Raising Blaze (19 page)

“If it’s true that these ten-year-olds can understand the content of that show and then be able to laugh at it, then I’m afraid there’s no hope for society,” I say.

My father laughs and counters in kind. “There isn’t any hope for society,” he says. “Get used to it.”

I am not allowed the luxury of filtering these debates internally and trying to apply them to my own child because, shortly after our dinner discussion, Blaze starts getting into trouble at school for using “inappropriate” language. The first warning comes shortly after Grace takes her maternity leave and is replaced by Mr. B. One day, after I leave the classroom, Blaze calls his new teacher a “dick.”

I am mortified when Mr. B. whispers this in my ear so that the other children won’t hear and get any ideas. Mr. B, who can barely control his own laughter, understands that Blaze doesn’t comprehend the meaning of what he is saying. But he certainly knows it is rude, I argue. As for the rest of it, I decide to call in my father to have a little chat with my son.

“Do you know what a
dick
is?” my father asks Blaze in a rather strident tone.

“No,” Blaze admits, honestly.

“Well, I’ll tell you. A
dick
is a rude term for a penis. So, basically, you called your teacher a penis. Do you understand how disrespectful that is?”

Blaze struggles to contain his laughter and maintain an appropriate level of chagrin, but I can tell that he finds the whole thing very funny. My father is masterful, never betraying his own amusement. He continues on, telling Blaze how important it is for him to have respect for his teacher—and everyone else, for that matter—and how he shouldn’t throw words around that he doesn’t understand just because he’s heard other people use them because then he’d really seem like an idiot, wouldn’t he? Blaze agrees, but I’m not entirely convinced that his contrition outweighs his amusement. My uneasiness is soon justified.

I arrive to pick Blaze up from school one day shortly after my father’s discussion with him, only to be greeted by a confused and troubled Steffi.

“Blaze said something very bad to me,” she says. I have to kneel down beside her to hear what she whispers in my ear. “He said he was going to stick a knife in my wiener,” she breathes. From the corner of my eye, I can see Blaze cowering in the classroom, a very guilty look on his face. I give him a fierce glance to indicate he is in big trouble, but my first duty is to reassure Steffi. I pull her aside from the little crowd of girls surrounding her and put my arm around her shoulders.

“Steffi,” I begin, “what Blaze said was totally inappropriate and I am going to speak to him about that, but I hope you know that he doesn’t really understand what he’s saying. Do you know that?” She nods, shyly. “He probably heard somebody say something like that and he’s just repeating it. But I am so sorry he said it and he will apologize. He doesn’t mean anything by it and he would never want to hurt your feelings. Do you understand?”

Steffi nods again and, before she runs off to catch her bus, she gives me a sweet little smile. “I know,” she says. “I know he doesn’t know…I know he didn’t mean it.”

When I walked into the classroom, Mr. B. gestures toward Blaze and says, “You heard what he said?” I shake my head in assent. Mr. B. is also of the mind that Blaze is merely repeating words he’s heard in the classroom without the slightest comprehension of meaning or context. Together, we demand an explanation from Blaze and, after considerable prodding, Blaze reveals that he’s heard an almost identical sentence from another boy in the class.

When we get home, I have it out with Blaze. I tell him how disappointed I am that he would say such a rude, hurtful thing to one of his friends. I remind him what my father told him about not repeating things he’s heard, especially if he doesn’t understand what those things mean. I explain what
wiener
is slang for, and Blaze is painfully embarrassed. The worst part of this whole episode, I tell him, is that what he said had violent overtones. How could he say such a terrible thing to a little girl?

Ultimately, I come to the understanding that Blaze is venturing
into territory that, until now, he’s left uncharted. He is learning that throwing out certain words and phrases will get him some attention from the boys in his class. He is still receiving plenty of help and mothering from the girls, but for the first time in his life, he is trying to go beyond them, to reach for acceptance from his male peers. I realize that this is a huge milestone for a boy who has spent most of his days watching his social milieu from within the confines of his own shell. But if the Steffi episode is any indication, I think, it is obvious that Blaze still doesn’t have a map or compass to navigate this new landscape. I can’t tell Blaze how to be a boy—nor do I want to. What I can do, I decide, is give him some information.

As I knew it would, this decision generates both internal and external debates.

“I have to have a ‘facts of life’ discussion with Blaze,” I tell my father and we discuss how, when, and why. My father offers to have the talk with Blaze and, at first, I think that this is a splendid idea. After all, I am no authority on becoming a man. But when my father says that there is no time like the present and offers to have his talk with Blaze immediately, I go into a state of panic. I remember the confusion
I
felt when I stumbled onto the facts of life at ten years of age and I fear that Blaze would be totally lost. I doubt that he has the emotional maturity to digest it all. I decide, finally, that, rather than passing the buck to my father, I will explain the whole thing to Blaze myself.

I reckon I need to find a completely unbiased book, preferably with illustrations, to read to Blaze so that my own interpretations won’t color our discussion. Besides, I reason with my father, wouldn’t it be better if he heard it from me first? Perhaps then he wouldn’t feel it was a topic he could never raise in my presence.

The first task, finding a book that explains the facts of life, proves to be much more challenging than I imagined. I roam the aisles at my local bookstore with Blaze trailing behind me, finding everything
except what I am looking for. There are several books about menstruation for girls and an overabundance of books on potty training. I see books for teens about coming to terms with homosexuality, AIDS, suicide, and a new baby in the family. There is nothing I can read to Blaze. I solicit the help of a bookstore employee, finally, and explain what I am looking for. She is a young woman who seems sensitive to my plight. “There must be something here,” she murmurs and begins pulling books off the shelf and leafing through them. Judging by the look of astonishment on her face, I feel safe assuming she’s never perused this particular section of the bookstore before.

“I just need something very basic,” I tell her. “I need a book that lays out the simple, physical facts. I don’t want any of this stuff about masturbation or sexually transmitted diseases. It’s definitely too soon to tell him about all of that.”

She takes a look at Blaze, who is walking around the store singing a tune of his own creation, and raises her eyebrows as if to ask,
This
is the kid you want the book for?

After a long search, I settle on a book that has a section devoted to sexual intercourse and a few pages explaining inappropriate language, illustrated with nonthreatening cartoons. I am not convinced that it is the best text to use, though, and my trip to the bookstore only reinforces my belief that this subject matter is filled with potential minefields. I often feel that there are few second chances with Blaze and that if I explain a concept (or, in this case, a physical reality) incorrectly, it will take years to reconstruct and change my words in his mind. This also means that I will have to think very carefully about the moral overtones of what I tell him. I want him to respect women, but I also want him to respect himself. More than anything else, I want him to feel safe and comfortable. There is no book or pamphlet that can aid me in achieving that goal. I decide to bide my time a little and think very carefully about what I want to tell my son.

Blaze has been very quiet about the whole Steffi incident after my
initial lecture and watches my bookstore machinations with interest. I suspect he knows something is up and that he is in for a serious conversation very soon. I know Blaze has wisdom beyond what he is credited for and it isn’t a huge leap of faith for me to believe that he will use this wisdom to see us both safely across this crossroad.

A few days after my initial visit to the bookstore, Blaze’s class goes on a field trip to see a historic section of the city as part of their social studies unit. Since I am a permanent fixture in the class, I get to go along as well. I sit at Blaze’s table, as Mr. B. reads off his expectations for the class’s behavior, and wait for the arrival of the other parent volunteers who will be coming along to help. Jimmy, of the
South Park
discussion, sits next to me and complains that he is tired, having spent a wild time at another boy’s birthday party over the weekend. He relates the events eagerly: ice-skating, pizza, and lots of girls.

“There were some really hot chicks there,” he says. I raise my eyebrows and he continues. “There was this one chick, she was a real babe. Scott thought so too,” he adds, referring to another boy in the class. “The only problem is that she’s nineteen years old,” he says, chagrined, and waits for my response. I can’t help smiling; although, once again, I am amazed at his precocity.

“Maybe,” I tell him, “you and Scott can double-date.”

“That might be a good idea,” Jimmy says. “If you put both our ages together, we’re the same age as her….”

“Jimmy,” I sigh, “you are definitely something else.”

It turns out that Jimmy’s mother is one of the parent volunteers. She is wearing a tight blue T-shirt and jeans and her hair is a dark waterfall down her back. I introduce myself to her but she doesn’t seem at all interested in starting up a conversation. I can’t even approximate how old she is. (I stopped being able to guess at women’s ages when Blaze started school. All the other mothers seemed so much older than I was, yet I knew they couldn’t be so I was completely thrown off.)

The two other parent volunteers for the field trip are the mothers of the most boisterous, outspoken boys in the class. When, several hours later, we all eat lunch together in a park, I watch these boys interact with their mothers. Jimmy leans over his mother, his arms around her shoulders. The other boys ditch their too-cool attitudes completely and beg their mothers to take them to the gift shop, to watch them play on the grass, to take their hands as they cross the street. By contrast, my child, standing apart from the group and listening for the sound of trains in the distance, seems positively detached.

For a few minutes, these boys are just that—little boys—clamoring for their mothers. I feel a stab of sentiment and find my eyes blurring with tears as I watch this interplay, but I don’t want to blink them away. I am afraid to miss any part of this brief time in Blaze’s childhood and I believe a blink is as long as it will take for Blaze and the rest of those boys to cross over from being the children they are to the adolescents they are becoming. I suspect that Blaze’s crossing will be unconventional, but perhaps, I hope, not so different from those of his peers.

I am saddened by what I feel is the beginning of the end of innocence for all of these children, including my own. It is both foolish and dangerous to maintain a stance of happy ignorance, I decide. The best I can do is to impart my own values to Blaze with gentleness and conviction and hope that he will mark his passage across this border with courage and strength.

An entire year passes before I break out my little facts-of-life book and sit down with Blaze for the discussion. I’ve been equivocating this long about whether or not he’s ready and, I admit, struggling with my own cowardice.

When we finally do sit down to talk, it is because Blaze insists on understanding the biology behind conception. Again, it seems, everything cycles back to birth. I tell him, nervously, that I’m going to
explain everything to him and that he must listen very carefully and ask me any questions he might have.

“It’s okay, Mom,” Blaze says as if to reassure me and I wonder, briefly, which one of us is the adult. Miraculously, I get through the specifics without losing my composure. The book, with its dispassionate objectivity, helps a great deal. Blaze listens attentively. There are no giggles, no looks of alarm, no blank stares of incomprehension. When I finish, the book closed in my lap, there is a moment of silence between us. I ask Blaze if he has any questions. He has just one.

“Doesn’t it hurt the woman?” he wants to know.

How, I wonder, could I ever have doubted Blaze’s unlimited capacity for fundamental understanding? His question allows me to launch into a discussion about intimacy, respect, and physical expressions of love. For a moment, we live in a perfect world where everything is beautiful and pure. I don’t know what will happen down the line with my son’s attitudes toward women, men, or himself. But I do know that I got there first, before
South Park,
a jaded classmate, or even the daily news. For that, I am very grateful.

I
viewed Blaze’s fourth-grade year as something of an idyll for both of us. There had been a few bumps in the road, but, on the whole, it had been a very successful time. I wasn’t sure how much of this success had to do with Grace (who began coming over to our house for tea and tutoring in the spring), Blaze’s peers, or the fact that I had come to school with him every day.

I kept thinking that a large part of Blaze’s readjustment at school came from within himself. This was the year that he’d started thinking and talking about his birth. It was also the first time that I’d ever seen him take any steps, however tentative, toward forming some relationships with children his own age. But I often felt that trying to understand Blaze was like trying to understand the ocean. To me, he seemed just as deep, changeable, and unfathomable. So much of what I learned about him came from a purely instinctual level. I knew that coming to school with him was the right thing to do at the time but I couldn’t have said why, exactly, or what else I could have done. I also knew that I wouldn’t be able to give a repeat performance the following year. A fifth-grader couldn’t have his mother tagging along with him to class every day. Aside from the fact that it probably wouldn’t do him any good on a purely social level, I doubted that I’d find another
teacher as sympathetic as Grace. So, as the year drew to a close, I was faced with the dilemma of where to place Blaze for the following year. My thoughts were cloudy and uncertain. Should I place him in another regular-education classroom for fifth grade and just hope for the best, or should I transfer him to the other school in the district that had a special-education class?

Dr. Roberts made a valiant attempt to sway me toward the latter option, even going so far as taking me for a visit to the special-ed class in question. We rode up to the school early one misty morning as Dr. Roberts meted out bits of information about the school, the program, and the teacher.

“Mr. Davidson has been teaching this class for years and years,” Dr. Roberts said. “He’s a terrific teacher. We’re lucky to have him.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’m sure.”

Once in the classroom, I sat next to Dr. Roberts and watched as Mr. Davidson gave instruction to a class of about fifteen fifth- and sixth-graders who were mostly boys. The atmosphere was casual but hummed with precise organization. Mr. Davidson was a big, bearded man with a rumbling, deep voice. He wore jeans and a Hawaiian shirt. My immediate impression of him was that, unlike most of the teachers I’d met, he wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, literally or metaphorically.

I was impressed with Mr. Davidson’s control over the kids. I was also a little startled by how old the kids looked. The boys were big, much bigger than the kids in Blaze’s class. I recognized a couple of them from Sally’s class so long ago. They looked almost like adults now.

“Don’t you think Blaze would be lost in here?” I whispered to Dr. Roberts. “These kids look huge.”

“That’s because there are some sixth-graders in here,” Dr. Roberts said. “They are a little older, but I can tell you that Mr. Davidson is a gifted teacher. He does really well with these children.”

I was inclined to believe her, mostly because I was struck by how overwhelmingly normal all the kids looked. Nobody spoke out of turn, made siren noises, or rocked in a chair. Hands were raised, questions were answered, papers were pulled out. I would have been hard pressed to identify any “handicapping conditions,” from this brief visit.

Dr. Roberts sat next to me, emitting a sort of proud special-education glow, watching the proceedings with a small smile on her face. She was clearly in favor of this class. But I had my own glow going and that had to do with how well I felt Blaze had done in a regular class. I wasn’t sure that Dr. Roberts was giving him enough credit for that. I was also loathe to take him away from the classmates he’d just started getting to know.

“I think I’ve seen enough,” I told Dr. Roberts. “Thanks for bringing me here.”

Back in her office, I told Dr. Roberts that I wanted to keep Blaze at his “home” school in a regular fifth-grade class.

“Will you think about Mr. Davidson’s class over the summer?” she asked. “You can always change your mind.”

I assured her that I would, but also extracted a promise from her that Blaze would have help in the classroom from an aide come September. Dr. Roberts wrote this into her notes. And, as I was learning, once something was written down in the notes, it had to be done.

As I made these arrangements with Dr. Roberts, I marveled at how my relationship with her had changed over the last five years. I had gone from a fearful hostility toward her to a warm respect. A good portion of this transition had taken place during fourth grade. My position as über-mom allowed me to drop by her office at various times during the day on an unofficial basis to let her know how things were going and I did this quite often. She had listened with interest when I told her about Dr. S. and his verdict of pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified, saying that she’d thought the same about Blaze. When I told her that Dr. S. had said that giving
Blaze medication would only be an exercise in experimentation, she disagreed, but didn’t push the issue. Again, she recommended taking Blaze to the educational specialist she knew.

“It’s something I might do at some point,” I told her, “but it’s too expensive for me at this point.” I told her that Dr. S. had recommended the same person and I was relaxed enough by then to tell her about the conversation my father and I had had with the good doctor. For reasons I couldn’t understand, I then told Dr. Roberts that I didn’t drive and that if anyone needed psychological counseling, it was probably me. I laughed a little at the end of this statement, but to my surprise, Dr. Roberts took it very seriously.

“Yes,” she said. “That would be money well spent. You should see somebody first, before you think about getting Blaze evaluated. It’s just as important to take care of yourself, you know.”

“Hmm, yes, well, maybe…,” I said.

I didn’t give Dr. Roberts’s proposal much more thought as I became wrapped up in the year-end frenzy that seemed to consume the school staff and students alike. One of the last events of the school year was the much-lauded “authors’ tea.” For this effort, the entire student body was instructed to produce a piece of free writing and turn it in to the teacher. Of these submissions, every teacher would select two or three students from each class to read their work in front of parents, staff, and students at an evening tea. There was much scribbling and pencil chewing going on in our class as we prepared for the event. As usual, Blaze was quite lackadaisical about the whole thing, preferring to study the machinations of his classmates rather than produce something of his own, even though he’d recently been scratching out some poems and songs at home.

I’d more or less given up on him submitting anything to Mr. B. and was busy helping his classmates with their work when he insisted on telling me about Breanna, one of his tablemates, and what had happened to her.

“Breanna was crying yesterday, Mom,” he told me. “She was really upset.”

“Oh, uh-huh?” I said, distractedly editing a poem about the color red.

“Mom, really,” Blaze went on. “She cried and it was like a storm. Her face was all dark and light and quiet. She didn’t make any sound but there were all these clouds and rain in her face.”

This I paid attention to. “Blaze,” I told him, “why don’t you write that down? Write down what happened to Breanna yesterday. Just like you told me.”

“Oh, okay,” he said, as if this was a good idea that hadn’t occurred to him. Blaze’s difficulty with the physical act of writing inclined him toward brevity, so he was finished very soon after he started. He handed me his paper and when I read it, I had the same surge of joy that I felt whenever I read anything particularly good.

Blaze hadn’t used any punctuation, so I added a couple of commas and periods. That was the extent of my edit.

“That’s a great poem, Blaze,” I told him. “I love it.”

“Really?” he said, disbelieving.

“Yes,” I said. “The only thing it needs is a title. You have to call it something. What do you want to call your poem?” I waited for his answer while a few lofty titles floated through my head. “The Quiet Storm,” maybe? Or perhaps, “Raining Tears?”

“‘Breanna Crying,’” Blaze said, simply. “That’s what it’s called.”

Yes, I thought. Yes, indeed.

Blaze turned in the Breanna poem after I scribbled down a copy to keep for myself. I didn’t think about it again until the next day when Mr. B. took me aside and said, “I love Blaze’s poem. It’s so different. I want to put him in the authors’ tea. What do you think? Do you think he’d mind reading it out loud?”

Blaze didn’t mind the idea of the authors’ tea at all and seemed even a little excited at the prospect. We had a dry run in front of the class where Blaze and the other two children who Mr. B. had selected stood up and recited their work. Blaze had nary a problem. However, Breanna, the subject of Blaze’s poem, blushed several shades of carmine and crimson when he read it out loud. She had an amazingly expressive little face. Blaze had captured it perfectly.

Mr. B. was possibly more excited than either me or Blaze. He got a tremendous kick out of Blaze, who always said exactly what was on his mind, even if this meant spouting less than politically correct statements about other teachers he didn’t particularly care for. For Mr. B., a first-year teacher looking for a permanent position, this must have been both amusing and enlightening. But Mr. B. also genuinely liked Blaze’s poem and wanted to share it. He wasn’t recommending Blaze out of what my mother would have called
rachmones
(which translates to something between
pity
and
compassion
, but since it’s a Yiddish word, there is a slightly ironic edge to it) because Blaze was a special-ed kid.

I discovered, only later, that had it
not
been Mr. B.’s first year teaching, he would most likely not have chosen Blaze as one of his readers. It turned out that the authors’ tea was quite a political event. The teachers got to show off their kids here and show up their colleagues who may not have produced as great works of literature. The event was heavily choreographed with the earlier grades reading first and everybody sitting in a particular spot on the stage. There were rehearsals. Semiformal dress was required. The children were required
to write brief introductions for their writing and a bound program was distributed to all the parents and staff. The last thing anyone needed was an awkward kid who needed extra prodding or who might screw up at the podium. In other words, a kid like Blaze.

When I discovered all of this, I went into a bit of a panic. Blaze had never stood up in front of an audience in any capacity and he had certainly never displayed any desire to follow the kinds of directions and choreography required for this event. My unleashed imagination ran wild with possible scenarios. What if he walked onto the stage before he was supposed to? What if he got stagestruck, didn’t read his poem, talked out while someone else was reading? He hated loud noises. What if the clapping and cheering freaked him out and he ran screaming from the room? I began to think the whole thing was a terrible idea, and I struggled to keep these thoughts from Blaze, who seemed remarkably relaxed. But despite my misgivings, it was a done deal. Blaze was in the program and that was it. My parents were attending. And as if all this wasn’t enough, Dr. Roberts informed me that she was planning to stay at school late so that she could see Blaze as well.

When the evening of the authors’ tea finally arrived, I was too anxious to sit next to my parents in the audience. I cowered in the standing-room-only section of the library. From my vantage point, I could see the holding room where the kids waited for their turn to read. I noticed that Blaze was making a bit of a stir, walking around the room, not sitting perfectly quietly like he was supposed to. I broke out in a cold sweat, adrenaline pumping unchecked through my body. Never doing this again, I told myself. Never, never. Can’t take the stress.

My nervousness precluded any enjoyment I might have gotten listening to the poems and stories from the lower grades, even though, from some far distant corner of my brain, I noticed how cute the little ones were as they stumbled through their rhyming couplets. When it was finally time for Blaze’s class, I was on the verge of hyperventilating and thought I might very well pass out where I stood. A thin little girl
read a passage she had written comparing popularity at school to chasing butterflies. Then it was Blaze’s turn. I saw Dr. Roberts emerge from her office and stand quietly on the periphery.

There seemed to be an almost unnatural silence in the room as Blaze walked up to the podium. He bumped into the microphone and it crackled. I swore I could hear the indrawn breaths of every staff member who had ever worked with my child in that school. Blaze cleared his throat.

“Ahem, excuse me,” he said and smiled. He paused in front of the audience for a few seconds, just long enough to convince me that his performance was going to be an epic disaster. Finally, he spoke.

“A girl in my class became upset and started crying,” he said. “When I looked at her, it reminded me of a storm so I wrote about it.”

He read his poem then, in a perfectly assured cadence. He didn’t rush or go too slowly. He didn’t stumble or waver. He looked born to this, as if he’d been performing in front of crowds his entire life. It was over in a matter of seconds.

“Thank you,” he said and the room erupted into a thunderous applause. He took his place next to his classmates with a huge grin on his face, wide enough to swallow my ocean of doubts forever.