iRetard Goes to School

I know, I know, the retard word is really offensive. I threw it up there straight away to let you know you better buckle on some armor. I feel I earned the right to throw around the “r” word the same way that black people feel they can use the “n” word and not be charged with political incorrectness since I was saddled with that moniker during a critical developmental time in my childhood… and again more recently in an extremely abusive relationship though the label had long ago lost any sting. I understand what makes people think I am retarded is not my fault or theirs, and I adore the little stranger the world could not understand. I forgive you for your misjudgment. Can you forgive me? Will you forgive yourself and also the next person you meet who may have struggles of their own?

The mix up likely could have been avoided to a large degree if I had entered school at age five instead of four, or possibly if I hadn’t consumed a handful of bright, gooey, yellow paint in ’72… Perhaps the school was being merciful by admitting me; my mom had a new baby boy to be her pet, and decided it was too much hassle to have me underfoot all day watching Sesame Street, preforming song and dance routines and putting my toys in long straight rows. I also asked a lot of questions which I am sure was rather tedious for her to contend with. When she didn’t have the answers, she said I asked goofy questions. Strangers called me precocious, I don’t think she knew what that meant. I had a deep, insatiable thirst for understanding and knowledge from a very early age, unfortunately, I was mocked for my earnest pursuit of truth and was expected to be content with faith that those bigger than me had all the answers and I was too dumb to know anything that they did not know.

At the Kindergarten roundup my mom assured the teachers I would be ready to endure the rigors of school though I did not know the alphabet, numbers, or how to write my name. She reasoned; I was on the cusp, I should be able to handle it.

After witnessing years of my siblings complaints about school, I was trepidatious about my impending exile from the nest. I was reassured that I was going to KINDERGARTEN which was only remotely like school. It was a magical place where I would learn letters and all sorts of cool stuff, make new friends, play games, sing songs… I considered this for a moment before asking for further clarification, “You mean like Sesame Street?”

They laughed and agreed. 4 year olds don’t understand sarcasm. I was thinking, “You mean Grover will be there? I’m all in.”

They deceived me.

I gave up looking for the cast of Sesame Street around the time I started to look for Santa that year. Why do we fill children’s heads with lies?

In school I marveled how everyone knew the answers to the questions teachers asked as well as each other’s names! I was fascinated by how brilliant and lovely they all were while it took me so long to understand any task. My excitement to learn soon turned to dread. I seriously began to question how my classmates had all the answers and why it was so new and perplexing to me every day. I could tell I was different but I couldn’t understand why. It was obvious I was a burden to the teachers which made me feel very ashamed because I wanted so much to please them. Yet I could not spell my name and argued when they tried to correct me. I could not see or understand the difference between “th” and “ht” I wrote letters backward more often than forward. I was always tired, frustrated, confused, and plagued with strep throat, stomach aches, and migrane head aches causing me to miss class.

Thanks to the ease of access to all human knowledge now provided by my iPhone, I can see I was malnourished, poisoned from having my gut nuked by antibiotics multiple times each year, and suffering classic symptoms of toxic stress in my environment from living in a home where I might be jumped at any moment. I exhibited the symptoms of ASD coupled with being teased and tourtured way too much. My parents hated me for my doctor bill, they didn’t mind that my siblings bullied me with no mercy or conscience because having the power to break me down emotionally gave them pleasure and reinforced their insistence in the view that I was mentally deficient. I had no concept of manners or what it was to treat others with respect because I had never been treated with respect.

The children at school avoided me because I was weird, dirty, stupid, and poor. I couldn’t remember their names or faces. Eventually, I stopped trying. Though I had learned to find solace deep in the quiet of my imagination, removed from the pain my body felt, other children could not be content with just that. I allowed myself to be blamed and punished for things I did not do simply because I was too slow to find words to defend myself and I was often completely unaware that I was being tossed under a bus until I had already been run over.

Irony, the tricky ether-dimensional shadow that haunts my life determined I was the only chick in our grade that had to go out to the retard wagons for special ed- and though it would prove to be the grace that saved me, this alone made me the easiest target in the school and the only child who also attended normal classes to wear the retard title. Several days a week a few sickly boys also clad in threadbare hand-me-downs and I would be excused from class to quietly put on our coats and go out to the rickety brown trailers set up in the sheltered square of the L shaped school. It was cold out there, even with our coats on. When the wind blew, the trailer rocked and shook making me dizzy and nervous. We colored work sheets, practiced flash cards and used grease pencils on laminated dittos. I wrote my spelling words over and over to prepare for tests then rewrote them twice as many times when I failed the test. Meanwhile, the rest of our class learned new things.

These were the days before neuro-atypical was even moderately understood, when we were still clamoring our way out of the asylums. Dyslexia and the host of other learning barriers were only just being acknowledged as something that could be worked out and those displaying these patterns were not necessarily throw away humans. Our teacher was kind; she looked us in the eye and smiled at us, every day. She took pride in our accomplishments as she nurtured and encouraged us in our studies. She believed in me, and because I believed in her, I believed in me too, and because of her faith, I would not give up until I got it right.

I eventually got a gold star on the Wednesday test and was instructed to show it to former teachers and office staff. I was delighted to play waitress as my beloved teacher served up a large dish of crow to the faculty who bullied me mercilessly because they just didn’t want to have to deal with my problems. Some were delighted and savored it like an exotic dish, others promised to enjoy theirs later. Some smacked it away. I didn’t care about that, I was content that I had made my teacher beam with delight.

I did not repeat that success often. I. Could. Not. Spell. Nor could I transfer words or numbers from one place to another accurately, my short term memory often operates like a pad of Teflon post-its. These are facts that are true to this day. My spelling is still so atrocious; spell check often does not know what the hell I am trying to say, but the technology I could only dream of when I was a child gave me the ability to manage and organize my thoughts and ideas as an adult. If it would have been available to me 30 years ago, it would have allowed me to get a decent nights sleep on occasion rather than doing homework until 10:00, then worry past midnight about how I was going to get my report done when I had to look up half the words I wanted to use in the dictionary.

My husband gifted me a hand held computer before the days of smart phones and made my life 100x more efficient. I am so thankful our children have this technology to enhance their life. I gotta say it makes me a little sad to see how much they are used for promoting time wasting garbage and ego petting rather than actually engaging the world to make it a better place. Children have a world full of adults promoting leisure and slack. Leisure and slack make some people money so they make it seem like these habits make you happy. Perhaps technology makes us a little short sighted as well. It is as addictive as cocaine and far more accessible. We willingly offer the most valuable gift we have on this earth, our time, to create a virtual reality in which we have the responsibility of cleaning up virtual animal shit while real children go untended.

Lucky for me now, my vocabulary is large enough that I can usually pull a synonym from the fluff after several moments of stabbing myself in the temple with the soft side of a pencil. I can then replace the gibberish, unrecognizable as America English, or utilize the new word to find the term I really want in the thesaurus, but only after giggling madly at ideas inferred by the phrases slightly skewed with the selection of words instantly at my disposal. Twisting lines into a fine rhyme, wasting time, pleasing the piece of me that needs to see the world we share expressed more beautifully. At which point I realize I’ve turned my face into a bruised and bloody mess, particularly if the muse is riding my back tapping out maddening beats and I’ve been forced on a writing binge. I consider this could all be avoided if people still wrote with plumed quills, but then I mourn for the sweet singing birds plucked bare, and the towering forests of trees laid waste to the wrath of permanent ink dripping backward letter blobs and angry x-es from my errant pen, while my conscience is overcast by the dirigibles of ozone destroyed by the poison evaporating from the silo sized vat of liquid paper necessary to turn the deep bleeding indigo stains into fluffy clouds where cherubim reside and rush to escort me into the swirling baby blue nebula speckled with sparkling solar systems and planets where people like me matter… another project for another day.

Besides, if you placed a feather in my hand, I would study it, wiki it, consider it’s form and function, blow on it, cogitate its meaning while absentmindedly rubbing it all over my body then counting how many ways I could make it into a fashion accessory before pausing to deliberate and order the steps necessary to feasibly construct a comfortable robe of fluffy feathers… Writing might not happen, obviously, but at the very least, a whole lot of thinking would.

Due to the efforts of my earth bound ginger haired angel, in second grade I learned how to read. That is, I learned how to comprehend reading. It was a real game changer for me personally, but it was not enough for the school board to let me pass into third grade. Any vague and tentative bonds of friendship created with classmates evaporated like the hope that I’d be hanging with the muppets at Kindergarden, but I found new comrades in neat rows at the library. More of a loss to me personally was time spent in the retard wagon with the one person who believed in me, the compassionate human component is the miracle that pulled me through that fire. Several years later, with tears in her blue shadowed eyes, and a proud grin beaming from her pink stained lips, she tested me for the TAG program. I wonder if she knew the countless ways her compassion and kindness saved my life.

I want to live in a world where teachers like her are given crowns of jewels and sit on cushioned chairs in courtyards filled with gardens and gilded rooms created in buildings designed to uplift and inspire all students who want to learn. A place where there is zero tolerance for bullying from adults and students. More like Sesame Street and less like an institutional prison robbing children of their creativity in an effort to make them conform to average. Where every individual is embraced and encouraged to grow in their natural curiosity and talents. Children are brilliant at solving problems and should be allowed and encouraged to do so in their own schools and communities. I don’t believe my expectations are too high because we live in a world where a group of amazing people innovated, collaborated, and created the iPhone. The resources are here and abundant. We, as a society have the ability and responsibility to make a better future for our children, we just have to put down our broken and virtual realities and do it.