Playing hooky

The day started with a phone call from my sister-in-law. My mother-in-law’s pathology reports came back all clear. They seem to have got all of the cancer and it doesn’t seem to have spread. This is very good news. She may go home today or maybe tomorrow.

• • • • •

The drive to the psychologist’s office is beautiful, past rolling gentlemen’s farms (in that they appear more scenic than functional). Only once were we stuck behind farm equipment.

We arrive at a slightly dumpy building that looks as if it started out as a white house and then had all kinds of other buildings tacked onto it. We head down to the basement, twist around, and enter the waiting room, a long room with five doors off of it. All but one with a twig and silk flower wreath on it is open. There is no receptionist, no evidence of a phone. There are empty coathooks on the walls, which are painted a soothing blue and hung with generic hotel art, the kind where everything matches. AJ likes the wire Eiffel tower sitting on the bookshelf. He spurns the shelf of kids books and walks straight to the psychology books on the other end. He pulls of a book called “You Mean I’m Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!” because he likes the title. He leafs through it, puts it back and takes off “365 Wacky, Wonderful Ways to Get Your Children to Do What You Want.” I think the title looks ominous, but AJ likes the cartoons of kids doing crazy things and parents talking baby talk.

When AJ’s done checking out the bookshelf, he notices a small set of Froebel blocks on a table. He brings them over to where I am sitting and builds first a building and then an airplane. Then we play a game where we take turns adding blocks to a structure. He decides it needs to be symmetrical. I wonder if that’s smart. We talk about his grandmother, who is maybe coming home from the hospital today. He asks if she will have oxygen and I say no, but she might still have some tubes because her wound is still healing and they need to get the extra blood out of there. He wonders if she has enough platelets. Is that smart? Maybe. What about when he looks at the small oval shadows on the fluorescent ceiling lights and says, “All those bugs were just attracted to the light and they got stuck and they died there. Maybe they got too hot.”

“Maybe, but fluorescent lights don’t get that hot – it’s one of the things that’s good about them. Maybe they just got stuck and couldn’t get out.”

“And maybe they starved. What do bugs eat?”

“It depends on the bugs.”

“Oh, yeah. Like fleas eat blood. And mosquitoes. What do flies eat?”

“They eat our leftovers. I’m not sure what else. And you know what dung beetles eat.”

He grins. It’s so easy to win over a 2nd grade boy. Just talk about poop.

I am nervous for him . Then the psychologist comes out to say hello and she reminds me of a slightly subdued Kathy Griffin. This is strangely reassuring. She takes a few minutes to set up for him and gives me a form to fill out as she and AJ disappear behind the wreathed door. The white noise machines in the waiting room drown out all but the echoes of voices except when I hear her reading number patterns. I know he is thinking of what comes next and I try to telegraph the answers to him, not because I care so much about the test results, but because I care a lot about him feeling good about himself. He seems to be struggling with that lately, largely, I think, as a result of the stupid school test. I’ll have to hate them a little for that.

Yesterday, when we were talking about his lying, I asked, “Why did you tell me you’d done your homework when you didn’t?” It’s a question I probably shouldn’t have asked. It’s the kind of question I used to hate hearing from my own parents. But in that instant, I just really wanted to know. AJ replied, “I don’t know. Because I’m dumb.” I looked at him. He didn’t look like he was joking. He looked miserable.

This morning, when AJ was working on his homework, I asked him a different question. I asked him if the reason he hadn’t been doing his homework was because it was boring. He said yes. I said summarizing your reading is pretty boring after a while, but sometimes you need to do boring work. But in this case, I told him, I thought he could make it more interesting for himself if he wanted. Write from the point of view of one of the characters. Write about something you read that could have had a different outcome and talk about what might have happened if things had been different. Write a poem. In truth, he probably won’t do any of these things. They will take more time than what he’s been doing. But I think he liked that he had some options. And in any case, the school year is almost over. I’m hoping this particular assignment doesn’t continue into next year. Although it’s anybody’s guess.

About an hour in, Andy came out for a snack break. He looks happy. I think he’s having fun. Good. He gets sucked back into the Froebel blocks. I may need to track down a set of those for him. It’s funny, because he wasn’t really into blocks or legos or other building things when he was younger. But lately, he’s more than interested. He designs cities and buildings, draws them on paper. He maps out towns, and countries, draws their flags, makes up their names. He likes networks of things. He won’t build a building. He’ll build a city of buildings and he will know what each one is for. Then a tornado will come through. Or maybe a tidal wave. Or possibly Godzilla. And they will all tumble down, leaving a clean, empty field where once there were skyscrapers. But that’s okay, because tomorrow, it will be something else entirely. I am realizing now that he’s always been like this. Even when he was little, he never played favorites. There was never one stuffed animal he had to sleep with every night, nor even two. There were always at least 5, who either worked in some coordinated effort or who fought relentlessly with one another.

I remember when AJ and Unfocused Girl were little – 2 or 3, Siren was mortified when UG came over and pulled out every single toy in his room at once. I loved it. AJ didn’t really think to do it, and I blame that early impulse for neatness entirely on living with two freakish parents and no other children. AJ loved having everything out at once. He loved the chaos. He loved organizing it and leaving it messy. He loved seeing everything at once and having things together that he’d never used at the same time before. Siren will be glad to know that AJ is much more inclined to dump everything out than he used to be. Ms. Frizzle’s reiterated message in AJ’s once beloved Magic School Bus books seems finally to have sunk in: Take Chances! Make Mistakes! Get Messy!

AJ goes back in for more and before I know it, he is out again, finished, and chattering up a storm. It’s as if a switch has turned on and suddenly he is no longer the sullen boy who complains about homework and numbs himself with video games. He is the boy I remember when he used to spend more of his day at home, who asks a lot of questions and figures out a lot of his own answers and begs for more problems to solve. I haven’t seen that boy in a while. I’ve missed him. As I sit wondering if we’ve made a mistake (although perhaps a necessary one) about keeping him in public school, the psychologist calls me in and gives me the scores. They are good. They are very good. They are the scores we need.

I tell AJ he can go anywhere he wants for lunch and he picks that evil fast food conglomerate with an indoor playground. Why an indoor playground on a gorgeous 78 degree day, I’m not sure. But there is one of these on the way home and it is clean and relatively quiet. We have lunch and AJ plays and I am feeling relaxed for the first time in days. We go home and I send an email to the gifted teacher and copy the scores and put them in an envelope and put it in the bag of my bike. AJ and I take our bikes to the pond where AJ tries and fails to catch 8 frogs. We love watching their long legs swimming away. Then we ride up to school. I drop the envelope in the office while AJ surprises his friends on the playground. Then we both go to pick up his homework from his classroom and head back to the playground where I run into his first grade teacher who is on playground duty. She asks how things are going and I tell her. She is pleased and will write a recommendation.

AJ and I ride home, trying to see how far we can go without pedaling. By the time I am home, I already have an email back from the gifted teacher. AJ’s moving on to the next round of testing. Deadlock broken.