A Confidence Game

Last week we had an IEP meeting - the first at the high school,* the first with Boo in attendance, and the first in which the teachers and administrators failed to treat us verrrry gently, as if a blunt remark might break a fragile parental bone**. Educators like to sugar-coat every discussion of disability with repeated assurances that each bump in the road is charactaristic of 98 percent of the typical children in the school, not to worry! Reassurances waste a lot of meeting time. I hated it.

So, welcome to high school! These people were Bandaid Rippers, man. We reviewed test scores and Boo complained of some skewed results. "Well," said the SLP. "It's actually representative of your writing." "I really don't need help with that," he said, at a recommendation for some extra support in another area. "You sure do!" said the academic head, cheerfully. "Remember how the civil rights reading packet tripped you up?" And so on.

Boo takes it well, if unwillingly. It’s become clear in the last few years that his self-image is solid as bedrock. I don’t know if it’s his nature, if it’s something we did, some random factor I can't know about, or if it’s some vestige of his disability (a possibility I’ve been mulling). Everything we did was a gamble and something paid off. Or not.

When he was two and it first became evident that there was something seriously wrong, the thought that kept me up at night was that my laughing little man would think of himself as less than other people, that he would have no confidence, that he would be ashamed of who he was and what he could not do. And as hard as we drove him when he was younger, we protected him as zealously, from failure, from ridicule. I’m glad we did. I don’t know if it played any part in what we see now.

Gradually, I stopped protecting him. I remember thinking "we can't afford to be delicate about this" and handing him his Lindamood Bell test scores when he was ten and saying "look, you're in the top third here, but *there* you score worse that 99 percent of the kids your age. 99 percent! We have to work on this!" Looking back from a distance of years, it seems schizophrenic – he was unaware of being different before 2nd grade, and two years later I was throwing test scores at him and explaining percentiles. I suppose I did what seemed right at the time. The best I can say is it didn’t seem to damage his confidence.

Last week, once I was over the surprise, I was grateful for the team's blunt language. The teachers know that college is careening down the pike at us. They know Boo is not aiming for community college (although we could certainly make a case that he should be). They know they do him no favors with the sugar-coating. He's still a little bristly about a few of the recommendations, but we'll get there, I think.

*Okay, I admit it- I blew it off last year. It's terrible, I know, but there's a part of me saying woo! the school can handle this! I don't have to engineer it! and I can go attend to my job, where I can fail without screwing up my child. I like that.

**Not fair. The middle school wasn't that bad. But they were a long, long way from blunt.

Funny.

Picture a high school track team going through their daily strengthening regime. Included is the plank position for their abs, the coach shouting insults and encouragement for the three minutes, adding ten seconds if anyone drops early.

This time, the coach answers his cell, leaving 80-some high school kids in the dreaded plank in silence. Someone begins to sing softly, "John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt." It catches on and by the time the coach hangs up, a bunch of the kids are on the sixth or seventh chorus, and the rest are giggling.

Who started it? My kid, that's who.

***

He's funny, I tell you.
Funny odd or funny ha ha?
Yes, both.

***
We are not an earnest crowd. Approximately 40 percent of what is said around our house is hyperbolic or sarcastic or meant as a set-up or punch line. And he doesn't grock that when it's directed at him.

I make a crack at his brother’s gangstah slang, he gets it. His father tells a good story about a ski wipeout, he gets that. His tiny cousin dresses up in dishtowels with a bowl on her head and calls herself the pasta princess – he gets that.

But a crack at him – an obvious one, say, about him being lazy or disorganized? Doesn’t get it. He takes no offense, answers earnestly, patiently, as if anyone could really think he’s either. We give him The Look. “Uhhh, Boo? HeLLO?” It takes a minute and he laughs.

What he finds funny is the wrong thing in a strange place. Years ago, my mother in law stayed with the boys and unloaded the dishwasher, unwittingly switching the spoons and forks in the cutlery drawer. He laughed himself silly, thinking she’d done it purely as a joke. Forks in the spoons’ slot? Bwah!

He’s seventeen and this hasn’t changed much. This winter, a Christmas tree set up and decorated on the median of a highway got the same reaction.

***

”He has a great sense of humor!” His principal said back in sixth grade. “I really enjoy it!”

“You do?” I said, dubiously. By his eighth year of public school, I’d heard a lot of crap from teachers, but expected more of this particular principal. “It seems rather Three Stooges to me.”

“Oh it is!” she says. "It's very physical."

“I worry that sort of humor isn’t particularly well-received at his age.” I say.

“It is,” she says. “But it’s probably something we could work on.”

But how do you work on something like that?

***

Once, I was watching a dvd in my room - Big Love, the polygamy soap my mom and sister love. Boo comes in and asks "what's on?," just in time to see Bill Paxton's bare butt in action. I paused the dvd. "It's not for kids," I said.

"What's it called?"

"Big Love."

"I'll say," he said, walking out the door.

Oddly enough, he can joke about unmentionables with a reasonable degree of sophistication.

Up north over New Year’s, I was again watching TV, this time with some friends. That horrible ad came on about Viva Viagra. Boo drops into the room - where I sit with his friends’ mothers, for god’s sake – and grins. "I know what that would do for me," he says, "but what would it do for all of you?"

He wiggles his eyebrows at us, and then he’s gone.