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.