Will School Crush My Special Needs Kid?

Every once in a while, the truth that my baby is no longer a baby, nor a toddler, catches me off guard. I’m reminded by little things,* like when Tucker asks me to carry him, which I used to do oh-so-gently, barely able to trust myself to carry him up the stairs, and remembering to “mind his head!” Later, I carried him more easily, slung on a hip, while I fed myself, went about chores, and peed. Today, it’s hard to carry him up the stairs, or for more than a block or two, coming home from a playground.

I’m caught off guard when I catch a sideways glimpse of how huge his feet have gotten, and end up doing a double take, marveling at how my once teenytiny human is becoming a little boy. Is already one, no matter my level, or lack, of preparation.

His entire foot was smaller than my fingers.

LOOK at those tiny chicken legs!!!

I marvel that he will become an elementary student, a hormonal teenager, and, one day, much too soon, a man.

As Tucker’s vocabulary, social desire, and increasing understanding of emotions and the world around him expand along with his feet, my pride, amazement, and worry grow. He’ll be entering kindergarten this fall.

Kindergarten!

It doesn’t seem possible that four and a half years have been filled with his giggles, his tears, and the fact that he turned my heart upside down in the best of ways by mattering more to me than anything else. I feel immense gratitude over the fact that he now wakes me up in the morning by climbing into my bed, rather than crying at me from his, and that he enjoys the simple act of burying me under a mountain of pillows to crash into.

He often follows that play with “Wake up, Mommy.”

“Wake UP, Mommy. Both your eyes.”

Seeing him grow and absorb is a wake-up in itself. A both-my-eyes kind of wake up.

While today, he is not aware that his language, handwriting (if you can call it that), and his childhood milestones are grossly behind those of his typically developing peers, one day, he may be.

And that, my dear friends, fucking terrifies me.

Today, at work, a friend who has a now grown, dyslexic son and I were talking about school. Kindergarten. Private. Public. Elementary. IEPs and advocacy for special needs rights.

While I understand that each school experience is different, her words continue to rumble, cycle through, and ferment in every part of my brain.

I feel Worry.

Grief, at how his experience may be.

“He will feel dumb,” she said. “It’ll probably happen around the third grade, and it will crush him.”

“By that time,” she said, “it may be too late. There’s no fixing low self-esteem.”

There’s no fixing low self-esteem. There’s no fixing low self-esteem. There’s no fixing low self-esteem.

Her personal experience with public school was nothing less than horrific. Her son’s, too. While I’m terrified, I am also hopeful.

Although I obviously have continually evolving dreams for my little boy, they do not include excelling at particular school subjects, nor getting into Stanford. To me, now, that doesn’t have anything to do with the Point of All.

I’d like for Tucker to be his best him, whoever he is, and whoever (whomever?) he becomes. And I believe that in order for him to be his best him, that it’s critical that he not feel like a dummy.

I dread the potential day when an insensitive teacher asks him to perform an impossible-for-him task, in front of his class, feeling like she’s doing him a favor. Making him “man up.”

I dread the mean kid asking Tucker why he is allowed extra time to complete his exams, if he’s even taking them, and I dread the innocent child who asks my son why he can’t read a certain something. I dread those kids’ parents. Which means, I maybe dread you.

How is my son expected to be his best him, for all of his life, if he feels like the him that he is – is something less than?