Kid Amnesiac

It has come to my attention in recent months that many more people than I knew are medicated for anxiety. Whenever I learn of someone who is benefiting from psycho-pharmacology, my thoughts inevitably turn inwards.

“How can X be on meds and I’m not? I’m pretty tightly wound and neurotic myself. Is this something I need?”

These questions in turn lead me to various online quizzes, books, and once to an unofficial chat with a trained psychologist. The survey questions never change, nor do my results vary. I am high strung and definitely more anxious than average, but I do not cross the line into clinical. Sometimes this is a relief : “Yay! I’m OK!” Sometimes it feels more like a burden:”This is what I get. Forever.” The vast majority of the time it’s not something I think about at all.

Until it pops up with Simon. Last Thursday night he put on a clinic for anxiety in the school-aged child. It began with a sheet he brought home that looked like it was for me to fill out. He couldn’t tell me exactly when it was due or what I was supposed to write, and when I pressed him, he confessed that he couldn’t hear Ms. R and was afraid to raise his hand and ask her to repeat herself.

“Why would you be afraid to raise your hand, Simon?”

“Because what if she thought I should have heard the first time and clips me down for asking again?”

We’ve been through this song and dance before. The worst thing about in-class behavior charts for a kid like Simon is that his terror of ever doing anything wrong inhibits him from fully participating in class. And I have to say that while I shared Simon’s perfectionism and anxiety at this age, my raging extroversion helped compensate a little. I loved socializing with my friends, and if that meant that excessive chit-chatting cost me an “A” in conduct, it was a price I was happy to pay. This is not the case for my more introverted son.

Back to the discussion at hand. As Simon confesses this, he dissolves into an absolute puddle of tears. He is clearly distressed that (1) he’s afraid if he asks his teacher to repeat herself he’ll get clipped down; (2) he’s afraid if he doesn’t get the right information to me he’ll get clipped down; (3) he’s afraid I’m upset with him for not raising his hand and getting the information. By now, any suggestion that he could or should ask his teacher to clarify things he doesn’t understand or cannot hear is interpreted as a direct rebuke, which leads to more—Yup! You guesssed it—anxiety.

We have now arrived at the kitchen sink portion of the evening. This is the time when anything else lingering in the back of Simon’s mind gets tossed into the air and forms a funnel cloud of fear and misery. It happens that Simon also noticed children turning in homework papers when he did not. Obviously, this meant that Simon was somehow missing out on assignments, not getting his work done, and was going to be in BIG TROUBLE.

More tears. I get out his teacher’s newsletters and patiently and calmly show him the complete list of homework assigned to date. We’ve done it all. I can show him this. He can read the list and remember doing it all himself. We can check his daily journal and verify if/when any additional work was assigned. We find nothing. But the funnel cloud is still swirling, and he’s not convinced.

Thankfully, Ms. R is online in the evenings, makes tons of time for her students, and is just generally a super hard worker and conscientious teacher. So I write her asking about the parent sheet and why Simon appears to not be turning in the same work his peers are. She responds immediately that Simon is always welcome to raise his hand and ask for clarifications if he needs them. Further, Simon is not seeing peers turn in homework he forgot about it; he’s watching his peers turn in homework late that he already completed.

Simon’s relief was palpable, and my conversation with Ms. R continued after he went to bed. She told me that he’s shy, that he does not raise his hand to volunteer information in class, and that she can see his anxiety. She thinks a chat with her will help, as will time, as will dividing the class up into small groups now that she has their reading and math levels assessed.

Nevertheless, I found myself anxiously reading about anxiety in school age children last week. I must have read through 10 check-lists on identifying red flags that signal your child might have an anxiety disorder. Not surprisingly, it turns out that Simon is a lot like his mother: he’s more anxious than average, but he’s not clinical.

I was recently reminded of this happy fact when I left his daily folder, the one with his reading log, homework, and personal journal, on the dining room table Wednesday morning. I was on my way out to run errands when I saw it out of the corner of my eye and immediately pictured Simon in a fit of hysterics in class.

Anxiously, I drove all the way to 28th and Kentucky, 10 miles in the opposite direction of my errand, to bring the folder to him. At which time I was greeted by an amused an unstressed child.

“I’m OK, Mama. Because of open house, we didn’t have any homework to turn in. So I figured today was an OK day to forget.”

Ms. Ray and I were equally pleasantly surprised by this rational line of thinking. What goes unanswered, of course, is why I—knowing there was no homework to turn in—found it necessary to drive 10 miles in a fit of panic over a 2nd grade folder myself.

Note to self: When trying to de-escalate anxiety in your child, do try to de-escalate your own anxiety first.

I’m no fan of rigid gender stereotypes in general, but I particularly dislike how color coded things have gotten. It seems like almost everyone I know who opted to learn her baby’s gender before birth did it so she* could “get the nursery ready” or “shop for clothes before the baby arrives.” After all, if you don’t have a mound of pink clothes sitting in a room with pink or pink-striped walls, how will you know that your baby is a girl? It’s as if pink’s association with girls means that all girls must drown in it at all times.

Beyond the social and marketing facets of this trend, part of my disdain comes from not much liking pink in its paler shades. Or at least not liking it on me. Pale or Barbie shades of pink are decidedly not my color, nor are they the best colors for many of the girls I see wearing them. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a professional photograph of a young girl looking feverish or ill in the shade and thought to myself, “You should have put her in orange or green.”

The second reason I hate the pink-blue divide is because it is as rigid as it is irrational. Up until a hundred years ago, both sexes wore all colors. Then, around 1910, it was decided that pink, as a shade of red, was the perfect color for boys. Girls, meanwhile, were deemed more suited to the dainty and delicate color that is pale blue. The two colors didn’t switch places until the 1940s.

And the third reason I despise the pink-blue divide is because it forces parents to steer half their kids away from a color many have an innate fondness for. My nephew Nathan liked pink when he was little; he even had a pink birthday cake for his second or third birthday. Simon liked it too, choosing pink water shoes for summer camp when he was 3. But since the camp was public and older kids would be there, I had to talk him into yellow ones. The situation left me angry and resentful not just at Society, which had put me in this ridiculous situation, but also at myself for acquiescing.

By the time Simon was five, he had gotten the memo. Pink is for girls. Pink is NOT for boys. This message meant that even though his best friends were disproportionately girls, he still felt the need to put distance between him and their signature color.

Why I am writing about this now? Because this happened:

That’s Manchester City’s Yaya Toure, an absolute marauding beast in midfield, at this summer’s World Cup. He’s sporting the Puma trickster cleat, where the right is pink and the left is blue. The mismatched-on-purpose cleat was Puma’s big marketing push for summer 2014 and was designed to capitalize on World Cup.

Around the same time, this also happened:

That would be Gareth Bale sporting the Real Madrid’s third kit. Real Madrid is consistently one of the top 3 clubs in the world, and Gareth Bale is the guy who joined last year and helped them win Champion’s League.

Now I realize that NFL players have taken to wearing pink for breast cancer awareness events. It’s possible—I can’t confirm it—that Real Madrid’s pink kit is part of a breast cancer awareness campaign. The difference, however, is that while some American football teams have donned pink jerseys or arm-bands for a day or month, these cleats and kits are for an entire year.

What’s more, they are for sale to men, women, boys, and girls, and I am beginning to see some spill-over. One of the soccer games we watched last Saturday was Louisville Soccer Alliance’s (LSA) U-10 Team 1 vs. Javanon U-10 Team 1. For those of you not from Louisville, I’ll quickly explain that LSA is to Javanon what David was to Goliath. LSA accepts and tries to develop all players and costs around $350 per season. Javanon has incredibly competitive tryouts (that you have to pay $40-$50 for!) and costs well over $1000 for the same.

A Javanon team is typically composed of the equivalent of 10 of our top players. This past Saturday, as Javanon was comprehensively dismantling our team, one player in particular stood out: He was tall, very slim, had the best footwork on the field, and was wearing hot pink cleats. I’m pretty sure he was doing to be cool and to stand out on the field, not as a statement in support of breast cancer research!

As we were walking back to our cars after our games ended, I noticed a team of high-school aged boys walking to the fields from the parking lot. They were all decked out in a kit that featured a hot pink jersey with a large navy vertical stripe on it and matching hot pink shorts. Again, this was not a one-time stunt; this was the uniform for at least the season if not a full year.

I don’t pretend that this means the pink-blue divide is going away any time soon. But it does give me and others some wiggle room. Sunday afternoon Simon attended the birthday party of his friend Katie. She had pink birthday hats for her guests, almost all of whom were girls. When I went to put the hat on Simon, he blanched.

“Hey buddy!” I said to him, “You know who wore pink and blue cleats this summer? Yaya Toure and Sergio Aguero. You know who’s wearing pink jerseys this season? Gareth Bale and Christiano Ronaldo. Remember that kid from Javanon that schooled you all wearing pink cleats? You telling me they wear pink but you’re too cool for it?”

Reader: He wore the hat.

*Yes, I realize that babies are born with two biological parents. However, I have rarely if ever heard a dad tell me that he was concerned about nursery and wardrobe color schemes in pre-birth. In fact, in my incredibly unscientific polling, most of the men were up for waiting until birth to learn the sex of the child; it was the mothers who wanted to know ahead of time.

Brandeis offers rewards to students each month who exemplify a certain characteristic. One month it might be “generosity”, another it might be “conscientiousness.” I’m nominating Simon for the “self control” award. Actually, I’m unilaterally awarding it to him, and I defy anyone to challenge me.

This is a kid who has been corrected at school twice in over two years: Once for not raising his hand when he needed help, and once for sending a ball over a fence at recess. That’s it. There is no talking in the halls, no loudness at lunch, no not finishing work, nothing else at all ever. In fact, I have suggested to him more than once that he might want to take a break from perfect behavior, let loose a little, and realize that the world doesn’t end if he gets a rare and gentle reprimand. It’s like talking to a wall.

To give you an example of his preternatural self control, I offer two examples from the past two days:

1. Tuesday the counselor came to visit his class. At the end of her presentation, she handed out Laffy Taffy to everyone. Simon declined (I hope politely) his piece because, “I know I can’t have anything sticky because of my sealants.” While it is true that his dentist told him to avoid sticky foods to keep his sealants in place, it is also true that most kids his age would have taken the candy and hoped for the best.

I know I would have! In fact, I was over 30 when I pulled a crown out of my mouth by chewing a coffee nip, which must be the stickiest candy ever invented. We will not discuss how much Laffy Taffy I have consumed in my day; let’s just say it does not cast me in a favorable light, and I have sealants to protect, too!

2. Also Tuesday, Simon did half of his homework, took a break for dinner, and came down with a terrible stomach ache before he finished eating. Two hours later, he went to bed still hurting and with unfinished homework on the dining room table. I told him not to worry about it and assured him that I’d either explain what happened to his teacher or he could complete the assignment in the morning if he felt better and had time.

At 7:00 a.m. this morning, Simon woke up, went downstairs on his own, sat at the dining room table, and got back to work. He had a get out of jail free card on the homework front and, as with the taffy, he didn’t take it.

The school award for self control won’t be given out until next winter spring. The winner in our house, however, has already been declared, and he won it by a wide margin.

Picture the scene. It’s about 10:30 p.m. Simon is upstairs in bed, and Matt and I are downstairs in the living room. He’s sorting electronics parts and I’m collating PTA flyers while we both keep an eye on the Arsenal Champions League qualifying game.

Suddenly, I think I hear footsteps. A few seconds later, I hear a door creak open followed by the unmistakable sound of Simon thudding around upstairs. I expect he’s awoken to use the restroom and don’t think much about it until the thud-thudding gets louder and more erratic and is accompanied by crying sounds.

Matt and I look at each other and simultaneously declare “He’s up!” Matt then runs upstairs to help settle Simon down.

What he finds is pretty creepy. Simon is running from room to room in a confused frenzy with is eyes open but clearly in a haze. Matt correctly guesses that Simon is in search of the bathroom and tries to guide him there. Simon continues to cry and resist, and my own suspicions about the odd sounds coming from upstairs are confirmed when I hear Matt say,

“Come on buddy. I don’t think you’re really awake.”

He was sleep-walking. Even when Matt led him to the bathroom, Simon tried to turn around and run into another room. In his sleep disturbed state, he knew he needed to go to the bathroom, but he couldn’t figure out where the bathroom was (even when he was in it!) or how to use it.

Matt firmly but gently guided Simon where he needed to go. Once he had relieved himself, Simon found his own way back to bed—eyes wide open—got back in bed, and immediately resumed normal sleep.

Matt and I disagree on the nature of this event. Whereas he thinks night terrors, which Simon has also had, are much creepier, I’m putting my money on nocturnal perambulations for the dubious honor. Where we both is agree is on the importance of reminding Simon to use the restroom before he falls asleep at night.

It has come to my attention that I haven’t been doing a good job of helping Simon become more independent. This is largely the result of his being an only child; there wasn’t anyone younger or needier to divert me away from him when he was two or three, so I’ve kept on doing certain things for him that parents of more than one child would have stopped doing long ago.

My first hint came when Simon returned from a sleepover with his friend Rhyse earlier this summer. Rhyse has two older sisters, and Simon adores the whole family. He also noticed some differences in their household, like the fact that the kids all get their own snacks instead of asking their mother to do this for them. When he told me about this, I blanched with the recognition that in some respects I’m babying Simon. I explained to him that when there are other kids on the house, moms and dads can’t do everything for you anymore. Kids with siblings are more independent at an earlier age than most onlies.

“Wow,” Simon replied. “Katie P—- must have been independent when she was, like, three.”

Katie P—- has four younger siblings, so he’s probably not far off!

But just because I can continue doing many things for Simon doesn’t mean I should. In fact, I’m pretty sure I should absolutely stop doing many things for Simon. Not because I mind doing things for him—far from it, I love it—but because I’m robbing him of the confidence and satisfaction that comes from being able to do for yourself.

In case I needed reminding, a second prod arrived yesterday. Simon was supposed to bring a book to school for afternoon independent reading. We decided the Ken Jennings Junior Genius Guide to Outer Space was a good choice, and I told Simon I’d put it in his back-pack. Then Tuesday morning rolled around and I realized I forgot to pack it after we were already at the bus stop. Simon was quite upset, and that afternoon I asked him how it went.

“What happened when you didn’t have a book in the afternoon, Simon?”

“I checked one out from class. And I told Mrs. R that you forgot to pack my book for me.”

“And what did she say?” [Note, I’m expecting to hear that she reassured him it was OK, she wasn’t mad, etc.]

“She told me that I should have remembered and put it in my backpack myself.”

Hm. I think Ms. R has a point, and I told Simon as much. Yesterday we packed up his bag together, with me asking what should be in it and Simon putting everything together and double-checking. Baby steps.

Yesterday I also pushed him in another way.  Simon was unclear about his homework for Tuesday night. He tore out a page of math to do at home, then worried he misheard Ms. R. By Wednesday morning he was in tears at the prospect that he did extra homework and would be clipped down for it. Because that’s what teachers do: they punish you for doing extra homework. Especially when they have already told your mom that you are a great boy  who is off to an awesome start in second grade.

Old Jessica would have emailed the teacher to give her a heads-up about the bundle of nerves coming her way. Current Jessica still wanted to do that, but resisted the urge. This was small enough that even though it seemed huge to Simon (and even though he was engaging in some catastrophic thinking about it), I decided he should handle it. It turns out the page wasn’t due. Now Simon needs to figure out what do with it between now and when it is due. He’s going to talk to Ms. Ray and figure that out for himself, too.

Not because he can, but because he should. I also think that gaining confidence and competence will go far in managing Simon’s occasional bursts of nerves.

Second grade started Wednesday this week and brought with it a bundle of mixed emotions including trepidation, concern, anxiousness, and fear. It’s probably the worst I’ve felt about the beginning of a school year since the early days of preschool.

There were two primary reasons for this. The first, as I’ve mentioned before, is the dearth of familiar boys in his class this year. The second is that this year’s teacher has a reputation for being very strict with the children and is more “old school” than teachers he’s had in the past.

Three days in, I’m still quite concerned about the boy situation. Simon has described them thusly:

“A likes to goof off. B is pretty good, but his friendship with A might get him into trouble. C and D are NOT good students. They get in trouble all the time. E is just disgusting, even for a boy. I don’t know who would want to be his friend. F, G, and H seem shy.”

I believe him, and I’m hanging my hopes on F-H and possibly splitting B off from A unless A gets with the program. The saddest thing I heard him say? “I think I’m in the badly behaved boys class.”

So that’s going to be fun! The boy Simon was paired with from last year, Apurv, did indeed move over the summer. As random luck would have it, it increasingly looks as though the preponderance of boys assigned to his class are the types Simon actively avoids. There’s no sugar-coating this situation: Whereas last year Simon had five close boy friends and several more friendly acquaintances in his class, this year I’m going to be doing good if he can land more than one or two.

I sure hope Olivia, Rayna, and Brooklyn don’t decide that all boys are icky this year, because Simon is going to need their friendship.

Happily, my second concern has more or less vanished. Mrs. R is in fact strict. I had heard it before, and Simon told me so himself. I had also heard that Mrs. R was introverted and had a rather flat tone with the children. I.e. She’s not perky, she’s not an entertainer, and she’s not overly motherly.

I prepared Simon for some of this beforehand. It seemed to me that Simon of all people should understand introversion and a teacher needing time to get to know and warm up to her students. I tackled the perky/motherly bit by explaining that we all express care in different ways. Some people are verbally affectionate, others are physically affectionate, some like to shop for those they care for, and still others show they care through hard work.

Mrs. R had adorable puppy folders for all the children in her class, a theme that was also found on desk labels, her door, and various other spots in the room. She must have spent hours on these preparations, and I explained to Simon that this is how she shows her care and devotion. As with introversion, this is something Simon should understand. Both of his grandmothers are the types who show their love the most through their actions. They don’t smother him with kisses or spoil him with presents: What they do is show up for soccer and tennis games, take him to Putt Putt, help with school work, and otherwise spare no effort in being a part of his life.

When it came to the strict thing, I drew from my own past. I can name several teachers right now who scared the pants off of me when I first met them. These were teachers I was convinced were going to yell at me, flunk me, and otherwise make my life miserable. Every last one of them ended up being a favorite. They ran tight ships, let me concentrate on my work, were consistent, and appreciated my efforts.

And so it was with many years of school under my belt that I was able to confidently tell Simon that strict is his friend. Strict is what will keep his class from being too noisy or unruly for him. Strict will keep the badly behaved boys from running amok in class. He was made for strict!

I got confirmation of all of this today. After school, Simon wanted to show me his classroom. I was mindful that this was the first Friday of the school year and that Mrs. R might well want and need to have some peace and quiet. So I made Simon knock on her door and ask if it was OK for us to duck in for a few minutes.

I left 20-30 minutes later. Mrs. R had things to say—most of them about Simon. She praised his reading, his first writing assignment (“beautiful work, and so much for the first of second grade!”), his math assessment today, his friendliness, his helpfulness, and his obedience. It was almost more than I could take. She told me, and this is verbatim, “I haven’t found anything he isn’t good at yet. He’s just a wonderful child and a pleasure to have in class.”

I think I became welcome by association, for this famously quiet person then went on to tell me all about her class preparations and summer vacation. She could not have been more engaged and welcoming, and it was clear to me that she’s going to look after my boy.

Strict is Simon’s friend, literally. Now if we could just get a few boys to straighten up, we’d really have something to work with this year.