Raising Blaze (26 page)

I told her that I appreciated the offer, but I’d have to decline. If anything opened up at Blaze’s school, I said, I would appreciate it if she could consider me for that. She said she would and I knew she wouldn’t. Once again, it seemed, I was on the outside looking in.

It was the end of August, a week before school started, by the time a teacher was hired for Blaze’s class. My father and I had a hastily arranged meeting with the new teacher and Clark, the school psychologist (another one, I thought—if I lined up all the school psychologists Blaze had seen over the years, I’d have enough people for a bowling team), who pointed out that he was not just a plain old psychologist, but a
neuropsychologist
, thank you very much.

“You know,” my father said, “I really think that, for the right person, Blaze could provide a whole new perspective. He’s such a unique case, such a unique individual, that he could make a fascinating study. You could learn from him. I predict that he’ll be very interesting for you.”

Clark looked unimpressed. “I think I’ve seen just about everything,” he said.

The new teacher seemed scattered and unprepared. His room was
still in a state of chaos and he had only just received the files for the kids in his class, all of which were several inches thick.

“We’re going to do our best,” he said. “Things are a little disorganized at the moment, but we’ll all get into a good rhythm pretty soon. How does Blaze feel about starting middle school?”

“He’s anxious,” I said.

“Well, that’s natural,” the teacher said.

“You know, I’m always available,” I said. “You can call me anytime and I’m willing to come in, help out, whatever you need.”

“That’s great,” the teacher said. “I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

“What do you think?” I asked my father as we left the meeting.

“The shrink seems reasonable,” my father said. “I don’t know about the teacher.”

“Me neither,” I said.

Months later, I looked back and tried to find a few grains of optimism in Blaze’s first few weeks of seventh grade. I kept thinking that there must have been something positive in his initial experience there, there must have been some happiness in the beginning. But there wasn’t. Day one was bad and from that inauspicious start, things only got worse.

Perhaps it was ridiculously naive of me to expect the slightly fuzzy warmth of elementary school in an institution containing 900 seventh- and eighth-graders. Still, I was amazed by what seemed to be a feeling of guarded hostility among the staff at the middle school. Adults patrolled the grounds in the morning with walkie-talkies, barking at children to keep clear of the curbs, get to class, stop loitering, stop running, and report to the office. There were very few smiles. The office staff were surly. The administrators seemed as if they were waiting for the students to do something wrong, as if they were all just juvenile delinquents in training.

It was true that the kids didn’t much
look
like kids anymore. They
were a mass of long legs, big pants, lip gloss, and Nikes. They were all taller than I was. They were brushing their hair outside the bathroom and spitting into the parking lot. They had headsets, water bottles, and cell phones. They chattered in groups and clustered around the flagpole. They didn’t say good-bye to their mothers as they quickly hopped out of their cars.

Standing in the middle of this twelve- and thirteen-year-old throng with my son, I could remember what it felt like to be in middle school and be one of a hundred little dramas unfolding every morning between homeroom and first period. I could even remember thinking, then, that I had no perspective, that everything seemed oversized, physically and emotionally. I looked forward to being able to look back on the experience with the viewpoint of an adult. What I saw now, from that adult viewpoint, was a group of children who were not children and not adolescents. They were in that perilous nether region that had made me so uncomfortable when I’d passed through it myself. Yet, it seemed to me that the grown-ups around them treated them all as if they had already metamorphosed into young adults and should behave accordingly. How could you demand that of them, I thought, when you could still see the shape of their children’s bodies just under their skins—when, only three months ago, they were still considered kids?

Blaze stood outside of all this, moving in his own space and time. Would there be anyone here, I wondered, who could reach him?

From the outset, the answer to that question seemed to be a resounding no.

In the first week, Blaze’s teacher reported that he was “concerned” about Blaze’s anxiety over fire drills and other loud noises. I explained that Blaze had been hung up on fire drills since kindergarten and that the fire drill issue was something that had been discussed at length in every IEP meeting and was written all over Blaze’s file.
Blaze tended to wander off, his teacher said, and he was “concerned” about safety issues. Me too, I told the teacher. Blaze had a pattern of testing his boundaries this way, I told the teacher. He would see how far he could go before he would be brought back. This was all in his file, I said, and I’d discussed it at the meeting, didn’t he remember? Blaze’s teacher was “concerned” that Blaze wasn’t taking notes in his science class. He can’t, I said. He can’t look at a blackboard, listen to a lecture, and copy notes. He just can’t do that. That’s part of the reason he’s in special ed to begin with. For four days out of every week, Blaze’s school was on a “block schedule,” which meant three two-hour class periods a day. Blaze couldn’t handle the two-hour blocks, his teacher said. He got up, walked around. I’m not surprised, I said. Can
you
handle a two-hour block? I didn’t even have classes that long when I was in college.

“There are other programs in this district that might be better for Blaze,” the teacher said to me after one of these conversations.

“Really? Like what?”

“Well, there’s a regional program in one of the other middle schools.”

“You mean the SED class?” I asked him. “The one for the emotionally disturbed kids?”

“Well, uh, that is, um, the program.”

“Forget it,” I told him. “Never.”

I didn’t even bother trying to figure out why this man would recommend a program like this to me, nor did I attempt to explain why I would never place Blaze there. Although I didn’t think he was a bad guy, I had no respect for him as a teacher. After a career as a businessman, he’d suddenly decided to start teaching and this was only his second year in the classroom. He dressed with a studied casualness that came off as rather goofy and he had an awkward “good old boy” attitude that didn’t inspire much confidence. I didn’t feel that he knew
what he was doing and his instincts weren’t that good, besides. I sensed that he was practicing on my kid. Maya was rather less intellectual in her assessment of him.

“He looks and acts like a giant Easter bunny,” she said.

That was about the size of it.

I didn’t have too much time to dwell on his incompetence, because a mere six weeks after the school year began, just as Blaze was starting to form an attachment to him, the Easter bunny quit, throwing his class into total chaos. The Easter bunny’s replacement was Mrs. M., a middle-aged woman who had been teaching for too long and whose attitude had the unmistakable odor of resentment at having been drafted into a position she clearly didn’t want. Her antipathy toward Blaze was immediate and irrevocable. To be sure, I wasn’t an objective observer, but I had come to know many teachers throughout Blaze’s school career. I hadn’t liked all of them and I was sure that many of them hadn’t liked me much, either. Among them, they had been warm, cool, officious, loving, competent, gifted, inexperienced, hostile, and gregarious. But Mrs. M. was the first teacher I had met who simply didn’t like my child. Blaze, sensitive in the extreme, picked up on her feelings almost immediately and responded in kind. He regularly exited his classroom and refused to come back inside. He screamed, he carried on and generally acted like a mental patient. Usually, this got him exactly what he wanted: a get-out-of-jail-free pass from class into the office of the school psychologist.

After she’d been teaching Blaze’s class for two weeks, Mrs. M. told me, “I’ve tried everything with him and nothing works. He won’t stay in class and I can’t follow him out. I don’t really know what to do with him. He’s uncooperative and resistant. I’ve tried everything.”

I thought,
two weeks
and she’s tried everything? I started getting calls from Clark, the school psychologist who had indeed taken an interest in Blaze, although not at all the kind I wanted.

“We’re very concerned about Blaze’s behavior,” Clark said. “His anxiety level is very high and it’s impeding his ability to function in
the classroom. I think he has some serious difficulties. Have you thought about medication? I think this is clearly a case where medication would be beneficial.”

Trying to be as polite as possible, I explained my entire philosophy on and history with the psychotropic drug issue. Clark wasn’t having any of it. He was fairly convinced that Blaze was hearing voices, seeing flashing lights, experiencing major panic attacks and, although he never said it, I knew he was thinking psychosis. I began to panic myself. I knew very well that Blaze’s many visits to therapists had only helped his ability to manipulate a situation. He was telling Clark what he thought Clark wanted to hear. If it got him out of class and out of working, all the better. What made it all so complicated, and what I tried to explain to Clark, was that Blaze really
was
different, really didn’t fit in, really couldn’t function in the half-assed excuse for a special-education class he was in. He wasn’t faking
all
of it.

“He told me that he heard voices,” Clark said. “He said that he could hear his kindergarten teacher telling him to get on line. He said he wasn’t going to listen to her.”

“What were you doing when he told you this?” I asked.

“Blaze was describing what he felt like when he came to class in the mornings.”

“Exactly.” I took a deep breath and tried to calm my racing heart. It was so very difficult to speak quietly and with some semblance of control, but I knew that if I screwed up this conversation, I wouldn’t have any allies at all in Blaze’s school environment. “Look, Clark,” I said, “I know why Blaze says those things.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Blaze’s kindergarten year was a time of major transition for him and it was also kind of rough. He didn’t have the easiest time with his kindergarten teacher. Blaze has a steel-trap memory—he’s got every experience locked in there. When he tells you he hears his kindergarten teacher, he’s making an
association
between that year and
this one. This transition to seventh grade is just as difficult as the one to kindergarten and this is his way of equating the two. He’s not really hearing voices in the way you’re thinking. You know, Blaze’s handicapping condition is ‘speech and language impaired.’ He doesn’t communicate in a conventional way. I’m telling you what he means.”

“I don’t know,” Clark said. “He seemed pretty sure that he could hear somebody speaking. And that’s the language he used:
I hear her.
Usually kids won’t say that unless they really can hear something.”

“Yes, but Blaze isn’t a usual kid,” I said.

“He sees flashing lights,” Clark said. “He said he can’t be in the classroom because of the flashing lights.”

“Well, that’s just nonsense,” I said. “It’s an excuse to leave the room and it obviously works. There is a light that flashes when the fire alarm goes off and that’s where the flashing light thing started, but there’s no way he’s just seeing lights.”

“I don’t know,” Clark said.

“Well, he doesn’t hear voices and see flashing lights at
home
,” I said. “I can tell you that.” My voice had the tinny ring of petulance. I was starting to lose it.

“Well, Blaze is clearly not as anxious at home,” Clark said. “I really think you should consider medication. There are so many medications available now, especially for anxiety…”

I realized that I was fundamentally exhausted. I searched, but I couldn’t find the reserves of energy I needed to try to convince Clark that Blaze was not emotionally disturbed, that I was not in denial about his problems, and that what he really needed was not medication but a decent teacher and program, similar to those he’d had last year. I had been struggling through this morass for eight years. Every encounter with a new psychologist, administrator, or teacher had required me to refocus my speech and attitude. It had been like learning fifty new dialects of the same language. I didn’t know if I could attain fluency one more time. Clark didn’t seem particularly interested in changing his point of view, either.

At home, my relationship with Blaze was starting to take on an odd new shape. I often found myself angry with him. I felt he wasn’t trying, wasn’t even making an attempt to fit in. He was also amassing a disturbing collection of physical tics. He fidgeted with the zipper on his pants (“Totally unacceptable,” I told him), he chewed on his lower lip until it bled (“You’ll scar yourself,” I told him) and—the worst one of all—he constantly licked his hand and touched it to his forehead (“Do you know how insane that looks?” I asked him. “You have to stop that.”). The crazier he acted, I told Blaze, the crazier they were going to think he was at school and they would start treating him like a nut. Did he want that? No? Well, neither did I.

“What’s with the flashing lights?” I snapped at him. “You’ve got to stop telling people you’re seeing flashing lights.”

“But, Mom—”

“And you
cannot
just keep getting up and walking out of the room.”

“But, Mom, I can’t stay there. I just can’t stay there.”

“You have to try, Blaze. You have to.”

Soon after Mrs. M. told me that she’d “tried everything” with Blaze, I began to think about retaining an educational advocate. None of the school skills I thought I had were working now and every time I tried to convince Clark or Mrs. M. that Blaze really was all right, my son did his best to make me into a complete liar. We were about to reach an impasse, I thought, and I was going to need a lawyer. I called around and got a referral from the mother of one of Maya’s violin students (Maya had recently begun teaching private lessons full time). I liked the sound of Dr. Jean on the phone. She was very smart and had a wicked sense of humor. But she certainly wasn’t cheap. Dr. Jean’s services ran $125 per hour, right around the going rate for educational advocates. At that point, though, I had decided that I would spend whatever money it took to get Blaze into a better situation and if that ran out, I would have to borrow the rest.