“Okay! Good! Here’s how it happened. Mommy and Daddy wanted a little boy. One day, we got a phone call from a lady named Linda who said she knew this two-year-old boy who was really great and wanted a family.”
“Me!” he said.
“That’s right! It was you! We told Linda we wanted you to be our son. After that, we thought about you all the time. Soon, you became the only thing we thought about.”
Thorin clapped excitedly.
I asked, “You wondered how we met?”
Nodding his head and laughing he said, “Yesith!”
I had a stab of guilt. Of course any child would wonder how he became part of his family, but most children could ask.
“I should’ve told you before. Okay, so one day, Linda sent me a photo of you. You were so beautiful I cried. Daddy cried, too. I kept your picture in my purse. I would look at it all day. I would talk to you. I would tell you how much I loved you.”
Thorin made a sighing sound.
“Then we finally met you! The rest you know.”
He jumped up and down on the bed. When he stopped, he signed, “Again.”
“You want to hear it again?”
“Yesith!”
The story became a nightly ritual, which Thorin initiated by making the sign for “again” at bedtime. We started calling it the “Again Story.” I realized Thorin was in a position where he would have to wait until I asked him a question to figure out what he wanted to know. It made me wonder what else I was missing. I thought the next logical step was asking him if he wanted to know how Ward and I met.
“Me there?” he asked.
“No, just Daddy and me.”
“No, tanks.”
I wasn’t just experiencing a learning curve on communicating with Thorin but with many of the women at the school. I loved the school, and, most importantly, Thorin loved the school, but I was becoming exhausted by their continual unsolicited advice. The staff got me through his first field trip, assuring me he would be okay. They were sympathetic to his health needs. They administered his rescue inhaler and, if needed, his nebulizer. They made accommodations. Thorin refused to nap, so one of teachers built a little cardboard house over his sleeping mat, and he could play as long as he was not disturbing the other children. He was absolutely safe there.
I just didn’t want to sing “The Goodbye Song” when Thorin didn’t want to leave. When I found out there was also a “Clean-up Song,” I just shook my head.
Who’s writing these crappy propaganda songs? What’s wrong with “Listen here, Mister, you made the mess so help me pick this stuff up?”
When I was a child, my parents often used work experiences to give me context for my behavior. Say, I was running through the house screaming, so my dad might tell me, “If you did that at work, it’d be all over with. It’s easy to find non-screaming workers.” That logic seemed fine to me.
I found out from Ward the staff never said anything to him.
“What? Why don’t they tell you what to do?”
“Kari, I’m a man. No one expects us to do anything.”
“That sucks!”
“I don’t take it personally and I’m relieved not to hear the feedback.”
One afternoon when Thorin wouldn’t leave school with me, the speech therapist, who didn’t have children, responded with, “Okay, Thorin, should we walk out of the school like a monkey or roll like a log?”
Roll like a log? No fucking way!
I was not going to be able to watch my son and an adult roll down two hallways and out of the school without my head exploding.
“Okay, no, thank you, we aren’t going to do either one of those.”
I looked at Thorin. “Get up and move it if you want a Popsicle at home.”
“We find bribery doesn’t work,” she suggested.
I wanted to scream, “Shut up!”
I decided against telling her tell I had a bag of M&Ms in my purse in anticipation of tantrums in the supermarket. Rather than peel a screaming, spread-eagled Thorin off the floor, I would lean down and whisper, “If you want two M&Ms, get up now!”
I ended up being thankful for that ludicrous exchange with her because it got me to finally talk to Louise, the school director.
“I know you have our family’s best interest at heart. I really, absolutely know that. But if I don’t ask for advice or a suggestion on how to deal with Thorin, please have your staff refrain from offering it.”
“Who did that?”
“All of you!” I responded too harshly. “I mean most of you. Actually you do it, too, Louise.”
It was a couple years of resentment coming out at once.
“I do? I’m so sorry!”
“I should have said something before. I’m sorry, too. I still want to ask for your advice. I value it.” Then I told her about rolling like a log.
“Oh, no. The monkey isn’t bad but . . .” She looked at the expression on my face and continued, “But if you don’t want to be a monkey, it’s bad.”
We both laughed.
“Don’t worry about this. I’m going to take care of it!”
And she did. The unsolicited advice stopped.
I thought we were on an even keel at school until one morning I brought Thorin in to find out Mindy had left without putting in any notice. Thorin was beside himself, and my heart went out to him. He really did love her and not being able to say goodbye was difficult. He couldn’t articulate it, but what I saw was the pain of abandonment—something Thorin was all too familiar with. He would tear up when he asked about her, which was constantly. I asked Louise if she could contact Mindy to send a note addressed to Thorin at the school. Louise didn’t have any luck. Thorin needed closure. I didn’t see any other alternative but to send Thorin a card as Mindy. To make my card believable, I mentioned a couple of things I knew they both loved.
Dear
