The other day (last week? Two weeks ago?) I was scrolling through Facebook and I stumbled across a status update from a mom friend. It was all about how well her son is doing in school. How he’s being praised for good citizenship, behavior, and academics.
She’s so proud of him. She should be proud of him.
But my heart sank a little while I read it because my kid is not that kind of kid.
I talked to many parents when I was teaching and listened to their frustrations about how their child wasn’t doing what so and so was doing. I’ve had mom friends lament the ways their children weren’t meeting milestones at the same pace as their peers. I told all of them not to compare their experiences because people are variables and those can be unpredictable.
We shouldn’t compare our experiences. Truly. We shouldn’t. I believe that. We can’t compare them. They aren’t the same.
But I find myself doing that a lot lately.
We’re just not having a good kindergarten experience. I’m feeling a little sad about that.
Right now, it’s not looking like my son will be the kid who comes home from school having earned a special award or recognition.
We’re sure getting a lot of notes about everything he’s doing wrong, though, and they’re things I need to know about, like hitting his classmates, biting somebody in the lunch line, not completing his work because he’s busy catapulting pencils across the room.
(I definitely smiled a little at his ingenuity with the pencil flipping. It’s physics! Science! Smart stuff! But not the right time or place.)
I don’t know what to do when my kid is thatkid. And right now he’s that kid.
The kid who gets in trouble all the time. Who can’t be tamed or calmed. The one who can’t focus. And I don’t know what to do about it.
He’s so bright and smart and sweet (sometimes) and then he goes to school and the kid he is there isn’t a kid I recognize. Or have I just not been paying attention?
I’ve talked to the teacher. We’re all sitting down next week for a big ol’ powwow with psychologists and special education teachers and principals and counselors on one side and…me. We’ll discuss a behavior plan, intervention strategies, and I will probably cry.
I’m on the other side of the table and it’s a really uncomfortable place to be.
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