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Archive for the ‘Childhood Trauma’ Category

31. The Pretty Good Year

Posted in ADHD, Childhood Trauma, Family, Homeschooling, Special Education, tagged , , , on June 1, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

You know where I’m going with this, don’t you? You know what this all meant, right?
Yes. It meant that, in terms of emotional development, he wasn’t disabled. He was delayed. Developmentally delayed. That has a whole different meaning from developmentally disabled. That means, given time, given care, he can develop; he can grow.
I wrote up an assessment of the semester, and Annie, my mother and I presented it to his principal, along with a proposal: “What Kenny calls ‘pretty good,’ his grown-ups call an amazing success, unexpected progress, tremendously encouraging—the first year we could say any of those things.
And that being the case, the next step feels so clear to us, you could almost trip over it. This ain’t broke. So let’s not try to fix it.
This is better than not broken—it’s working. For the first time, something is working. Let’s hold on tight. One more year of this can only be good for him—not just ‘pretty good,’ but food for his soul. This year, doing school this way, Kenny has had good days and made measurable, observable progress. We, his family, are able, and more than willing, to continue our active, cooperative role in his daily education.”
In June, after school let out, we took Kenny to be evaluated by a well-known neuropsychiatrist who specialized in gifted ADHD children. She attributed his social and behavioral difficulties to developmental delays, as opposed to emotional disturbance. Even better, she expressed enthusiastic support—in writing— for our hybrid schedule, mornings at school, afternoons at home, to continue through fifth grade.

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27. Ferdinand

Posted in Childhood Trauma, Family, tagged , , on May 21, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Ever since he was four or five, anytime you’d take a walk with Kenny, he’d stop to pick up leaves and flowering weeds and rocks. We have bowls full of his rocks in our house.
While other boys might be running and jumping and kicking a ball, Kenny might be weaving a wreath out of clover to give to his mom. Sometimes I think of him as Ferdinand, the young bull who preferred to lie under a tree and smell the flowers than fight the matadors in the ring.
Oh, wait. Over here. Check out his bed. It’s covered, inundated, with stuffed animals. Every one of them has a name. Every teddy bear. Every creature. Big bear. Smithsonian bear. Astronaut Bear. Pumpy. Snakey. Kitty. And Blanky.
The blanket Aunt Patty crocheted for him before he was born. It’s been washed and mended so many times, it’s got holes. The edges are in tatters. But Kenny loves Blanky. I mean, he really loves Blanky. He brought Blanky for show and tell in kindergarten. Even now, at ten years old, he can’t go to sleep without Blanky.
Or his favorite lullaby. And after you’ve sung that and rubbed his back, he’ll ask you to stay a little longer, to sit quietly another minute, even though he’s not afraid of the dark. He just wants to be together a little longer.

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24. Forever Four

Posted in ADHD, Childhood Trauma, Family, tagged , , , on May 15, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Spring 2005. After you’ve had to supervise an elementary-age kid in the same way that you’d supervise a toddler—that is, moment by moment: “don’t touch that,” “don’t touch that,” “I told you not to touch that,” “put that down,” “I said, put it down,” “put it down now,” “give it to me,” “put in in my hand,” “give it to me now,” “thank you”—till he’s five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten years old, you can’t help wondering if this is the way it’ll always be.
After all, you’ve wracked your brains and tried everything you can think of to move this boulder forward. And in spite of all that, it’s still right there in front of you, blocking the road.There’s a term for that. I don’t want to scare you. So if you’ll just lean a little closer, I’ll whisper it: Developmentally Disabled.
Not in the way that term is usually used—not physically or intellectually. But emotionally. Socially. Stuck. Forever. That’s what we were starting to wonder about, to whisper to each other.  Was the trauma of Sean’s illness and death so profound for Kenny that, instead of improving slowly over time, as one might from a severe blow to the brain, he would never recover? Never develop?
It had been five years since Sean died. Kenny was now ten. And he was also, after all these years, in a lot of very important ways, still four, still the age he was when Sean got sick.Forever four. That’s what it was looking like. And, while a 4-year-old 4-year-old is adorable, a 10-year-old 4-year-old is. Not.
A 10-year-old 4-year-old is hard work. He’s a logistical challenge. A relentless rebuke to your parenting skills. An embarrassment in the grocery store. A heartache.
You look around at other families on the street, in school, at the store. You see kids following along obediently after their parents. Those parents don’t have to strap their kid into the grocery cart to keep him from careening around the aisles and hiding in the shelves among the canned goods. At the movie theater, those other kids are sitting still, gazing up at the screen. They aren’t monkeying around so much in their seat that it folds up with them inside it, squeezing their shoes off their feet in the process.
Those parents aren’t getting called by the principal to come pick their kid up for the fifth time in five days.When you’ve got a kid like Kenny, you look at those families, at those kids, in amazement, in wonderment. Like, wow, look at that little kid, he’s just walking along next to his mom, and she isn’t even paying any attention. She’s not even looking down to see if he’s there. She just knows he is. And she’s right.
Man. What’s that like? When you have a kid like Kenny, seeing something like that is like watching a magic act, like seeing a magician bend a spoon with his mind.

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18. Kenny’s Big Story

Posted in Childhood Trauma, tagged , on May 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

You know those small, genderless figurines that are made out of transparent plastic—the ones you can look through to see the parts of the human anatomy?
What I was just thinking was—wouldn’t it be amazing to be able to make something like that, but—in place of the skeletons and the organs—the insides would be filled with stories?
Like, in place of bones, there’d be the primary stories, the ones about home and family. And then, like muscles, the stories people tell themselves when they need to be strong. And throughout the body, the exciting stories, the sad, painful memories and the dreams of love. Other stories that are still being digested. And new stories breathed in with the air.
It’s not totally far-fetched, really. Considering that whatever any one of us is thinking or remembering or feeling at every moment is, undeniably, physically, part of us—chemically, electrically, encoded in our molecules and our cells.
Memories, dreams, stories—just as alive, just as vital, just as real as our muscles, our skin, our bones.Spring, 2005. Kenny’s 10. In many ways, still a little boy. A little boy, whose big story is coursing through his veins, pulsing like blood through his heart.

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17. Was I traumatized?

Posted in Childhood Trauma, Family, tagged , , on May 3, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

One evening in 2005, when Kenny was about 10, about five years after that day that Annie described at Sean’s grave, Kenny and I sat down on the couch after supper to watch the news. The stories were typically disastrous. The word “traumatic” was used. Kenny, fidgety at first, but quickly curious, asked, “What’s traumatic?”I told him that a trauma is an event that causes a person deep emotional pain, like the death of his dad.“Was I traumatized?” he asked.“Yes,” I said.He conjectured about how his younger sister and brother, Lizzie and Jamie, must have felt. Then he said, “I guess Mommy was the second-most traumatized. Right?”

“Probably,” I said.

He thought for a minute. And then he said, “I wanted to stay with Daddy when he died. But I just couldn’t.”

I told him that none of the kids were with Sean when he died. That only Mommy and Pop and I had been there, and that Mommy hadn’t brought the kids into the bedroom to say good-bye until after the rest of the family had arrived.

He repeated, “I wanted to stay with him. Lizzie and Jamie stayed longer than I did. I tried to stay. But I couldn’t.” His eyes welled over, and when I held out my arms, he got onto my lap and cried. “I miss Daddy,” he said.

I said, “I know. I do, too. But all the times you had with him will always be inside you. And you’ll always be sensitive and understanding to people in pain, because of your own experiences.”

And he said, “I know.”

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16. Annie and Kenny visit Sean’s grave.

Posted in Childhood Trauma, Family, tagged , , on May 1, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Life’s a jumble. We like to think of it as a story, because that shapes it into something we feel we can grasp. Everyone’s got stories. More than you can count. More than you can remember. Most of them flicker and fade. Some go on forever.This is a story that our daughter Annie, Kenny’s mom, emailed me on September 6, 2000, five days before Kenny’s sixth birthday, about three months after his dad, Sean, had died of cancer:
I took Kenny to visit Sean’s grave this week for the first time. Of course, he attended the burial, but it was under great duress, and he didn’t participate. He couldn’t. Since then, I’ve gone many times, but I’ve made it clear that it’s totally up to him to decide when that will come. So when, completely out of the blue, he asked this morning, I jumped. I had one foot practically out the door to take him to school, tying someone else’s shoes, when his voice came over the divider: “Mommy, after school today, can we buy some flowers and take them and put them on Daddy’s grave?” Of course, I promised that we could do exactly that.
I picked him up after school, and off we went. We stopped at the grocery store, and I let him choose the flowers. Of course, his choice was the $17 long-stemmed roses. But how could I say no? Even with a bank account rapidly approaching my age. And we were off for the cemetery.At first, he just walked around the grave, which is still quite the mound of dirt, just beginning to pack down, and no marker. Kenny looked for a long time for just the right place to lay the flowers. He asked where Daddy’s head was. As we looked around, we discovered that a small, burrowing animal had made a home in the grave. We speculated on what kind of animal it might  be, and Kenny decided that it was nice that Daddy has some company.

Then he wanted to walk around and look at the other stones. He read me the dates on the markers and asked me to do the math to see how old they were when they all died. He wanted to find the oldest person.

Then his behavior started to change. He started breaking clumps of dirt from Sean’s grave with his hands, muttering to himself. Soon he was pulling larger clumps up from the grave, his voice getting louder, saying, “I hate it! I hate it! I hate it!” He started smashing pieces of dirt against a rock, to see them explode. I talked to him a little—”Yes, I’m angry, too. Yes, it’s horrible. It’s not fair. You’re right.” But mostly, I just let him do his thing. He did it for a long time.

He made a huge mess. I watched and listened. He said things like, “It’s like losing all your food.” “It’s like losing your home.” “It’s like seeing a butterfly, and it was your best friend, and then it flew away, and you never saw it again.”

He stomped his fury back and forth over the surface of the grave. He said, “I’m angry! I hate it!” But as angry as his words were, his voice had more of an aura of concentration and deep thought.

After awhile, he calmed down and just sat on the grave, sort of digging, and found a rock. My eyes fell on a small, red, plastic flower about ten feet away, and I walked over to pick it up. Kenny asked for it and began to bury it in the grave. He said, “I’m going to bury it, just like Daddy.”

He covered it with dirt and dug it up three or four times. The last time, he said, “Make a wish on the flower, and it will come true. Make a big wish, and it will come true in a hundred days. Make a medium wish, and it will come true in five days. I wish Daddy would come back.”

I asked, “Do you believe that will happen?”

He said, “Yes. It will.”

Quietly, I said, “Kenny, you know that’s not going to happen.”

He replied, “Yes. It will.”

I let it go. Shortly after that, we left. We brought the plastic flower with us.

The next morning before school, he wrote a letter to Sean that said, “Dear Daddy, I wish that you didn’t get cancer.”

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15. The Good Day Principle

Posted in Childhood Trauma, Family, Homeschooling, tagged , , , , on April 29, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

One afternoon, as Kenny and I are reading the instructions for a science assignment, which call for teams of two students each, he smiles up at me and says, “That’s you and me!”And then it dawns on me. This is a good day.
In fact, when you stop and think about it, most days since we started bringing Kenny home at noon have been pretty good days. He’s not getting chased around the classroom or being sent to the principal’s office or driven home in disgrace. Nobody’s teased him for doing something weird.
One afternoon at lunch, he reads me a “Calvin & Hobbes” comic, in which Calvin eats some ridiculously sugary cereal and gets out of control. “Like me,” Kenny says with a little smile.
But wait. Today, Kenny’s not out of control. He’s sitting quietly at the kitchen table, eating lunch relatively neatly, and reading “Calvin & Hobbes.”I start thinking about that, and an old saying pops into my head: “We are the sum of our days.”
A platitude, an abstraction. Like “a stitch in time saves nine” or “good things come to those who wait.” After I heard it, whenever that was, I never thought of it again. Till now.Now it opens my eyes. Really, what are we, if not that? How do you measure a life? Inches, degrees, words, miles, decades. Days. Kenny is ten and a half years old—about 3,833 days. Many of those days have been hard, sad, scary.His daddy got sick and died. His family grieved. He cried and cried. He didn’t mean to knock over that chair or spill the dog food or lock himself into his bedroom before school by breaking the door knob off. Getting the candy down from the top of the fridge before breakfast sounded like a great idea at the time. Stuffing the toilet paper roll into the toilet whole seemed like it would be funny. It was funny.

That’s why he just couldn’t stop laughing and shouting and running around the room in circles as the water seeped out of the bathroom. Other kids made fun of him. The grownups got mad and yelled. Don’t do that! Be quiet! Stop that! I told you to stop that! Act your age! You know better! Why can’t you keep that in your head? What’s wrong with you?

Oh, boy. It’s really painful to remember all that. It hurts. It hurt at the time. That’s what gave this old/new idea so much power. It rearranged the whole picture, brought it into focus. It was a new light in the tunnel, a new ball we could keep our eyes on. It was—a plan.

If it’s true that what we are is the sum of our days, then for the first time, we actually had a clue about what we should do. The goal, at least, was simple: start racking up the good days.

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6. School Daze

Posted in Childhood Trauma, Education, Family, Special Education, tagged , , , , on April 11, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

By the end of third grade, even though Kenny was doing more than fine academically, his teachers held him back, judging, correctly, that his social development wasn’t advanced enough for him to take part in the kind of group projects that fourth graders needed to do. And even after his second go at third grade, that hadn’t changed. Academically, he was gifted. But emotionally, socially, life had left him right about where he’d been when Sean was diagnosed: around four years old.The Montessori school had no place for him. He was tested and placed in the Gifted & Talented, Learning Disabled (GTLD) program in public school. It was 2004. He was turning 10. He was in a  fourth grade class with a teacher, two aides and eleven kids. It was a turning point. For the first time in his life, he made friends. There were other boys who liked to sit with him at the edge of the playground during recess and dig in the dirt with sticks.But Kenny still didn’t want to go to school. He invented maladies to keep himself at home. His head hurt. His stomach ached. His skin itched. And on the days he did go to school, which was most days, something would invariably happen around noon: he’d get “sick,” he’d have to throw up, he’d start crying. Or he’d make noise. He’d start running around the class. He’d disrupt the room. Annie couldn’t leave her job in the middle of the day, and I worked from home. So I’d be phoned to come pick him up.

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5. And Then

Posted in ADHD, Childhood Trauma, Family, tagged , , , on April 9, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

children's grief, loss, comforting a child
That winter, Kenny’s daddy, Sean, was diagnosed with brain cancer. The tumor disrupted Sean’s brain’s signals to his right arm and leg. He couldn’t use his arm at all, and he began to limp. When Kenny saw that Sean had trouble working the pepper mill at supper, Kenny said, “I’ll help you, Daddy.” He imitated the way Sean was walking. He became very interested in the human body. He learned about the respiratory system and the circulatory system and the nervous system.A year and a half later, after the hospice nurses came over to tell us that Sean’s life was coming to the end, Annie and I took Kenny to a lake near our house. We let him feed the ducks for awhile, and then we explained to him as gently as we could that his daddy was going to die. Kenny had brought his one of his favorite stuffed animals, a soft yellow snake, along with him. He held Snakey to his face and paced back and forth in front of us and didn’t say anything. He was five. Sean died in his bed June 30, 2000. That summer, Kenny didn’t want to leave the house. For any reason. He looped string from room to room, trying to tie all the furniture together. He cried every night. I made each of the kids “Daddy necklaces,” 2” x 3” laminated photos of Sean attached to a rope of braided red yarn that they could wear around their necks. Kenny wore his to school. Some of the kids made fun of him. He came home sobbing.We took him to a therapist. He was diagnosed with ADHD. Various medications were prescribed. Ritalin helped. Annie enrolled him in a more protective, individually-focused Montessori school for second grade. That September 11 was Kenny’s seventh birthday.

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