Despite my desire to make it up to Michael—to change him, to cure him—by the end of the day, I couldn’t stand to spend another second with him.
The September before they turned four, Mitch and Missy began attending nursery school three mornings a week. Logically, that ought to have made things better. Caring for one child, albeit one child like Michael, ought to have been much easier than caring for three, right? To my surprise, I found that things were more difficult on the days that Mitch and Missy were in school. Michael and I both missed them, and the time that we spent one-on-one did not satisfy either of us. Although he did not have the words to say so—he spoke very little, and what he did say, we usually had to work to decipher—Michael did not understand why he could not join his brother and sister at school. Barring that, he could not understand why Mitch and Missy ought not to be prevented from going. “Michael go,” he’d insist when I dropped them off each morning. He shook his head violently, clawing at my arm as I held him at the doorway, as I tried to steal a moment to kiss my other two children good-bye, rarely getting the opportunity to do so. “Michael go, too! Or no go. No, no, no go!” He’d break into a fit and pummel me with his little fists as I dragged him to the car, the other mothers staring and whispering as I made my hasty retreat.
On the short drive home, I would be silent as he whimpered and fussed beside me. I knew it was my job to help him, to comfort him. But nothing I said or did—no touch, no word, no gesture of any sort—seemed to matter to him. So I learned to keep my eyes on the road, choking back the guilty tears. There was nothing, I told myself, that I could do for my child. The damage had been done; it was too late. And it was my fault.
Eventually I started having Lars drop the other two off at the nursery school. That helped, but I still dreaded pickup time; I was never sure how Michael would act in that gathering of children and mothers and end-of-schoolday confusion. But there was no way to avoid it; Lars was at his office at that hour.
The hours between Lars leaving to take the other two to nursery school and my driving to the school for pickup felt like an eternity. I did my best to entertain Michael, trying to engage his interest as I read him stories on the couch, walking around the block at his slow, methodical pace, and taking him to the playground on nice days, where I’d swing him for hours—something he loved, and that gave me respite in a way, a chance to clear my head, the orderly, reliable pace of the swing on its chains a small comfort to both Michael and me.
Mitch and Missy were aglow with all they learned at nursery school. They adored music hour, and they would insist I turn on the car’s radio on the way home, so they could sing along with the catchy tunes. They learned in full detail the name and sound of each letter in the alphabet, and they quickly became skilled at counting to twenty. These accomplishments made me smile, thinking that even at their tender age, they already displayed an extraordinary ease with and love of learning, much like my own.
Still, my joy was bittersweet. While they flourished in this introduction to school life, Michael and I both withered.
Kindergarten the next year only made things worse. I was thankful Mitch and Missy had had the nursery-school experience; they were a few months shy of age five when they started kindergarten, and thus younger than many of their peers. But having each other, and having a little bit of schooling under their belts, they did splendidly. They learned to write their own names, and they could recognize a number of words in their picture books. Their drawings transformed from scribbles to stick figures and recognizable houses and suns and stars. They remembered to hang up their jackets and carefully line up their boots in the coat closet when they got home, as they did at school. Lars and I marveled at these wonders, at how smart and accomplished Mitch and Missy were.
And then we would both be silent, thinking about Michael.
There was never a question of sending him to school. Not regular public school, at any rate. The public school was not required by law to educate him, and we did not feel it would be fair to anyone—the teacher, the other children in the class, or Michael himself—to force him into a typical classroom situation. He would be disruptive, we knew, and he would learn little; a teacher with a room full of other young children to manage would not be able to give Michael the type of one-on-one attention he so clearly would require.
Of course we researched other options. We looked at a few special schools, private schools designed for children who could not function in a regular school. But the children at those schools were either high achievers who were completely out of Michael’s league, or else children with much more severe disabilities, for whom the schools seemed little more than babysitting services, somewhere such children could be during the day, giving their mothers a break.
“I can teach him at home,” I told Lars. “I have the credentials; I have the experience.”
He gave me a skeptical look.
“I can do it,” I insisted. “I had the occasional difficult child in my classes, you know.”
“But none like Michael, right? And none that were your own.”
“True,” I conceded. “But really, Lars, what other choice do we have?”
I didn’t bother giving Michael formal lessons during the kindergarten year, but we began working on some basic skills. Knowing that forming accurate circles, squares, and triangles is the foundation for writing letters, I encouraged him to draw. This he appeared to enjoy on occasion, although his drawings were generally indecipherable as any particular objects. Quite often I read to him, hoping that he would eventually fall in love with stories, as most children do when frequently read to. Michael did not relish these sessions, the way most children would, but he tolerated them for short periods.
Not until Mitch and Missy started first grade did I decide it was time for Michael’s lessons to start in earnest. His learning might be delayed, but, I reasoned, I had as long as it would take to teach him.
Whatever it took.