the intellectual hit. When he aced his grade three provincial test, Don and I celebrated and then fretted: maybe we should have been saving for college after all. By grade four, however, the trajectory was down, not up. There was more to remember — and hence more to forget — and the concepts became less and less concrete.
Another factor may have been involved. Andrew, the gregarious kid who used to approach other children when he was little and announce, “Here’s Awdoo,” had a limited social life during much of this period. His pals from earlier in childhood were now all at the local Island school, and their allegiances were naturally shifting. Because the my-kid-isn’t-invited-to-birthday-parties issue is almost a cliché in child-rearing manuals, it’s easy to dismiss it as parental neurosis, particularly if you don’t have children. But to hear your own kid phoning his old buddies to see if they’re available, only to learn that they’re out, makes you ache for him.
Far worse, though, was his mom’s sudden death, just before the end of grade five, likely from a bad combination of alcohol and codeine. She may not have raised him, but she had loved him and he her. He had spent time at her home; they talked on the phone regularly. When we broke the awful news to him, he asked in a small voice, “Are you sure?” Later, he wanted to know if she had committed suicide. He largely kept his grief to himself, except for outbursts in which he blamed me for her death (“My mom said you were too controlling and you wanted to steal me from her”). Don, of course, was devastated, and between the crying and the shouting my life began to seem like the plot line of an especially over-the-top made-for-TV movie.
If you don’t understand the learning deficits of fas kids, you could easily mistake their tendency to grasp something one day only to have it vaporize the next, their difficulty with processing more than two or three directions at a time, and their acting out when overwhelmed as laziness, inattention, or deliberate disobedience. This was exactly the conclusion of Andrew’s grade seven teacher. I’d done the usual — bugged the area’s special ed consultant, talked to friends who teach in the public system, steered the iprc toward my choice — only to find at the beginning of the school year that the teacher everyone had thought so highly of had moved.
Despite the detailed Andrew operating manual I had provided, almost immediately I started getting calls saying he’d been sent to the office or was on the verge of suspension. The impression that he was, at best, a goof-off was reinforced by the punk/hip hop “uniform” he had adopted: a 2XL T and monster jeans, accented with a gaudy, oversized crucifix or a spiked dog collar, plus gelled hair sticking up in multiple points. His all-purpose philosophy had become “Fuck authority.”
“Andrew, can you please turn down your music? It’s hard for me to work with it that loud.”
“Who’s going to make me? Fuck authority.”
You get the idea.
Private school wasn’t an option. I had checked out the limited range of special ed institutions earlier in the year, figuring we would somehow cobble together the $20,000 a year for the right place (by this point, I had a stable university teaching job). But it turned out Andrew was a bit too special; what the schools wanted were compliant, low-decibel children who might be dyslexic or a little challenged by abstract concepts. One principal pronounced, as she firmly indicated her school and Andrew were not meant to be, “He is a deeply disturbed child.” Andrew squirmed beside me, making the American Sign Language gesture for “bullshit.”
But she was probably right. Shortly before our meeting, and less than a year after Kira’s death, Don had hit Andrew across the face after he had been especially rude. Immediately banished, Don took refuge with some long-time friends. We didn’t stop to consider that the wife was a justice of the peace, and hence duty bound to report suspected child abuse. My daybook for that period has notes like “Thursday: Valerie (cas)” and “Friday: 11 a.m. — 52 Division. [Officers] Karen B. and Larry M.”
