The Child With No Ideas

The wonderful SecularHomeSchool forum of which I am now a member (yeah, I know, I am neither strictly speaking secular or strictly speaking home-schooling, they are clearly as tolerant as I am scatty) recommended me a book about literacy through art. At bedtime I started reading, and then I couldn't sleep because it made me too excited. So today I was overtired and nervous that these great ideas wouldn't work. A bundle of nervous tension. Not great.
I love creative writing, can't get enough of it. My son is the opposite. He can't stand writing of any kind. He'll do it, under suffrance, at school, like most boys. He will write the minimum he can get away with. In fact, he rarely meets that benchmark. His teacher suggested I use his time off school to work on his writing. I have been hesitant, because I applaud the aim but had no idea how to work on it: I mean, I can insist he sits and writes for twenty minutes but he complains he has no ideas, even if I show him a photograph and say "Describe what you can see."
Clearly something more was going on. Today I took the scribble-drawings he'd produced last week with his brother and reminded him gently of the story he had suggested. He was reluctant and grumpy - I am learning that for the first five minutes of any activity he will be surly and unco-operative, and it will take a couple of reminders that I DO actually need him to do some work now before interest and enthusiasm kick in. The reminders were delivered, which usually does the trick.
But this morning there was no rush of enjoyment The more I showed him my plan, the more anxious and wound-up he got. I explained that we were going to list some of the features of the picture in a chart - "Clouds" "Trees" etc - and that then we would think of words to describe them for our writing.
At the word "writing," he shot out of his seat. "No Mummy I am NOT GOOD AT WRITING! It is boring!"
I thought of the breathless tone of the book about literacy and art. A chart like this was supposed to unlock a child's creativity instantly, turn them into a combination of Shakespeare and Rembrandt. Clearly book had some missing steps. Or, clearly, my son had some massive issues about writing. I fought back the urge to tell him to shut up and do what he was told.
"Well, you see," I said feebly, feeling like a maiden aunt confronting an armed burglar, "the thing is, this is the exercise, we have done these lovely pictures and now we are going to write the story to accompany them." He looked at me as if I was the armed burglar.
"But Mum," he exploded, "I am the illustrator."
 Of course he was. It made perfect sense. Writers  and illustrators do different jobs. The bloody book didn't include a way to get around this. But at least it was conversation rather than refusal. I clutched at the straw that whistled past me in the wind.
"OK, yes, you are the illustrator. And I am the writer." I gave up all expectations of written work for this lesson. "But an illustrator needs to help the writer understand his pictures."
We looked at the picture together. "But I need to draw trees."
"OK," I said, thinking how badly this was going. You are not SUPPOSED to still be drawing, son, we are SUPPOSED to be on the literacy part of the lesson now. He drew some more trees. They looked weird, clunky and odd. Then he said casually "Can you put on that chart that the trees are people-like?"
I held my breath. "Yes, I can do that." Should I be casual or tell him that that was amazing?
I chose the latter, which seemed to please him. He drew a few more details, and we worked on the list. Then he told me the opening of his story, which I wrote down as he asked me. The words are entirely his, I just prompted him occasionally by reminding him what he'd put on the chart. He chose a title. We just worked on the opening page, which we agreed should be atmospheric, before the story proper started.

The Little Patterned House

Long ago there was a little patterned house. And next to the house was an archery contest at the palace fair, and also a forest of people-like trees and grass standing still as statues because the wind can't reach them in the forest.
Smoke poisoned the air from the chimney of the little patterned house. But the wind blew it far away. Each colour of the rainbow shone brighter than the sun and did fancy loop-the-loops and other fancy tricks, when the wind blew. The clouds did loops and loops and blocked some of the rainbow, and the sun made the rainbow bright. The wind howled at night like a wolf howling to the moon.

Not bad for a child with no ideas.

Oddly, as I look back on the morning I am more interested in the moment of resistance, and in the changing tack that had to happen, in order to accomplish the goal. That's so important for a kid with "ishoos" and so impossible for a teacher, whose job is to herd thirty children in the same direction at once. I think this is the one advantage of educating at home. You don't have the degree in pedagogy or the institutional framework or the resources or the classroom support or the teaching experience. You are sailing a very small boat across a very large ocean, whilst everyone else is on an ocean-liner. Their voyage is far steadier and more luxuriously equipped than yours. Your only advantage is that you can react quickly, move away from danger fast. And, of course, you can keep close tabs on your passengers. It's all too easy to lose someone overboard from a shipping liner and simply sail on.

Do I want to sail across the Atlantic single-handed? I'm not sure. One of the more irritating aspects of the home-school "culture" is the single-minded insistence that YOU CAN DO IT, yes, YOU, yes random parent who is surfing the internet wondering about his or her child's wellbeing. It's a bit like the Kitchener posters in World War One, insisting that the Hun will only be defeated if you personally, Sam Jones in Warwickshire, lay down your plough and hurry off to the front. It brings out my inner rebel. I feel like writing back to these enthusiasts: "wow really? You're sure I can homeschool? That's amazing, I am so glad of your encouragement, you see I thought my crack habit and sideline in prostitution might be a stumbling-block." Just because you CAN do something, isn't necessarily a reason that you should. I feel a bit like Sam Jones in Warwickshire. It's all very well being noble and laying down my life to educate my children singlehandedly, but actually there's quite a few fields that need ploughing, the boys have developmental and medical needs aplenty, and will that be neglected if I run off to the front of home-schooling?
It's a toughie though, because I am realising that I am actually OK at this. From the last couple of months' experience, I am now pretty sure that yes, if push came to shove, I could homeschool adequately. With the gym and me-time a vague but alluring memory, I am still hoping it won't be necessary to give up my entire life for my child: but today's lesson taught me very clearly quite how much could be accomplished with intensive one-to-one tailormade tuition, that just can't be done in a school. I guess if I could wave a magic wand right now it would involve my children being whisked off to a fabulous school (exactly like the one they currently attend, in fact) where they would spend just enough time there doing reading writing and sums to make me feel that I didn't have to worry about the basics. Then I would have them at home the rest of the week, providing tailormade tuition for their strengths and weaknesses and enjoying their company.
My fantasy also involves a fairy godmother who takes care of the washing cooking and cleaning so that I can spend my time preparing lessons. (And possibly a male masseur, who presumably comes with a magic wand of his own).
I can't tell what will actually happen, be desirable and/or possible. But I know I am excited about my children's learning - and about being involved in it - in a way I have never felt before. I have a sense of fun about it all, a feeling that we are all embarking on a tremendous adventure. I am not quite sure what the route is, but that will emerge.

Because at the end of the day I just want this child who is so regularly crippled by pain to have the sense of rainbows looping the loop in his childhood, colours shining brighter than the sun. At the moment he thinks that the little patterned house might have a family rather like ours in it. Let's hope we can keep the poison smoke of pain blowing away in the wind. I want him to be filled with the magic of people-like trees, to hear in his imagination the sounds of wolves and winds howling to the moon. The more of that, the less time spent begging for painkiller. So whatever makes that happen is the right choice, whether it be at school or at home.

A page full of scribbles

To begin with, I actually thought my middle son was ill. He was so unbelievably distraught about something that had happened at school that there was no way I could get him dressed or out of the door. So I assumed today was a sick day and phoned the school office. This is probably getting our family closer to our award for Worst Attenders of 2013. I wonder if we get a trophy?

After half an hour or so it was clear that it was just panic that had gripped him. I sat him down and explained that his big brother was doing some work at home today, and that if he wasn't going to school we would find him some work to do too. Then I had a little panic attack of my own.

You see, the reason I thought that home-school time was working so well for me and my eldest was that it was exactly that, time for me and my eldest to bond over something interesting. My eldest is really good one-to-one. He revels in the adult time and in the feeling of being treated as an equal. Moreover, he and his middle brother don't really get on that well. They don't get on badly, but they don't play together much. They seem to have totally different interests and glide past each other on a day-to-day basis, sharing space and family life without actually being playmates. Moreover, both can find each other intensely annoying. I envisaged the next few hours as being a three-way tug-of-war with lots of emotional rope burn and without the element of fun.

But in the event, it was OK. No, more than OK, it was actually pretty amazing. First and to my relief, middle son thought school at home would be just fine, and the boys were charmed by the idea of working together. Fortunately, we have two computers, so I set one up on the laptop and the other on our ancient desktop with the spelling site. They worked at different levels for twenty minutes and then we tested them both. Eldest was helpful in supporting his little brother, which I expected. What I didn't expect was that when it came time to test the eldest, little brother both wanted to try to read the words out loud for him, and then wanted to know what all these strange new difficult words meant. For a kid with speech delay, this was good stuff.

I gave myself, erm I mean them, a short break. Then we gathered around the table for our second lesson. Fortunately, I had something I'd planned for a while that was actually easier with three than two. I am trying to get my eldest to loosen his imagination a bit, instead of being gripped with fear and stress every time he picks up a pen to do art or writing. So all three of us covered a piece of paper with shapeless scribbles. Then we swapped our sheets around and took turns in guessing/inventing what imaginary pictures were represented by the scribbles. We finished them off, adding neat leaves to the scribble-tree, a sun coming out from the scribble-cloud. Then we talked about what story might be happening in the pictures.
I was pretty sure they would both be able to manage this task technically. But what I wasn't sure of - and that was a pleasant surprise -  was the fact they didn't just work on the same task together, they supported and encouraged each other. I am used to seeing them completely ignore each other's interest and work. This time they were chatting and laughing together as they worked. They looked like two brothers, rather than two boys who happen to live in the same house.

Lunchtime came. At the moment we are experimenting with only sending my eldest to school in the afternoons. I got the boys ready, picked up their bags, encouraged THEM to pick them up, reassured them that they had already had enough to eat and didn't need an afternoon snack, took them to the door, realised they didn't have shoes on, found their shoes, persuaded them both that yes they DID need them, got halfway up the drive...and hit a wall of rain that was so heavy I could scarcely see them.

"I'm sore!" shouted my eldest. I have no idea whether he really was or whether it was just the panic about the rain. But whatever, there was no way I could get him up our impossibly steep driveway. We all went back to the house. Whereupon I planned an impromptu lesson around an educational DVD, and gave them some maths problems. And my younger son spent the whole day out of nappies, for the first time ever. Not a wasted day, then. Quite an important and useful one. But most importantly was the way the two boys got on together, in a completely different way from the usual squabbling over toys and food. Creating a learning environment was better for them as people.

I am not saying I want the responsibility of home-schooling both my sons fulltime. It was a day off, there was the novelty value, I was not seriously trying to introduce a new concept to my eldest, the younger one was not in one of his non-compliant moods, etc etc. But I can't escape the nagging thought that this was extremely good for them - both - in different ways. What started out as a meaningless scribble on the blank sheet of the morning, an incoherent tantrum, turned into an opportunity to - to what? To spend time with them? To teach them about each other, about learning alongside each other, about being friends?

If I was arriving in New Zealand at this point, I think I would seriously consider fulltime home-schooling. As it is, we have an excellent school, where they are both happy and settled. But there are cracks. We heard this week that my middle son is having social difficulties, that he is not integrating with his peers any longer in the same way that he was managing a year ago. Is school going to work longterm, if he's not happily integrated with the rest of his class? In fact, is it working now? He is able to read and do his sums without difficulty. But he is refusing to engage with group work, messing around at mat time, and refusing to participate in the work of the remedial small groups. I don't believe that there is such a thing as a neutral school experience. Either you are learning good habits, or bad ones. At the moment, he seems to be learning some bad ones, alongside the good ones of literacy and numeracy. It's not going that well. And I have deep doubts about my eldest's ability to manage a full school day, even if we do manage to get the magical ramp that might make it easier for him to get out of the house and into school.

I don't have any solutions. All options have drawbacks. I feel a bit irritable that whenever I mention homeschooling every professional I speak to jumps in to tell me that it would be a terrible idea. But I also don't think that my middle son should be out of school at the moment. He needs structure. School is a good way of providing that. Not the only way, but a good way. My eldest son too, benefits from the structure and energy of school. But I also increasingly feel that they both benefit from my individual attention, teaching them at home. I feel that I am looking at a page full of scribbles, waiting to see if a picture emerge.

The terror of hope

No matter how old you get, it is tempting to surrender to the idea that there might be fairies lurking at the bottom of your garden. (I still insist on the English word, garden: yard doesn't have the same ring to it). Watching my son with his medication this week, I am reminded of Tinkerbell dying onstage, and the command to the audience of Peter Pan to clap their hands if they believe in fairies. As they clap, she revives.

I want to believe in fairies, this week. I want the improvements that we have seen to be more than a random good patch, I want them to be the result of the new medication we are trying. He's been on it for six days, and he's had six good days. Six days where he could move freely, where he had brief episodes of pain but none of them incapacitating him for more than a few minutes at a time. 

It is tantalising, like being shown a brochure of a foreign country marked "health." And that is why I am finding this week harder than any of the previous weeks. Because I so want it to be more than random chance, but I know it may well be. We have had good patches before. And adults don't believe in fairies. But I don't want to be an adult, this week, wry and coping with adversity. I want to be a child who believes in the magic of medicine to cure people, especially little people, those who ought to be too young for endless pain.

The little people, of course, is an Irish way of referring to the fairies. When I was a child I watched my Irish aunt draw the sign of a cross on the sodabread dough before it was placed in the oven. I asked why, and she said gently that it had been done for a long time, and didn't do any harm. Much older, I read about the sign of the cross as a protection for the goodness of the bread, lest it be stolen in the oven by the little folk. The form of the bread would remain, but it wouldn't nourish you. I feel sometimes as if my son had the physical strength taken out of him when he was sleeping, the way my aunt's ancestors feared would happen to the bread.

So to see him this week, strong and running around, almost all day everyday, has been breathtaking. So beautiful, and so vulnerable. I don't want to overstate it. He has cried at the pain of descending our, excuse me, fucking steps. He has needed the SN buggy to get him from the lounge to his bed. He has winced with pain climbing the hill, and refused to join the walking school bus because he was afraid it would be too sore. But these have not been all day every day. These have been - dare I say it? - remnants of the pain he was in.  I am afraid to discuss it with him, afraid to jinx it. I am superstitious, the way my Irish ancestors were, unwilling to discuss the fairy folk in case they attracted their unwelcome attention. But there have been a few moments where I dared to believe in fairies, dared to believe that this improvement might be real. And then I felt the terror of hope, that shocking deep wave of uncertain light and shadow. Has the sky cleared or are we still mid-storm? Is this the stars we see or a desperate hallucination? In some ways it is easier to be in utter darkness. You reassure yourself that it is OK to be without light, that you can exist this way. Then you are offered the dream of daylight, and all your carefully built defences against despair plunge into nothingness. Because you realise how much you want to believe in fairies, want the magical cure. And you have to simultaneously steel yourself, and remind yourself that you will all survive either way, that this is real life, that there are no quick fixes or easy answers, that this medicine may even help a little, but it is not going to be a total fix.

And that is probably the true meaning of hope, which is a virtue I have battled with this week. "Hell is hopelessness," wrote Moltmann, and "to live without hope is to cease to live." I have hope for my son, whatever the medicine does or doesn't do: hope for the institutions working with him, that they will treat him gently, kindly, with respect. Hope that the sense of institutional bullying we encountered in a meeting this week is unusual, a once-off. Hope that we will have strength, that he will have fun. Hope that healing will occur, of whatever type is possible within the confines of his body: that whatever happens physically, he will be emotionally strong, calm and happy. That he will find joy in life, in love, school, home, friends. That whatever is going on physically, he will have the strength to deal with it. That he will not be emotionally scarred by the experience. All that I pray for, and all that is a prayer for strength, for hope, and yes, for healing. Healing can take many forms, it does not simply mean a child out of pain, a child able to walk and run freely, play sport. It can simply mean acceptance, the courage to know one's inner strength and physical limitations. I do pray and hope for emotional healing, in whatever form God chooses to send. 

But oh, this week, it is hard not to have too much hope for the physical kind of healing, too.

Because I think mothers ought to be allowed to be kind: landscape, history, and not being a slavedriver

There's a ditch where I grew up that was made by human hands. I say hands, literally, because the ditch is prehistoric. So no wheels or fancy implements. Just dug out. It's an unbelievable ten kilometres long. A staggering monument to human perseverence and determination, the Dorset Cursus runs across the English countryside like a sword blade. I'm thinking about it right now, because my son wants to do more study of landscapes. He wants to compare England and New Zealand. This should be easy. When I came to New Zealand, I found the Maori fortifications on Auckland volcanoes looked very familiar: to anyone who grew up in the area of Stonehenge, terraces and earthworks, the digging up of the landscape on a grand scale seems natural, an intrinsic part of the land, not a destruction or alteration.
Hard work, though. In the case of the European monuments, we know little about the diggers. We can only guess what the earthworks meant to them, and why they persevered through illness, hunger, the ongoing struggle for survival. They must have meant more to them than life itself: perhaps the survival of the tribe, or the family.
 Parenting children with additional needs, whether by illness, disability or developmental delay, can feel like digging out a ten-kilometre ditch by hand. Yet, rather like the diggers of prehistoric Europe, the work is largely overlooked, invisible: the families who live that complicated life do not feature in many glamorous lifestyle magazines. "And in this artful corner, the family have carefully placed the most gorgeous little commode...over here, you have to admire the artistic sensibility with which this wallpaper was ripped, and those adorable little head-banging marks on the door." Like those ditch-diggers, who perhaps occasionally dared to wonder whether this work was really as sensible and logical as it seemed, the task of parenting kids with additional needs can feel a bit, you know, onerous and ridiculous. Why put ourselves through such unrewarding labour? The answer, of course, is that no one else is there to do it, and the child seems to need our help: just as the land must have seemed to need digging, or the stars demanded that the ditch be begun, or something. Something deep and primitive and unspeakable, but also urgent and necessary. Child-rearing, the mother instinct. As strong and as determined and indefatigable as that strange early human need to dig up large chunks of the English land.
Because that instinct has such strength, and drives those of us mothers who parent SN children to what must seem like crazy lengths, excessive commitment, ridiculous zeal, so there is the popular and I think unhelpful iconography of the SN parent (particularly mother) as saint, or superhuman. You know, the "I don't know how you do it, you must be so amazing." "Special children are given to special people."  Of course it is nonsense, any more than the men and women who lived through the London Blitz were special or amazing: they had to bear difficult circumstances because they were there, having bombs chucked at them, not because they were somehow different from their compatriots in the countryside or overseas. I'm quite prepared to admit to a parental talent for eating chocolate. Other than that I think I'm good in some ways, lousy in others. But I try not to be irritated, because I know these people mean well, and it's a way of trying to encourage a fellow human along a difficult road. And God knows, I could use some encouragement at times.
When professionals start on that line of argument, though, I grow suspicious. It's generally a tactic: build you up because we are about to tell you we have no funding so you will have to do the therapy yourself, or not offer you the family support you have requested. It's blarney, designed to soften you up. But at least it's not harmful.
What I find far more challenging - and what I have encountered far more often since my eldest became so sore - is the smug professional assumption of the overqualified and undereducated-in-life health professional. Which is that somehow you are to blame for your son's failure to thrive, to learn to speak, to play appropriately with his friends, to recover from pain. This smug nonsense crosses all bands of developmental and physical difficulty, and I have many friends who have recounted it to me. "When my son was attacking me at home for years, they told me I had to learn better parenting strategies. When he started attacking his teachers, they were the victims and they immediately sent in an army of professionals to support him in the classroom." I remember saying to a social worker in the UK that I needed to be taught how to restrain my children safely, because if they were out of control then one of us were going to get hurt. No one would train me, though, because parents were not allowed to be shown how to restrain their children. The assumption is that it is you that are at fault for your child's violence, rather than your child's violence is biological and that you need help to manage it safely. It is given unquestioningly to professionals working with these children, so why not to parents?
With the onset of my son's chronic pain, I discovered a whole new torment. The assumption of approximately fifty per cent of all the health professionals I had to deal with was that I was in some way "enabling" or "encouraging" my son's pain.

Don't comfort him.
Don't ask about the pain.
Don't go to him when he falls over.
If he says he is in pain, tell him you are feeling fine, so that everything must be OK.
Don't give him pain relief.
Don't use the wheelchair. Make him walk. He won't need it if you don't let him have it.
Don't install a ramp, or a lift, or any other vital equipment, because that will make him think of himself as disabled.
Don't let him play with the other wheelchair-using kid at school, because that will make him think that he wants to be in a wheelchair for life too.
Don't let him have fun racing in his wheelchair, ditto.
He must be in school. Home will make him worse not better. Home education is the worst idea of all.
If you can't physically get him to school, or school calls and says he needs to come home, then make sure you don't spend any time talking to or interacting with him during school hours.
He's just getting what he wants by being still. You need to take away the toys and games that amuse him in order that he has an incentive to move around.

I wish I had invented this list. It seems like a satire to me. When I read them back I am horrified anew by the cruelty implicit in the idea that the best way to deal with a child's pain is to pretend it isn't happening, treat it as a behaviour issue. Trying to deal with this nonsense is like digging a 10 kilometre ditch whilst someone comes alongside you filling it in, then blames you for the fact that it isn't finished yet. So I don't argue, or engage, any more. I simply refuse to deal with that professional any further. It is quite liberating, really, I wish I'd thought of this strategy months ago.
Of course, some parents doubtless do make their child's pain worse by fussing about it. Just like some special needs parents truly are amazing. But the point is that whether you are being praised to the skies or trod into the dust, the parenting appraisal is based on prejudice, generalisation and stereotype. I am not causing or prolonging my child's pain by my maternal instinct to take care of him when he is sore, any more than when my middle child was failing to learn to speak it was a sign that I was a superb special parent. I just am, the same as other SN parents are, we muddle along doing the best we can, sometimes that is excellent and sometimes that is dire. We are digging a very big ditch, and it is taking a very long time. And we anticipate that if we are very lucky, and we do complete this project as planned - if our child does manage to grow up healthy, happy and loving us - then the hard work we put in will largely be invisible. Just like the great Dorset Cursus ran across England unnoticed for thousands of years. People just thought it was the landscape, the way the countryside was. Or the product of another, magical era. (I was told as a child that the local legend was of a Giant having scraped it out with a spoon) Only with aerial photography and modern archeology was it identified as a colossal monument to blood, sweat and toil.

My hope is that as medicine advances and therapy develops, we will have fewer children like mine, who are wound up like springs by their own behaviour or who lie in a crumpled heap, begging for pain relief with the effort of getting out of bed. Hopefully the efforts that I go to will seem to later generations as archaic as doing the washing by hand, or following the horse with a hand-held plough. And to my children, I hope that their recovery and development is so total that all this is only vaguely remembered, like the legend of the spoon-wielding giant.
But if I want that to happen, if I want my work to become invisible, then I need to ignore the siren calls to make my son's life worse by scoffing at, ignoring or otherwise denigrating his experience of pain. For a start, it is ridiculous to pretend it isn't there, like staring at the Cerne Abbot Giant  and trying not to comment on the fact that it has an enormous willy. I'm sure the Victorians tried, but I don't go to the Victorians for suggestions on healthy childrearing. And therein lies the other problem. You can repress your child, you can demand that they shut up about their experiences. You can teach them to suffer silently, if you are so minded. (I went to boarding school, I know a lot about that). But the one thing that troubles me about the majestic scope of the Dorset Cursus is that - just like the Egyptian pyramids - I very much doubt that it could have been built without forced, or slave labour. They probably discouraged their slaves from complaining of pain or tiredness too. And I very much doubt the slaves forgot their pain as a result.

I don't want the same scars to wreck the relationship with myself and my son. So I probably err at times on the side of kindness. Today we got halfway up our (preposterously steep) drive, and told me he was sore. We carried on to the top, where he started to worry that he was too sore to take the walking bus to school. I could have forced him, pushed my luck. He would probably have obeyed me. But I don't want to be a slave-driver. I don't want that to be an ugly scar in his psyche, to add to the pain and hardship of that time. We walked down the drive together. Another day of home education, then. Yes, it is hard at points. But I'd rather that than pushing him out to dig his own ditch in pain.

Art, drugs and other unexpected events

It's been a tough day. We are trialling a change of medications. This is possibly the most stressful parental experience I know. There's nothing like starting the day with the knowledge that in a few hours you will be willingly exposing your child to the small chance of aortal rupture/sudden suicide risk/life as a chemically dependent zombie to add a little piquancy to your daily routine.

There was no way I was going to be able to send my son to school until we'd checked that the new medication didn't, well, kill him. (It didn't: he's still here, and I am duly grateful, although if he keeps me awake much longer listening to that blinking storytape I may start to rethink the huge care I took not to accidentally overdose him this morning). But after the obligatory sleepless night, it was equally hard to focus on "doing HE" properly. He was, as you would expect without the Ritalin, slightly spaced and hyper: especially as he wasn't in THAT much pain and under normal circumstances, today would have been a good day, the kind when he could go into class.

We agreed he'd spend half an hour on Mathletics, the computer maths game that normally he loves. Today, after twenty minutes, he was champing at the bit "Have I done enough, can I stop?" I was about to deliver one of my "you will do exactly what I say and be grateful boy" lectures, when I hesitated: I was sorting out library books and had a picture book in my hand, a few Andy Warhol prints designed for children to look at. "You can look at this for a few minutes instead," I said, and tossed it on the bed where he lay.

I felt bad that I wasn't making him KEEP HIS NOSE TO THE GRINDSTONE - how will he ever keep a job if he doesn't learn to work hard when bored? (This is not a very good theory, actually. I spent most of my school life bored out of my mind. Far from teaching me self-discipline and persistence it has just given me an absolute horror of boredom, with a consequent inability to spend time doing boring stuff, including, housework paperwork or paid work I am not interested in). But anyway, I wasn't MAKING HIM LEARN. Never mind, I thought, I'm too tired to think about it. Ten minutes later, he came and told me that he’d finished reading it. I told him that the paintings were by the same bloke as we’d seen the day before in Burger King (we do very posh field trips around here). He didn’t seem that interested. “What did you think of them? I asked, casually. “He is AMAZING!” he said, and wandered off as if there was nothing more to say on the subject, since Andy Warhol was, so clearly, fabulous.
I still feel very guilty about medicating at all, let alone messing around with different drugs. I’m doing it because we are desperate, we need to try everything we can to reduce anxiety and hopefully hence reduce the pain. Since the Andy Warhol is amazing comment, however, I stopped feeling guilty about letting him skip Maths. If he’s decided Andy Warhol is amazing, perhaps not everything about today is terrible. Sometimes the most effective learning points come in the gaps between what you expected, wanted and planned to do, and what is actually possible in the real live activity of a living child. Same with meds. You can’t predict what they will do, you just have to take a gulp and see what happens, hope that you don’t do any damage and that something may shift as a result. And you have to go with the flow, and see what’s possible. Then respond to what actually happens, rather than what you hoped or planned.

We wait to see what that “actually” is.

Geological time: a love letter to my son

Dear boy.

I watch you sprawled on the carpet, colouring in a geological map. You are not sure what period the crystalline Fiordland rocks of the South Island belong to, and nor am I. You wriggle, a little, and ask how much longer: how much longer till you have done enough work, whatever enough is, which neither you nor I really know. (I work on the basis that ten minutes after I should have stopped, you will begin to rebel. I try to avoid reaching that point. That's it, really).
I chose geology for our first home-school project, my son, partly because I knew nothing about it, and partly because I rather fancifully felt it might be good for your soul. You have such a lot to contend with. Your body has let you down so dramatically. Such a shock to you, to us all. At a time like this, who would not question the goodness of creation? The greatness of life? "If I don't get better, I will still love God," you told me earnestly, just out of hospital. That's your decision not mine, my love, but I wanted to give you a sense of the sweep and grandeur of creation. I wanted to show you the smallness of us, of this moment of pain. Of the bigness of the Earth, the formation of mountains, the sea. Find something to marvel at, and through that sustain your interest in the wider world, in the greater universe. In Love, perhaps, if you feel drawn that way.
But sometimes even this abstract conversation checks me, so that I have to hold back the tears: when we talk about earthquakes, or rocks disappearing under the earth's crust, or being crushed in the deep of the earth, to bring out new forms. I look at you, lying sprawled on the carpet, and I feel strangely sorry for those rocks, for the pain they might feel as they are crushed, pushed aside into nothingness in the impersonal drama that is creation.
Rocks don't of course feel, but I know that you do. Is it fanciful to think of you as crushed like a subterranean rock, sprawled on the floor beneath a mountain of pain? We don't discuss the pain or hardship much. You do like painkillers - who wouldn't? - but you understand that I can't give them to you all the time. We had to talk about it yesterday, though. As I prepare my application to charities for the ramp, I know with the hard-bitten journalistic side of myself that a few words from a child are worth a hundred from an O.T. or a mum. When I prompted you, this is what you said. “It’s incredibly hard. I have to get real sore and I get sore later in the day. Sometimes I use a box to sit on and slide down but it doesn’t work that well. It took me nearly over ten minutes to get down. When Mummy says Hurry up it feels hard. I don’t always walk down the stairs. Sometimes I slide on my bottom which hurts even more. Also I crawl down. It just feels awful."[If we had a ramp] I would be able to go down much easier. It wouldn’t hurt that much and life would be so much easier. “

I hope I have done the right thing, by asking you to articulate your life. I promise you that no matter what, we will find a way: if the charitable sector and the public sector both turn a blind eye to your pain, we will find a way to install that ramp. I wish it were otherwise, I wish there were a cure. But there isn't a way around this time, any more than there is a way to change gravity or isotasy: mountains will rise and fall. Seacoasts will erode and advance. Children will be in pain, and their mothers will grieve for them. That is the way this world, this universe, is.

Rocks bear a magnetic imprint of their age. This is new technology, but since geology's birth with William Smith, layers of rocks have been dated by simpler means: fossils, comparisons to other rocks. Two mountains can look alike, yet bear a radically different geological history. Two children can lie on the floor to colour. One can be relaxing after school, collapsed in a comfortable slump. The other can be focusing all their energies on staying at work and not asking for more pain relief. They are lying still because it is too sore to stand. Yet both children look the same. You have to dig deep into the mountainside to find its geological type.

Like the magnetic history of rocks, you will always bear the imprint of this time. I would it were otherwise, but I know you are old enough to remember, even if you do heal as the doctors hope. Daily, you are being changed. By the pain, by the countless conversations with doctors, by the missing school. Like the metamorphic rocks you are being squeezed and heated to a new form. There is a deep maturity coming upon you, which is both reassuring and unsettling. Sometimes I feel that I am talking to an eighteen year old. You have experienced more than you should, and it comes out in your occasional depth of wisdom, when you sound like a man not a boy.

I am not sure that this time is having such a positive effect on me. I am squeezed hollow nightly by the effort of getting through the day. My poor husband has to pick me up nightly, reassure me that I am doing a decent job. But oddly, the worst days are not when I am with you, worrying about whether it is time to make chocolate and what colour we ought to choose for Devonian rocks. It is the days when you are away from me and I wonder how you are. Often I arrive at school to pick you up. "He's fine," everyone says, and it is true, you are standing, you have run around. But then the story of how you really feel inside spills out. Mainly, you have been sore. Perhaps you weren't always sore but it is the pain that you remember of the day. And that is why I worry, because I am not there to distract you. To provide a soft, gentle landscape. Of colouring-in and interesting stories and maths puzzles. Not really to educate you, but to lay some soft earth over the jagged rocks of your pain.

So it would be good to have a ramp, if only because you would have something else to think about, a small victory against the difficulty of today. It would be good to have more work to do at home, more to occupy you. Let us hope that the health school finally get their paperwork and you can be enrolled, so that the pressure is not all on me. Also, I'd like you to get better, but that I recognise is a bit unrealistic for now.

I love you, my son. I love you the way you are, painful and anxious: I love you when you are angry because of the pain. I love you when we sit cuddling on the sofa, and I love you when you are running up the hill away from me, to school or to anything you can do with strong legs. When you look back on this time as an adult, I hope you will remember - not the details of the work we did, or the silly little experiments to pass the time - but a general sense of purpose. That you were not left just to occupy yourself, unable to move from the floor.

Because you are worth all that I put into you. You were born prematurely, and there was a strange era when you were fed by tube and we all wondered if you would be OK in the end. I had to battle to breastfeed you at all. No one puts that on their CV: "succeeded in breastfeeding premature baby with no suck reflex." But I'm still glad I did, that I did the best I could. Because you were worth it, you bright shining laughing baby, who smiled early and grew into such a bright shining laughing young man.

One day you will climb mountains of some sort, physical or mental. I am sure of that. For now, this is your mountain, and mine too. I climb it daily, with you at my side. And that is why I try to make time to ensure I enjoy it, that we pick topics like geology, that will frame our struggles together in a greater landscape. We may not have a cure for now. This seems to be our mountain. The route is hard at points. Let us try to make sure that we enjoy the view.

Arty stuff

One of the ways you can tell if someone is cut out to be a good homeschooling parent is if they and their children just LURRRVE crafts. They can't get enough of them. They are the parents who clog up Pinterest with their glorious "see, a working international model of the Space Station, my kids just threw this together in the five minutes before lunch with a spare paint-pot and a couple of pieces of pasta," sorta stuff.

I am NOT that kind of parent. I would venture to claim expertise in the field of parental negotiation around diagnoses. But I am dim and mediocre in the area of craftiness. I make sturdy but uninspired efforts in that direction. There is a CRAFT box which the children love. I leave them to it, unless the babysitters feel like doing something with it. We do the odd themed "ooh goodness it's Easter soon where is my Cheat's-Guide-To-Colouring-In-Easter-Egg-Pictures book?" With great effort and stress, I've managed the basics. The children have made drums, chalked pictures on the drive, cut out snowflakes for Christmas. Ya know the sorta thing. But I've always struggled, because until the Great Ritalin Miracle of 2012, my eldest just was a spinning ball of crazy energy and if you got crafts out, he would simultaneously decide
1) he was going to build the Great Wall of China out of paper RIGHT NOW, and it had to be JUST RIGHT: cue meltdown from him
2) he was going to take the scissors/glue/glitter and experiment on how many dangerous things he could do with these at once: cue meltdown from me
3) he was going to shout at his brothers (who were generally quietly and biddably doing whatever I'd suggested) for using the red/green/purple pencils/whatever he wanted RIGHT NOW: cue meltdown from everyone.

So when the book I'd ordered from the library about Arty Parenting arrived, I looked at it with the misgiving that I would feel if someone had suggested to me that I really ought to spend time cuddling a jellyfish. It suggested stuff like sketching with your kids. I laughed hollowly. Sitting still and sketching? You might as well ask a leaping frog.

Today I felt a right fraud for keeping him off school. He wasn't in any pain at all. Leaping around like a, er, leaping frog. But he'd had diarrhoea - which might have been psychosymptomatic in origin but was nonetheless smelly. The rules are clear, no school for 24 hours. I looked sadly at my gym bag.
But he could walk! he could get into the car and out again without screaming! the sun was shining! We could do that mythical homeschooling thing of which others speak, a FIELD TRIP! Plus I had some medical paperwork to sort. I felt rather guilty about exposing the medical admin staff to my son's bugs. Then they messed up his paperwork and were rude to me. I rather hoped they would catch it after all.
Down the road was Devonport. I'd been there on Sunday for coffee with my husband. Some cuddly hippy-bunny-types have yarnbombed the front parade of shops. It's labelled with chic panache "Knitty Graffiti." Ideal for our current project on Graffiti.
It was a bright, clear day. We looked at the knitted art and then my son asked to go to the beach. Why not? We walked across, he splashed around on the edges of the sea. I felt happy and at peace, like a NZ tourism ad. Usually when I write a sentence like this, it is followed by "And then something really terrible happened," but this time it didn't. He just did something lovely and innocent that brought me out in cold sweats. He showed me a twig he'd found on the beach and said "Can we take it home and make something?"
Er, yes, I said, trying to suppress my panicky "but I don't have a CRAFT BOOK that will teach me how to make something from something you have just found on the beach!" sequence of thoughts.
We took it home, and I brought it inside with the grimly depressed sense of a prisoner who has been asked to carry his own axe to the scaffold. I made lunch, procrastinated a bit. I could just give him his spelling game. Or Mathletics. Mathletics is proper learning. There are worksheets, too, that lovely site I've joined online, he could have some of those. Comprehension. The Three Rs. He does not need to be given the opportunity to follow his creative desires and...
oh, hang on. He's autistic. That is EXACTLY what he needs. As much creative growth as possible, precisely because he is anxious and prone to worry about getting it wrong and all he ever wants to draw normally is those blasted Skylanders models. He's telling me what he needs, I thought. You have to do this now.
I took a deep breath and went to prepare the artroom, that is to say I cleared the porridge and banana skins off our kitchen table. I fetched the damn sticks, plus some shells from our last beach visit. I put them out and got the pencils. Then I waited for the spinning ball of hyper inattentiveness that is my son meeting crafts.
"You can do what you want," I said with a calm I did not feel. I anticipated that this would shortly involve hurling the shells around the room. With a great effort of will, I recalled the art-with-kids book. "I am going to sketch." I started sharpening my pencil. He sat down beside me. "Hey, what do you call a, do you know what Skylanders is...can I colour in one of the shells?"
"Sure."
He took a shell fragment and did a rainbow shape across it. Pretty. I'd never have thought of that. Then he watched me for a moment. I am not much good at sketching but I do find it relaxing. Or I would if I ever got any bloody time to do it. "Mum, look at me." I looked across at his paper. He had drawn a shell, pretty accurately, and was starting to colour it in. We talked, as we drew. Mainly about Skylanders, although Monkey Quest and Beast something-or-other made an appearance too. And I realised how happy I was, just taking the time to do something together: teaching by osmosis, or example perhaps, but not particularly by content. And he was focused, and he was calm. Partly the result of maturity and Ritalin, but also the context. This is learning, not silly messing-around-time.
And I mentally thanked that book about doing art with your kids.

Later, I gave him some worksheets to do. He grumbled and groaned, but quite enjoyed them I think. And actually, that balance is right for now. I'm not ready to let him lead the way totally: I'm not sure he is the right kind of child for that experiment. But I am ready to let my guard down a little bit, to experiment beside him. To make sure he isn't the only one learning, or doing arty stuff. We both seemed to be happier that way.
And this, I've realised, is kinda key to making this homeschooling thing work: that I have to be happy, learning alongside him. That's the whole reason we are doing geology: not because I knew it all so that it was an easy place to start, but because I knew nothing about it and would find it interesting. For me to be happy with this sudden shift in role, I have to be engaged. Even if it's just learning about rocks, or remembering how to sketch, and wondering if I am persuade him to do it sometime again. Like those yarn-bombers, who we discussed on the way home. "Why do they do it?" we asked. And came to the conclusion because it made them and others happy. Just because it was fun.
Cumulus' latest INCREDIBLY OBVIOUS REALISATION ABOUT HOME-SCHOOLING: IF IT'S GOING TO WORK, PICK A STYLE THAT IS FUN FOR THE PARENT, TOO.

Stickers from the teacher

When my son has a day or afternoon learning at home, i always write in a small notebook what we have done that day, and something positive that I have noticed in his attitude to learning. I also include a random fact of the day about China we have covered. (I haven't yet mentioned that we are teaching him how to write graffiti; I think that conversation can wait until the day he decides to spontaneously redecorate her classroom). At his IEP, we agreed that I would do this and his teacher would sign it, to underline the message that home and school were in agreement on the project of his ongoing education. Bless her, she doesn't just sign it, but reads attentively and writes positive comments. She even gives me, erm I mean him, a sticker for working hard at this homeschool stuff. It's awfully encouraging.

Further evidence that I am not a natural unschooler. But I have my moments; I was reading today a book by a very inspired Australian lady who didn't just home-educate but also had sixty-five animals and a compost toilet, and lived by the principles of permaculture in remote Australia. One of her sons didn't read until he was twelve. They were all too busy having fun outside, building their own house and climbing trees. They would do nothing but play with Lego together for days. I can imagine her having palpitations at our style of home-ed. If we have a style, it could be summarised as "turn off that telly and do something else for a bit." Also, my son hates Lego. So we didn't seem to have much in common.

But she was talking some sense in amidst the odes to organic composting. One of the points she made was the importance of play. Because this is a new field to me, I am deeply and immediately affected by any book or article I read on the subject of home learning. Immediately I danced off into a happy place where play was all I cared about for my son, and he would ABSORB arts and crafts and mathematical formulae in a sort of ongoing Platonic dialogue with me, the wise all-knowing parent, who knows the exact right MOMENT and WAY to answer the desperately earnest questions of your learning-thirsty child. (I can see technical problems with this learning-in-the-moment thing. Trust my luck, we'd go four years without an educational question and then my child would demand to learn quadratic equations whilst I was desperate for the toilet. By the time I got back, the moment would have passed and they wouldn't care any more. I'd miss THE MOMENT and it would never happen again). But, you know, she did have a point. One of our most successful lessons this week has been when I simply presented him with a few erasers bought at Kmart, that came apart into intriguing geometric shapes. I didn't suggest he did anything with them, largely because my brain turns to mush where anything involving spatial reasoning has been involved. (One of our internal doors hasn't shut for almost three weeks. I blamed the damp Auckland climate. It took my husband to return from Canada and point out that there was a large piece of Lego stuck in the hinge. I can now see why my son hates the stuff). Because of this, he had to use his ingenuity and creativity, and spent a happy halfhour inventing shapes and mazes on the floor, and taking his beloved Skylanders figures on journeys through them. Not the sort of knowledge you can test and condense, but important and useful nontheless. Creative play. Very good I think for a child in chronic pain.

This was good because afternoons are always tricky. If he has been to school in the morning he is pretty wiped out. I do not try to set him serious academic work because I reason that school will have done that justifiably already. This afternoon was particularly tough. He'd been awake with pain and anxiety until one-thirty in the morning. Which meant I had been awake until two am. So whatever I did, it needed to have minimal parental involvement and minimal opportunity to get wrong, otherwise we would have screaming tantrums. And he might be grumpy too.

To get him home without complaining too much, I bundled the wheelchair into the boot, took the front wheel and demanded to know what he knew about a famous person. He hadn't heard of said famous person, so I told him something about their childhood. He asked to know what that person did when they grew up. (It was Helen Keller. Socialism and Swedenborgianism, if you are interested). So we came home and I looked up the answer on the internet. So far, so calm. But I had to leave him with Dad, because I needed to go out.

I dumped four library books on the floor in front of him. Two were loosely related to the topic we are "doing," and two were just random non-fiction that I had liked the look of. "Your task this afternoon is to find two facts that you didn't know. And bonus point if you find a fact that your father doesn't know." The jetlagged figure sitting on the sofa nodded vaguely. My son looked distinctly unenthusiastic. I left them to it. When I came back he had not two, but five facts to tell me. Two he had found that his dad didn't know. I felt like giving him a big sleep-deprived hug. Instead I gave him the chocolate we had promised him if he could outwit his dad.

Should I be giving him chocolate for doing his work? I dunno. His teacher gives him stickers, is chocolate worse than that? Chocolate is nice. It can cheer me up anytime. Better a bit of chocolate now and then than endless opiates for the pain. As I pondered the Cumulus Chocolate Theory of Pain Relief, I realised that it wasn't just about distraction from pain, nor the reward. It was also about making a mental association, that learning can be fun.

And I want to do that, because it matters to me. We are a family that enjoy learning. Richard and I have both spent way too much time studying for our own good. So really, if I have a homeschooling philosophy, it's increasingly just that. I want home learning to be fun. I don't really care if we end up parsing grammatical structures or building cuckoo-clocks out of plasticine. Because ultimately, I see home learning not as a goal in itself, but as the best antidote I've got to boredom, anger and pain.

And of course, introducing fun and laughter doesn't just have to come from me. Sometimes it's about letting down our guard a bit, letting our children have fun at our expense.
At bedtime, he wanted to stay up a bit. "Can i go on the computer?" "Yes, if you do something educational." He found graffiti-creator and started messing around. Then he wrote DIE KERRY. He looked at my husband and I, to see the effect. When he saw me laughing, he wrote some insulting stuff about his father's favourite rugby team. Spelling it correctly, I noticed. Fun. just messing around. Except he was writing, and learning, too.

Sometimes the most obvious things are the ones that take you a while to work out. Having floundered in a sea of educational confusion, I am starting to pick a path. When I have an idea, or read a hippy tome promising me that the way to educate my son is limitless Lego, I am starting to assess the stuff I read against a simple benchmark. "Very impressive/creative/freespirity/structured. But will my son enjoy it?" Some things I can pick as suitable in advance, some I will only find out by trying. The book he chose for fact-hunting was actually one I had taken out for my own enjoyment, not his. I thought he would be bored by it. Conversely, some things I am sure he will adore will fall on barren ground. Ah well. I can always strew the barren ground with carefully-placed stickers and chocolate.

Baby animal in trouble

Right, off to school you go, I said firmly to my son this morning. This was absolutely essential. I would have had to push him in his wheelchair even if he was screaming and begging me not to go, if necessary I would have had to carry him down the steps, because his younger brother had a hospital appointment so I wasn't going to be at home.

He had been on his feet most of the morning, complaining. He knew he had to go to school, though, and since it was wet outside found a piece of cardboard to sit on whilst he pushed himself slowly, painfully, down the steps on his bottom. (There might allegedly have been a moment where I yelled at him to stop messing around and get on with it). I didn't feel guilty for pushing him. There was no option. We had to get his brother to be seen by the paed today. That is just family life. So school it was. Got him to his classroom, and said casually "Yes, I'll come and see you when I drop off your brother."

I spend the next halfhour listening to my little ones play Wonderpets on a loop. "Dere's an animal in trouble - I got it!" The little one runs around the waiting room, rescuing imaginary lions. "Ah, look, here it is." He brings it to his brother. "It's a baby lamb." My middle son examines it seriously, then pushes the imaginary lamb into his pocket. I make a mental note to precede any future sheep purchases with reminders that they don't belong in our trousers. Hospital appointment over, I came back to school and popped my head around the corner of the classroom. He was on his feet, good. He saw me and said he was sore, in a lot of pain. But he was walking, so I had a quick word to the teacher to check she was happy to keep him at school, then said he was fine and I'd see him at hometime. As I left there was a bit of a yell from him, but I ignored it, knowing if I walked away he'd soon calm down.

I got back into the car, started to drive home. I waited for the guilt feelings to disappear. But unlike this morning, they were persistent, nagged at me. I could not put them down. They were as persistent as the driving rain. (I think it is fairly clear that the Great Drought of 2013 in the North Island is now over). This is weird, I thought, why can't I relax?

And then it hit me. Just because he was on his feet did not mean that he wasn't still really, really sore. And that meant - even if he'd had a good morning - he might just have been coping brilliantly with the pain. And was it really fair for me to assume that he could go on coping, because he'd done well so far? Was that not teaching him in reverse, that if he masters this we will just set him something harder? There is an incredibly funny book called "A Year of Learning Dangerously" about home education. I like it, not because it reassures me that I am not THAT bad a homeschooler, I have never yet been reduced to hiding in the bathroom and breathing into a paper bag. This episode of maternal collapse is brought on by long division. The writer's daughter quite reasonably refuses to master long division in school. Her reasoning is that she doesn't like maths, and if she learns to do this they will just set her something worse. Wasn't I in danger of teaching my son the negative lesson, that if he managed a whole morning at school that just meant I would insist on him doing the afternoon too?

And there was something else, that came to me whilst I was driving home. It was a long complicated road to get pregnant, and during those extremely arid years I remember promising myself that if I ever did have the luck to have kids, I would a) not mind if they were disabled b) listen to them.
A) turned out to be significantly harder than I expected. I'm still working on it. Keep you posted.
B) I tune out a lot of crap, but I do try to listen to the important stuff, and take their perspectives into account.
And today, not listening to him saying "I'm sore and I've had enough," well, it didn't feel like I was listening really. There's a baby animal in trouble, and I must try to do something about it. Without squashing him into my back pocket, if possible.

I turned around and went back. It was the end of morning class. Everyone was politely surprised to see me, and his lovely teacher (it is SUCH a kicker that he's not able to be there much, he'd learn SO much in her classroom) reassured me that he'd had a really good morning and he would be fine if he stayed. I popped him in the car and we came home, where caring overprotective mother that I am, I promptly forgot to give him lunch until he complained.

As I poured out the Rice Crispies (haute cuisine we are not) I wondered whose needs I was meeting, his or mine. Then I decided that it didn't really matter for now, and that if an average pain-level day meant half school, half home, then that was better than no education at all. I also thought ruefully that perhaps all that was stopping me apply to de-register him was how useful it was that he COULD go to school, rather than dragging him to his brother's hospital appointments.

"Can I take Crusher tomorrow in for Show and Tell?" my son demanded. Crusher is the newest figure from that dratted computer game that is dominating our lives. (Must learn to LOVE computer game and find a way to make it EDUCATIONAL! Like good homeschooling parents DO!)

Ah, yes, I thought, that's another good reason for persevering for now. Because when you take pain out of the equation he genuinely wants to go. He's not always crying for help. Half the time he wants me to leave him alone and let him enjoy fun with his friends.

Now I just wish I could get that dratted "Baby animal in trouble - somewhere!" song out of my head.

A good day, and a conversion experience

Today was like yesterday except in reverse. A really good day that should on the surface have been dreadful.

It started unpromisingly I had had very little sleep and had picked up my other half from the airport at such an ungodly hour that a headless chicken could have got us back to the North Shore before rush hour. Unfortunately my sense of direction is inferior to a headless chicken, so we spent a hour or two circling bits of the city we really DIDN'T need to see. Home, and having happily played in the Mcdonalds we stopped at for, um, breakfast (please don't slate me, parents who don't feed their children rubbish), my son seized up when we got home and couldn't manage to get out of the house. Sigh. Second child had tantrum at school drop-off: then third child had tantrum on way to kindy (he was either VERY keen on the Superman outfit in their dressing-up kit or not very keen at all, such was his state of despair I couldn't work out which)
I had coffee with a friend, came back to the house and braced myself. None of us had slept enough. Today was going to be a tough day.

But it went swimmingly, and I'm still trying to work out why. (Yes, I know, gift horse in the mouth). Partly I was cheered up by a nice conversation in the school carpark with a senior staff member (This is why I can't actually bear the thought of de-registering my son. I like all the teachers far too much). But partly I think, my son and I had just got the hang of this home education thing. We both knew what to expect from each other. I told him he needed to do half an hour of spelling and half an hour of Mathletics, and he did what he was told. Then we messed around on the computer together and had fun, I mean I did an ART lesson.
This was because we'd watched an episode of the Simpsons where Bart does graffiti, I mean street art. I thought "Ha! An original idea for an art lesson!" I found a website that lets you write your name in, like, cool graffiti-style. (I have never been the slightest bit cool. I think I may be overcompensating). My plan was to show my son the website and then spend a few minutes pontificating to him about what "street art" and "graffiti" actually is.
He took one look and said "cool, I'm going to do street art?" Pushed me out of the way and started to fiddle with the controls. Then as he worked he asked me questions about street art, just the sort of questions I was planning to discuss with him, only he brought them up so that I didn't need to.
It was lovely. Just what you think education should be like. Hooray for the Simpsons. I didn't have to be Superman, swooping in with my knowledge, because he was leading the questioning. Interest-led learning, etc. All good. And - for the first time ever - he didn't clockwatch, obsess about when the lesson was ending. He was enjoying himself so much he didn't desperately want class time to end.

And I was relieved, because when I went for a walk by the beach yesterday afternoon I realised that something very strange was happening to my thinking. I was repeatedly coming up with reasons why home education (of some variety, part-time, correspondence, flexible school attendance) was not right at all for our family: and finding that my reasons were actually really rubbish, unhealthy and prejudiced. They were nonsense. Oh Lordy, I thought with alarm. This is one of THOSE times.
This has only happened to me once before in my life, when I started to feel as a young woman that God was calling me in the direction of the ordained ministry, and pushed the thought away very firmly, because I was very sweary and not at all patient with others, and more importantly I didn't like church. You will guess what happened next. A similar experience happened to a priest friend of mine, a senior cleric in the Church of England, a leading light in the fight against women priests. A sort of misogynist's Superman. Nice guy. He sat down one day to write a strongly worded article to his parishioners on the reasons why he rejected women's ordination, and to his alarm and embarrassment realised that he didn't actually have any reasons worth writing of, because all the reasons he could think of were complete nonsnse. He then had the courage to stand up at the next Synod and announce with sonorous rigour "I have changed my mind."
It is a conversion experience when you suddenly realise that all the deeply held opinions you have had on a subject are wrong.

Now I'm still rather desperately hoping that this is all a short-term blip, and home education is NOT right for our family. But I rather think it might be, at some point, in some way, in some degree. At least a little bit. (Maybe just on Saturday and Sundays?) But anyway, even if it isn't a path we end up walking I'm going to be a lot less dismissive of the ideals and practice of home ed now I've had to think seriously about it. For the time being it sounds as if the Northern Health School are going to get involved. I have no idea whether they are good or rubbish, but they are the people who specialise in working with kids who are too sick to be in school. That's good, because hopefully they will tell me what to do and I can just mindlessly follow their instructions. They probably won't be involved longterm as they have a tight budget (don't we all) and are apparently reluctant to be a longterm substitude for school, but hopefully it will give everyone enough breathing space to work out how I can best claw back some semblance of a life for myself, er, I mean what is best for my child. They feel a bit like superheroes, soaring in through the window to save my sanity and shopping time. Perhaps they'll even be able to work out whether my youngest does or doesn't want to dress up like Superman.

An odd day

It should have been a good day. The sun shone. I had time to myself. My boy got to school.

It didn't look like it was going to happen, the school today. When he got out of bed he was sore, and soon he was needing to eat his breakfast crouched on the floor of the sittingroom, instead of making it to the table. I resigned myself to another homeschool morning. Then, at about eight o'clock, he walked along the corridor. He collapsed again, but I realised I could probably get him down the steps of the house.

So we did it. I pushed him in his SN buggy to the door (the wheelchair lives in the car) and then asked him to walk down the stairs. He did so, tottering, shouting at me "this will make it hurt more later!" But I had a good feeling that his legs might improve if we got him there. I pushed him into his classroom, as he shouted at me that I didn't understand, he had a headache and felt sick. Then I left him there, assuming the school would call me if there was a problem. And I was free.

At the end of the day I picked him up. I was right, he was walking. "It got better," he said to the teacher in front of me, and then sang a ditty "Pain, pain, go away, it will come back another day." I wanted to cry. The teacher showed me how his name was written on the board, with the children who had concentrated particularly well. I told him how pleased I was. We went to the car.

It should have been a day that made me happy. He did it, he got to school. Then he excelled. And more importantly, he had fun. He ran around with his friends. But it doesn't, it makes me sad. When I think about it, it reduces me to tears. That was not a terrible morning, unless you count the shouting and crying. But I do count it, each and every time. I hear my boy's pain, and I remember it, even when he gets over it and has a good day. School is great, except for getting him there, which is terrible.

I am haunted by a conversation I had with friends at the time he started school. "I've decided I will only send him to school if he is happy there," I said. I was thinking not of pain, but the more normal stuff, bullying, not fitting in, that sort of thing. But I was determined that if he was unhappy, I wouldn't leave him there. I didn't want to send an unhappy child to school.

I break that promise I made, each and every time I send him down the steps in pain. Sometimes, it is simply unavoidable. This afternoon, we came home and I remembered I had forgotten to pick up my youngest from kohanga. "Come on," I said, "we have to go now." His legs had seized up, and I had to push him in the buggy to the door, then ask him to crawl down the steps, screaming. But that was OK, in a way, because it was just unavoidable - we HAD to go and get his brother, it was impossible to leave him at kohanga all night. But the morning troubles me, even though the pain itself was less: because I didn't HAVE to make him go to school. I did it because I thought he might cope, because I thought it was good for him. And on the surface I was right.

But I am aware that this is stretching me ever thinner, like a rubber band: I am close to snapping with the pressure of it all. But it's not as simple as pulling him out of school, because fulltime home schooling could well be a disaster. We don't have a car at home in weekdays, and he could wilt with the lack of friendship. He will, as he told me yesterday, miss his friends. And I can't arrange playdates because I can never tell when he will be able to stand.

The one ray of light was that today an email arrived from our lovely Occupational Therapist. She's found a builder who can do a quote for a reasonably-priced ramp. It is not legal, in the sense that it would not meet government guidelines, but it is a third of the price. Since we will be likely be paying for this ourselves (or doing fundraising), this is wonderful news.
And it leaves me wondering, how much of my despair at sending him to school is that he can't physically get there without screaming, and how much is the question of how well he will cope once he is there?

There are no answers, just like there is no cure. But there might be a ramp. That is a start.

In which I suddenly realise I may have to think about educating TWO children at home

First day of term. And ho hum, sore legs, my son can't get out of bed. This is problematic because it means I can't drop the youngest to kindy. A kind friend offers to stop by so that I can get the middle one to school. Usually he'd catch the school walking bus, but it's cancelled because of the heavy rain. This is the important bit, remember that.

I come home, and prepare myself for a day of doing it back to front - there is no way the three-year-old will let us do the sort of focused stuff I had planned, so I tell my eight-year-old that he will do his main school this afternoon during toddler nap time, and all I want from him at some point in the morning is either Mathletics or spelling. He picks spelling, so I log him onto the free spelling website I have found. This simple process takes me about ten minutes and several computer reboots, during which time I compose a new Cumulus' Law of Home-Schooling: if something can go wrong technically, it will. I suppose I should be grateful that it wasn't going wrong in front of thirty children, just one.
The morning is cold, grey and depressing. Nick Jr blares from the TV and I can't imagine how the homeschooler is managing to concentrate on his spelling games. He is angry with the computer, he shouts at it "I can't do any of it right." I quickly check online, and realise with embarrassment that I have accidentally set the level too high for his age - he's in Year Four in New Zealand, but that does not equate to Fourth Grade US. Two years ahead. Oops. No wonder he's frustrated.
After the promised twenty minutes we do a test. He doesn't want to use his specially new bought clipboard and pens (ungrateful child), but wants it on the computer. I let him type his answers. He pecks them out, hunched over the keyboard. When I check, he's scored 100 per cent. Our moods both lift. OK, I think, the online program is obviously a good one. Phew. We can do this.

Then the physio rings. She is planning a meeting with school to arrange making things easier for him there, but when she talks to me agrees that there's not much point when I can't get him in. She asks "what is the structure of your day at home?" I describe the commode, the pushing him down the hallway in the buggy. She goes quiet. Then she says. "It's that bad?"
I tell her that I am using education as pain management, to give him something else to think about. She agrees that distraction is a good idea. Then she says "but you can't just distract, kids need to do, the things that they are supposed to do..." I know she is thinking, but not saying, he needs to go to school.

After lunch I put the little one for a nap. Then I spend a quiet five minutes setting up the kitchen table with a map, some magnets to stick on it, and a few notes I have made of the work I plan for us to do together. His legs have improved, so he's able to join me in the kitchen.

I am rather looking forward to this lesson. I have a sort of idea in my mind of homeschooling as a high-minded series of conversations, where I introduce worthy and thought-provoking themes in a fun yet weighty way. We will chat, as friends, only he will respect me as his tutor. At the back of my mind I see myself as a sort of kiddie-friendly Oxford don, offering him the privilege of a personal tutorial. This is the plan.
We start, and immediately I realise that he is high as a kite. Having been unable to walk all morning, he now can't sit still. He is keen as mustard, but it is like talking to a jack-in-the-box.
"Can we do this? What's that there on the map? Can I play with these?" He is all over the place, asking questions without listening to the answers, spinning magnets, thinking of new things to do. "Are we going to bake today? Baking's educational."
I slow down, remind him kindly to sit still and calm down, continue, stop, tell him to pay attention a little bit more firmly, continue, lose my rag and yell at him....
somewhere in the middle of all this we are meant to be discussing the idea of home education, and the different ways in which you learn at home and at school. He is not really interested until I ask him what happens when a teacher has to teach lots of children, and some of them understand the first time, and some not at all. "I get bored. And I hide my head inside my clothes, like this." He remembers a project he did last year about nature. "But it stopped, stopped stopped! And we never did any more and I hate that."
I am trying to make sure that he is getting a balanced picture. So I ask him about things that he can do at school that he can't do at home. "Play with your friends at playtime?" He grins, and moves that into the "both home and school" section. "You are my friend," he says. "I can play with you."
Er, yes, I say, hoping this does not mean he is expecting me to start spending those precious few moments when I am not teaching him playing Skylanders and Pokemon. Then I wonder if this lesson is going quite the way I want it to. I wanted to just introduce the idea that we might learn differently in different contexts, not find out all the stuff he doesn't enjoy about school-style learning. But I can't unsay it, or unlisten to what he's telling me. We move onto geology, and spend a happy half-hour drawing diagrams of layers of rock forming mountains with the snazzy multi-coloured pens I bought at the toyshop. This is a definite hit.
Oh goodness, I think with alarm, what if he falls in love with homeschooling? This is just meant to be a temporary measure, a response to the days of pain. I would have to LISTEN to him, and withdraw him from school; and I like school, and I think it's good for him, etc etc. I comfort myself with the thought that hopefully he is partly telling me what he thinks I want to hear, and then - relieved that he can now move - we drive down the road to fetch his brother.
As we drive through the gates of school, he says "It is hard being cooped up all day." I couldn't agree more. Then he says "I miss being able to play with my friends." I agree that that is hard, with a sigh of relief that he hasn't turned off school completely. This evening I make a cunning suggestion. If he has a day like today, where he starts off in a lot of pain but gradually improves, why doesn't he just go in for an hour or so in the afternoon? That way he'll get to see his friends.
We agree it's a good idea, although I can see he's nervous that this means I'll start to pressure him again to attend when he's in agony. We'll play it by ear.

I think again of the physio's hint, that working at home is not enough, is inadequate somehow. I wonder if she is right. And then the jinx hits: I suddenly realise that the entire strategy on which I have based this plan is flawed. I have been thinking of one child at home most days (usually my husband can take the littlest to day-long kohanga). But now that it is winter, I won't have the car. I won't be able to get the wheelchair up the drive safely in the rain. So far so normal, but what is not the same as summer is that the school walking school bus doesn't run when it's raining. And it's Auckland, there's a lot of rain in winter. If my eldest can't walk, I won't be able to get my middle one to school.
I look at my middle child. You are absolutely lovely and I adore you, I think. But please dear God not dealing with two of you at home needing an education. I know that the hyper afternoon session was because I couldn't do the focused work in the morning, when my son is steadier. And this was him at his easiest, with one-to-one attention. I can't imagine trying to teach him anything with another child in the room. Less of an Oxbridge tutorial and more of a bearpit, then. I compose a second Cumulus' Law of HomeSchooling: Just when you think it can't possibly get any harder, that's exactly what it does.

Do you bleed every month Mum?

Do you bleed every month?
I hesitated, and decided not to go into the precise details of the Mirena.
Yes, I said gaily, reminding myself that I am a MODERN OPEN parent, and wondering if possibly the Tribal Wives documentary was such a good idea after all. My son looked at me with horror. "It's sore!" "No, not really," I lie. "But men don't have to?" "No." He sighed with evident relief at his gender's good fortune. We watched for a few more minutes. The onscreen topic moved onto female circumcision. I pressed the fastforward button. "Is it kissing? Cos I am NOT watching that."
The documentary finished. "You've had your fun. Go to bed."
"That was not fun. It was educational. It was all about girls," he said grumpily. Hmm. Educational is clearly the opposite of fun, it's the horrible stuff Mum makes you do when you are sore and would rather play Pokemon. Must work further on this JOY OF LEARNING business.
In the morning, I announced to the boys that we were going to the Sky Tower. (We have an annual pass). They ran around screaming in that particular way that means a) they are happy b) they are going to be hard work. My enthusiasm flagged. But in the event, they were reasonably well-behaved, apart from World War Three nearly erupting in the cafe about sharing an ice-cream pot. What concerned me was my eldest, the one I'm part-time homeschooling: he was short-tempered and unenthusiastic, unable to cope with me touching him or his youngest brother wanting some strawberry ice-cream too. He'd been pretty awful before we left the house, too, claiming he couldn't put his new jeans on because they were going to hurt him later. Huh, I thought, typical ungrateful kid, this is supposed to be a treat.
On the plus side, I thought as he whinged at me about something else unimportant and out of my control, this is a reminder to me that when I am homeschooling and he is grumpy ungrateful and uninterested, it's not necessarily that the curriculum is wrong or the lesson was badly planned: it's just the way he is sometimes. I wallowed a little in self-pity for the fact that I was working my socks off for the educational and moral benefit of this grouchy young man.
Then I did what a GOOD HOME-SCHOOLING PARENT should do: I searched for opportunities to shake his mood and find educational, "teachable" moments. We all talked about the clouds and how they were bringing rain and occluding the sky. "Mum there is nothing beautiful in those clouds, they are just covering everything up." I noticed that the floor was made of granite and marble (or a synthetic imitation) and knelt down to point the links to our geology lessons. "Oh. Yeah." He looked up. "Can I buy one of those souvenir coins over there?" He knows I hate pestering. I try to think positively and don my INTEREST-LED LEARNING hat. "Hmm, maybe you could start a coin collection and then we could buy one of those for it next time we come? Would you like to start a coin collection?" "OK," he says unenthusiastically. Then he insists that somewhere in the Sky Tower there is a lift without a glass pane in the floor and that he will only travel down in one of those. I persuade him down with the promise that we will check with the personnel on ground level if he is right (top tip for raising an Aspie: do not confront an incorrect fixed idea yourself, find another adult to do it for you). When the ground staff tell him that all the lifts have glass floor panes, he insists that he has seen one and grumbles all the way back to the car. He's so interested in grumbling and dragging his feet that he gets shut in the Sky Tower by himself (the disabled entrance doors only open one way) and we have to call security to get him back. By this stage I am wondering if I actually WANT to be reunited with this horrible young man.
We get into the car and on the way home stop at the park, where he grumbles because I have chosen a park which will give him prickles in his bare feet. Then he complains about the car seat destroying his neck. I am about to give him a proper telling-off, the kind of "I am FED UP WITH YOUR ATTITUDE YOUNG MAN" yell that I keep for special occasions, when a thought occurs to me. He's been on his feet for hours and just ran laps in the park but - before I reduce him to tears with my special-occasion-explosion-telling-off, I will just check.
"How are your legs?"
"They're really sore."
"Have they been sore for long?"
"Yes."
"Do you know why I asked that?"
"Because I am angry."
We've never discussed the relationship between pain and mood before. We obviously need to now.
I'm struck by how awful and resistant he was to everything, simply everything. And I feel even more strongly that he mustn't be pushed into school beyond his ability to cope. Because that kind of mood is no way to make friends or keep them. (I also feel rather helpless in my desire to make learning FUN! and INTERACTIVE! and ENJOYABLE! when he's at home in this kind of pain, but that's a side issue).
But I am glad I haven't yelled at him, at least.

At home, to cheer myself up, I make a list of every educational topic we discussed whilst we were out. And to my surprise, there is quite a long list. Many he brought up himself. I intended to use it as a base for some topic-led lessons, but as I look I realise something more fundamental. That actually he's full of ideas, and interesting questions, and co-operative conversations, even on a bad day like today. There was enough going on there, even WITH the attitude-pain-thing, to satisfy any interest-led homeschooler.

But something else also occurs to me. One of the reasons I am shifting gear, from my all-out "you MUST get to school" approach, isn't that when he was in school in pain he wasn't learning, a bit, or coping, more or less. It was the terrible experience of the mornings, the screams of pain as I forced him down the steps, the fact that he just wasn't learning to get on with it, or respecting the fact that it would be better when he'd got into the car and could stay sitting from then on in, or putting up with it because I was Mum and telling him what to do. It was a battle I wasn't losing - he would comply, screaming - but I wasn't winning. He wasn't learning that he could do it, he was just relearning every day that doing it was terrible. I have always thought that if you are constantly having to "fight for your child" - as the folklore of Special Needs parenting has it - then you are in the wrong place. The wrong doctor, the wrong hospital, the wrong school. You need to find people you can work with WITHOUT a fight.
And the same is true of education I think. Educational = fun may be a way off. Realistically, if he's too sore for school, learning at home will be tough. I can't make learning through pain GREAT! COOL! AMAZING, MUM! CAN WE DO MORE? But I can try to find the places and ways that he can learn without resistance, without it becoming a fight. And if that means sitting on the sofa discussing my menstrual cycle whilst we watch documentaries about Maasai wives and cowdung, that is OK. As long as he is asking questions. (Even if they are consistently the most embarrassing personal ones). I'll take that as achievement in home education for now.

Homeschool: the grand unified theory

I've been doing some Internet reading in the past few days, and I'm pleased to report that I now have a much better understanding of how to home-school. (Part-time, obviously, when my son is in pain). To sum up:

If you're having a bad day, take the day off. If you're not having a bad day, remember that home-schooling should take place at home, in a structured environment, with a formal curriculum. Pre-packaged curriculae are the antithesis of what home-schooling should be about. Home-schooling should be about freedom to move, a road trip, days out learning in the real world. Real-world learning is a dangerous distraction from the real business of home-schooling, which is about protecting innocent and impressionable young minds from the sinful real world out there. If your child is struggling and you are unhappy, take the day off. A good homeschool parent lets the child lead the way. A good homeschool parent is a firm leader. Your child will learn as naturally as they breathe, if you don't get in the way. Your child will never succeed in life without Latin, Greek and the formal study of rhetoric. Experience beats textbooks. Home-schooling will fail without this [insert name here] course or textbook. Make sure your child gets up early or they will never develop a true work ethic. Let your child stay up all night so that they learn to listen to their body. If you're having a bad day, take the day off. A dedicated study room is absolutely essential for effective homeschooling. To express the true joined-up nature of study and life, make sure your child's education takes place in a space cleared on the kitchen floor between the dustbin and the potatoes. Do not limit screentime or your children will never learn that there is more to the Internet than Facebook. Remember that screentime is of the devil. If you are having a bad day, take a day off.

Phew, glad we've got all that straight. Obviously I'm still working out some of the finer details, but as far as I can see the only area of universal agreement is that days off are the answer to every crisis, and that home-schooling is much better all around than learning in school.
Which would be great if I didn't want to send him to school on his strong-and-walking days. Hmm, that means that the only piece of common ground I share with every other homeschooler in the universe is days off. Well, it's a start. Buoyed by enthusiasm from my research (and the kind support of you lovely friends on FB) I am slowly working out a few rough-and-ready home-schooling principles.

1) It doesn't really matter what I teach him. The national curriculum is arbitrary anyway.
This is a huge relief. I have stopped staring into the black hole that is Google wondering what age he will start reproaching me for never covering planetary magnetism at primary level, and if I have made a huge mistake by never studying Mandarin Chinese.

2) The point is to pass on a sense of the life-long adventure that is learning, not pass exams and stuff. Now, don't get me wrong. I rather liked exams. So does my son, that is why the best way we have found to motivate him to pay attention is to promise that if he is REALLY good and works hard all week, on Saturday he can sit a test with his father on the subjects we have studied, and we'll see who gets the highest mark. Hmm, not a natural candidate for unschooled education then. But therein lies my point: I would like in the next year or so to give him a sense that it is fun to learn stuff just because it's there, not just because you can get a pat on the back for doing well in the class or home test. If possible I would also like him to learn that you can enjoy learning about stuff unrelated to dinosaurs, but I accept that may be a little unrealistic.

3) The resources I give him are less important than the person I am.
I've been thinking about this good teacher business, and I came to the reluctant conclusion that actually home-schooling was not about being a good teacher but being a good parent. And being a good parent means, for me, modelling and pushing your child towards a healthy interdependence in relationships. (This is particularly important for children and young people with additional needs, who may have a different level of achievable independence than the average). The interdependent ideal is they learn to accept help where they need it, but also be independent where they can.
I am trying to apply this approach to homeschool too. I do not want the freestyle independent learning mode of unschooling, but nor do I want the extremely structured top-down approach of a child totally dependent on their teacher for curriculum. The way I see it, learning for a child should be about moving closer to the parent at one moment to listen to an explanation, then further away to explore stuff for themselves, then finding that there is a gap in knowledge or an unanswered question, and moving back towards the parent for assistance. A natural cycle of need and independence, then need again, but with the hope that gradually the need lessens and the independence grows.
Now at the moment - when my eight-year old son quite regularly needs help to wash himself, put on his trousers or rearrange the duvet on his bed, when he asks me to clean his teeth for him because he is just too sore - I am rather conscious of his physical needs being more than the average child. Half the time, he's like a newborn baby. All the more important to work on a healthy sense of emotional independence. So when I'm moving him around or bathing him, I try to do it with the same respect I would show an adult - "is this OK?" "Which T-shirt do you want?" "Tell me if it hurts." "If we tried getting you down the steps this way, would that be easier?" I try to remember that this situation could be reversed in forty years, and that relationships work best when they are not based on dependency or aloofness, but interdependence. So I try to look at our physical challenges as an opportunity for creative problem-solving. (Sometimes this Pollyannaish approach fails, so then I just scream at him to do it himself if he thinks I'm so hopeless. But you know, I'm trying). If possible, I'd like to transfer this attitude to home-schooling. Note to self: must consider further whether developing interdependency as a positive family outlook is compatible with bribing child to sit still with the promise of marshmallows in hot milk.

4) I do not have to do it well.
This was hard for me to grasp, but it was one of the most reassuring things. Fundamentally, let's face it, my son is a bright cookie who can already read and do basic arithmetic. If I manage to teach him anything at all, great, but it's not really essential for his longterm career. All I'm really doing is babysitting, on the days when he can't do "proper" school. That means I can have fun, be playful and experiment, I can read up on different homeschooling styles and try different bits of each. I don't have to get it right.

5) Er. That's it.

Right, must go off and polish my halo. All home-educating mothers are saints, didn't you know that? Totally dedicated to the cause of their child's emotional and spiritual wellbeing at the expense of anything and everything else. And they all have tidy houses and publish beautiful pictures of their child's independent artworks on lavishly illustrated blogs.
Or something. They're damn intimidating when you read them online, anyway.

Or possibly they're not a scary bunch at all. Perhaps they're just muddling along and doing the best they can, day to day. Perhaps they're really less self-confident than they seem. Perhaps, you know, they're learning on the job. Intimidated by the responsibility and trying to do the best they can. Just like me.

Gosh, all that thinking was hard work. I think I need to take a day off.