Monday, October 25, 2010
Fresh Writing: Making Change
My seven-year-old daughter Josephine is in the back seat, buckle tight over her lap and she clutches her brand new count-down-to-Christmas calendar. Dakota ate Jo’s first count-down-to-Christmas calendar this morning—chewed right through the 11th, 18th, 22nd, 13th, and the 10th.
That dog can’t count.
Dakota is a big old black lab and she belongs to my boyfriend who is in the middle of a crazy nasty divorce. Since I work from home, he's always leaving her at my place where she craps in the yard, pukes in the house and sleeps wherever she flops. That dog snores so loud, the floorboards shake.
I don’t say that I don’t want to take care of the dog. I'm trying to get along and show how I'm flexible and compassionate. It's a new relationship.
"I will get you a new one, I promise," I yelled as Jo sobbed great big tears over the trashed calendar.
Total fucking chaos.
An hour ago, on the ride home from school, my son threw up. One minute, he’s listening to the Bee Gee's high pitch Night Fever (disco is making a come back) while at the same time talking non-stop about a kid at school who keeps pushing him to fight.
Every single day it's the same thing, this kid can't seem to keep his damn hands to himself and the nuns at this school just don’t think the situation requires an intervention. Over and over again they say it's just “boys being boys.”
All of a sudden, conversation stopped and Spence got a strange look on his face.
“I feel sick, Mom,” he said.
I slapped at the automatic buttons on the door and got the window down just in time for Spencer to get his head out.
Jo screamed in that way she has, like a cat tossed into the tub.
“GROSS!” she added at the end of her long, tormented wail.
I pulled over, told her to please be quiet and went around and helped Spencer out of the car.
In the pouring rain, rush hour traffic weaving to get around us, Spencer heaved up a bunch of orange strangeness on a side yard of lava rocks. Orange on orange.
“What the heck did you eat, Sweets?” I asked, as if it mattered.
“Carrots,” Spencer said.
“Carrots?”
“I hated what they had for lunch so I just ate carrots from the salad cart,” he said, wiping the back of his hand over his mouth.
“On top of everything else I hate about that school, the lunch sucks!”
Spencer grabbed his belly and bent over. I rubbed circles on his back and looked up at the sky.
Winter rain soaked us both, top down but what I could I do? I had to wait.
I wiped at my glasses with one hand while my son let go another round.
From where she sat in the back of the car, Jo looked like a fish—great big eyes taking in everything.
Spencer was a student at a place called the Montessori Earth School, a tiny hamlet of a place run by a handful of Franciscan nuns who seemed to have the best intentions but the worst possible execution.
This year Spencer was being threatened, bullied and taunted by the one boy and then a another group of boys threatened to set him on fire. The plan was to douse him with lighter fluid and then set him aflame with one tossed match.
It's a mother's worst nightmare.
Spencer got the tip off from a pal in Lego-tectronics only the woman in charge of the program insisted the threat could not be proven. She claimed the whole “fire threat” had been manufactured by the Lego pal, who was under some kind of special psychiatric care.
After several emergency meetings, where I went from being an investigative reporter attempting to get the facts straight to a crazed mother on the brink of total fit, I found myself immobilized by confusion. What to do? Who to believe? What decision should I make?
The latest development, just this week, was how a troubled kid brought two guns to school—air guns—and of course, it was Spencer who flushed the guns out and turned the kid in.
The woman in charge of the program told me, “Spencer isn’t going to be very popular if he looks in cubbies that belong to other children.”
“I think we are missing the point,” I argued, maintaining a thin grip on my patience. “What the heck is going on at your school? What are you going to do?”
“Well,” she said, “he will be suspended for a week but you know boys will be boys. It’s important to have compassion for this particular child, he’s been through a lot.”
She suggested I come in, again, so we could talk about it with the nuns.
Finally Spencer stopped throwing up and I got him back into the car.
“I’m tired, Mom,” he said.
“I’ll get you home and to bed,” I said.
“That’s good,” he said.
The rest of the drive was quiet, not even music and Spencer leaned against the side door. His eyes were closed.
Jo said nothing, not a word.
I got us all home, put Spencer in bed and that’s when Jo started screaming about her count-down-to-Christmas calendar. It was in shreds all over the dining room floor. Dakota was flopped on the living room rug. She thumped her big tail, happy we were home.
~
It rains hard enough to turn the road into a sheet of reflected headlights. It’s five p.m. and everyone wants to go home. People honk their horns, impatient. Traffic jam. Jo and me are stuck in the slow lane and I worry about Spencer, sick in bed.
I adjust the mirror to see my girl with the count-down-to-Christmas calendar on her lap.
“Whatcha thinking?” I ask.
“About Spencer,” she says.
“What about Spence?” I ask.
“He doesn’t do well with orange food,” she says, a quality of the definitive in her voice.
“What?”
“Don’t you remember?” she says. “The fish crackers and then the orange juice?”
I chew on my lip and think back.
Spencer has thrown up, several times, over the last few weeks but I hadn’t really connected the dots. When you have kids, it’s like being in a blender. Life seems to happen in a blur of action, action, action—one day melds into the next. From first thing in the morning to late at night there is just so much to do: homework, housework, food to make, shopping to take care of and the extras which include sick kids and old dogs and new boyfriends. Most days, I can’t keep it all straight but Jo’s paying attention. She’s sorting it out. 
As we continue to wait in the traffic and the rain, it hits me. I can pull off this busy street, take a back route and get us home without waiting another minute.
And, I can tell my boyfriend to take care of his own damn dog since I don’t really have the time.
And, I do not have to go to one more meeting where I’ll be told “boys will be boys."
I can pull my son out of that school.
I can make a change. I can make many changes. It’s up to me.
I'm in charge. It's my life.
I ease the car out of the slow lane, make a quick u-turn in the middle of the standstill traffic and tell Jo to “hold on tight.”
3 Comments:
Catholic School huh?
Gee, what a surprise....
Tell Spence I said hello.
Suzy
hey stranger! Great to see you and of course, a Catholic school!!!
Hey Jen,
Glad you decided to take that u-turn.
Take care of Spence and Jo....
Best,
~Varada
http://naari-thewoman.com
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