Big Man

My kid lives in a very black and white world. Things are right or wrong, by instinct. People are friends or enemies, despite his very logical brain knowing that other relationships exist. Lord Smalldemort simply doesn't think that way, and it will take years of conversations and therapy to get him to think quickly enough to fake that he does. Anyone over 5 feet tall is perceived as a potential friend, which was a big motivator for my partner and I to move to the suburbs. He feels more at ease with adults than most children.

His likes:
1. Shadowiness (read: Gothic clothes, decor, trappings)
2. Spying (an imaginative game at parks where he evaluates who else is a spy)
3. Cats
4. Reptiles
5. MMO computer games (World of Warcraft, Star Wars: The Old Republic)
6. Chocolate: Chocolate Chip Pancakes, cake, ice cream
7. Star Wars
8. Science (biology, chemistry, physics, engineering)
9. Totally Spies (TV show)
10. Being in control
11. Having and wielding power


His dislikes:
1. Anything that gets in the way of any of the above
2. Other kids

Forget everything you think you know about children when you talk to him, except his age, because his language skills will fool you. He speaks like a 15 year old, but he has been on this earth for less than a decade. He is a very sensitive, anxious, fragile 8 1/2 years old. He is one of the most delicate children I have ever known, despite his strength and courage. He has felt "wrong" his entire life, and there is a lot of pain there. Through a wonderfully bizarre set of circumstances, he is at a good school with teachers and staff that care about him. He likes school...except for the kids. (See #2 under "Dislikes.")

Kids, as a general rule, are unpredictable. They are fast, noisy, imaginative, snatchy, teasing, shoving, pulling, roaring, growling, smelly little beasts. Lord Smalldemort is no exception, but he doesn't see that. His brain is very different than most. Imagine your brain as a computer: it's got a hard drive (long term storage and instructions), memory (the day to day, short term memory), video card (vision), sound card (auditory/vocal systems), and a processor (the cortex, which is a thin sheet of tissue folded up to fit inside of our heads; it's what gives the brain its wrinkled appearance.) Social behaviors and impulse control are thought to be run by a section of the cortex called the "orbitofrontal cortex," conveniently located right above our eyes. It's where the social imagination lives, where we anticipate the rewards and consequences of our actions. It is also thought to house our capacity for empathy. Speed really counts here.

You know what your kid probably has, that mine doesn't? A fast responding cortex, that talks to other parts of the cortex instead of just itself.

Imagine your child hanging up her school bag outside of the classroom. She's thinking about her pet, or you, or her favorite toy at home, and pulling out her folder to take inside to her desk. Maybe she's a little sleepy, or hungry, but she thinks about snack time in 2 hours and lunch in four hours. She thinks about her friend she is about to see, and how eager she is for recess so they can play together.

Lord Smalldemort hits her. In the face. He walks up, his backpack still on his back, and hits her. My kid hit your kid. I dislike it almost as much as you do. It infuriates me when he puts his hands on anyone, and even more so when it is random. I'm only glad she was not hurt, and I'm grateful in those moments for his lack of coordination. Here's what happened for him, if you even care at this point. I wish you would, but I understand if you don't.

He has been up since 4:30am, from the pure anxiety of existing. We put him to bed around 8pm, so he has gotten about 8 hours of the 11 hours a child should get. He sticks to himself for about an hour, window shopping on Amazon and looking up engineering videos on YouTube. We load him full of food, chat incessantly with him about making good choices, and after he brushes his teeth and gets dressed, we leave the house at 7:15am. It takes us 20 minutes to get to school, which doesn't start until 8am. We get there at 7:35am and sit outside so he can cope with the fears and anxieties he has about facing other children, and the daunting task of controlling his impulses for 8 hours. We sit outside on the bench, talking about his day, strategies for dealing with unexpected feelings, and at 7:45, we go inside and see the school social worker. I do most of the talking at his request, because by this point, he is so anxious that he can't acknowledge his feelings for fear of losing control of himself. We walk up stairs, hang up his backpack, and he goes inside to a lot of quiet stares, as he walks to his desk, uncomfortably close to the other students.

The morning my kid hit yours? I was sick. His mom did me the favor of letting me sleep in a little, and took him to school. She didn't know these little rituals, like talking on the bench or staying to talk with the social worker or walking him up to the classroom. She walked past the bench, led him in to the social worker and left, because she did not know. The waves of anxiety and fear began washing over him, sadness, then anger: anger always feels better than sadness. By the time he reached his classroom, he was enraged and had no idea why or how to let it out. His mom didn't know. She knows everything else, because that's what we do as his parents: we constantly strive to be experts on him, because it changes so quickly and we are his advocates. The bench that was comforting before school, for the last month? Now it feels scary, because you loudly confronted me, in front of him, about last Thursday when my kid hit yours.

Today, I hope he doesn't hit your kid. I hope he keeps his hands to himself, and monitors his feelings. I hope he spends the next 8 hours doing everything that we ask him to do, though 75% of it is beyond his comfortable capability. Please know that he will attempt it, and be held accountable for his performance, even after witnessing an adult loudly losing control during our decompression time.

He will be held accountable, because that is the kind of person we are raising. We both have the same goal, you know: we want to protect our kids. Your enemy, however, is not my child. The world is not so black and white. I happen to be an expert of shades on gray.

Contributing a Verse

I'm a Shakespeare fan, and like all nerds that are enthusiastic about a piece of culture, I notice when people take something that I enjoy and use it inappropriately. A popular abomination is from a line from "Romeo and Juliet" in which Juliet says "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" Romeo, as you may remember, is down below listening, hidden in the courtyard beneath Juliet's window. (There was no social media, else Romeo could have avoided the label of literature's oldest stalker by compulsively refreshing Juliet's Twitter feed from the privacy of his smart phone.) People hear the word "Where" in that sentence, and assume it means that Juliet is searching for Romeo, but they are wrong. She isn't looking for her new lover; she's lamenting that she has fallen for him. "Why are you Romeo? Why couldn't you be anyone else, rather than the son of my family's enemy? This is why we can't have nice things."

"All the world's a stage," William Shakespeare also famously wrote. People often misinterpret this phrase, when embroiled in conflict with another person or themselves, to mean "people play roles and wear masks." It's a poetic way for some folks to call others fake, or to reassure themselves that the disingenuous part they are about to play is a normal part of humans being. Just as in the first example, that's not what Shakespeare meant by that line. Sure, we have to do things against our nature throughout our lives, but the full passage of that quote is about something deeper. If you're a Clif's notes kinda cat, feel free to skip:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

-As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII

It is about how many changes we go through as we live our lives. Our priorities shift, our bodies swell and shrink. Should we live a long life, we become what we were in the beginning: toothless, helpless, and fragile. Life's scenery changes and requires new things of us, and we must adapt, or else our story is written by others who must make us fit somewhere. (Don't want to pay for the things you want, and decide to steal? That doesn't fit into the scenery of adulthood in our culture. The police will find you a place where you fit, and you will have to write the rest of your story on toilet paper that they must legally provide you.)

When you spend almost 35 years pretending that you don't exist, that life really is a long string of performances you must put on for survival, breaking the habit is hard. It's like waking after too little sleep, and it leaves me blinking in the blinding light of authenticity. To be true, to be good, to be sincere, to be present...I manage one at a time, intermittently, on my best of days. But I aspire to be all of those things, all of the time: to speak gently but intently, with a full voice given words by clarity and sincere awareness. To listen as hard to another creature as a parched tree may listen for thunder; as carefully as Kanye listens to Kanye.

DISCLAIMER: Authenticity cannot be a constant for everyone, all of the time. Boundaries must be erected to protect pursuits like employment; anyone ever fired for a Facebook status about their job can attest to that. Unfiltered thought and authenticity are not the same thing for most human beings; compassion and kindness spare our fellow travelers on this journey from every jaded, bizarre thought we have. e.g. I do not tell my stepson that a new pet he tamed on World of Warcraft looks exactly like the last 8 sporebats he tamed. I act interested. Because family counseling is expensive.

I'mma tell you, like Wu told me...

Anyone who was not a member of the Lucky Sperm Club at birth can attest to this fact: There are many levels of poverty. If non-rich people got together and released a studio album representing the full range of their financial experiences, the playlist would look a lot like this:

1. Newspaper for Coupons, feat. Sunday Only
2. Paycheck 2 Paycheck
3. Stairway to Leaven (See You Never, Restaurants)
4. Out of Deferments/Eat Your Diploma
5. My Budget is My Balance
6. Tax Refund/My Only Savings
7. Underemployed: Just The Tip
8. Paper for Plastic (Protein's A Luxury Now)
9. Pay Day Loan feat. 400%
10. The Unemployment Office of Unemployment, feat Under The Table
11. My Payment's Late...So Is My Period
12. Bad Credit feat. FICO and Bad Choices
13. Rubber Checks, Rubber Sheets
14. Crippling Debt/Ain't No Crutch For Me
15. ForeClosure (from the motion feature soundtrack "Repossession")
16. Bankruptcy: Monopoly Has No Broke Ass Token
17. Homelessness (Change Your Box, Change Your Life)