Sticks and Stars

I’m writing a whole lengthy post about whether or not my desire to escape to the woods with my children is realistic (per Peg’s comment) but it’s not quite done and I didn’t want to write about it anymore at the moment.

Things are a little bit better. I shouldn’t even say that because every time I sit down to write a post and start with that, some big pile of crap falls into my lap, forcing me to delete the “Things are a little bit better” start and change it to “I hate everything.”

I do want to say, though, that I really appreciate your comments. Even just “That sucks!” or “Keep your chin up!” or “Want to find the cheapest viagra online??” They all make me feel so…acknowledged? Validated? Not so fucking alone?? I don’t know, but I know they make me feel better. I never acknowledge them (except that if you ask me a question I will likely post an answer…eventually) but oh how happy they make me.

Anyway, things are a little better. They’re actually not great because my son got kicked out of school for the rest of the year (which is all this week) and I was only able to find alternate care for him for three days and I’m still worried about what this summer will bring, but I did talk to my boss and our HR department and if I run out of vacation time while attending to my son this summer, I can use unpaid FMLA leave, which is a huge relief. Of course, I’d rather not take unpaid time off, but I do have savings that I can use and it’s much more important that I keep my job and keep it on good terms. Really, my boss was actually pretty understanding about the whole thing, much to my surprise. It makes me wonder whether I was just projecting my own anxiety about this whole mess onto him and he never was annoyed by the whole thing at all.

At the moment, I’m working with my six year old’s school to claim that he has a disability so that he can get an aide who will essentially shadow him next year and help intervene when he starts escalating. I think the aide will be a great thing (I think every kid should have one) but it really irritates me that I have to claim that my son is “disabled” because he certainly is not. He’s just one kind of kid among many other kinds of kid, a particular type who needs his space, gets frustrated easily, and is very sensitive to stimuli. I understand that his type of kid isn’t one that fits terribly well into an underfunded, undersupported, understaffed, underresourced American kindergarten classroom, but still, it pisses me off that he’s the one slapped with this label, this huge label, that he will get to wear for the rest of his school career and maybe even his life.

I try to explain to him that the problem is with the system, not with him, that when a system is so overextended and undersupported it can only function with a narrow, narrow amount of allowed behavior, that anything outside of that allowance must be cast out and vilified in order to maintain the tenuous survival of the system, but of course he’s just six, his eyes glaze over at my first mention of “system.”

So instead I just keep whispering it to myself, to remind myself that this is all insanity, that if he were homeschooled I would be entirely oblivious to all of this and I certainly wouldn’t be trying to scrape up a bunch of bullshit that I can carefully package in order to justify the label “disabled.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 11:13 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.