Homeschooling Word Boy

It has been a tough couple of weeks for me parenting Word Boy, because of his anxiety. I've handled it really well, but this morning I broke down crying talking to Raider about how I just couldn't face homeschooling. Yesterday was a very challenging day that left both me and Word Boy (and possibly also his therapist) exhausted, and he's doing better today but it's a pretty thin veneer. His perfectionism leads him to have anxiety attacks when he makes a mistake in math or doesn't understand something immediately, and it has been a challenge to me to be disciplined enough to make him do math anyway. A friend who studies behaviorism says that parents are very motivated by negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement is the removal of an unpleasant stimulus--in other words, when a parent will do anything to avoid dealing with a tantrum, that's negative reinforcement. It's not easy for me to sit down to math with Word Boy when the likelihood is high that I'll have to spend half an hour dealing with an anxiety attack in order to get through what should be 10 minutes worth of math. He's behind grade level in math primarily because I have been negatively reinforced not to do math with him.

I've been doing a good job dealing with his anxiety-fueled behaviors during the last couple of weeks, which have feature not only yesterday's epic two-hour meltdown at the therapist's office but a four-day anxiety attack the other weekend. But I'm worn out. And the idea of trying to do homeschooling with him today when his equilibrium is so fragile just felt like too much.

And, honestly, I don't know why I bother "homeschooling" this kid. He and I decided to go the library, and on the way there, he asked about an errand I ran earlier, to renew the tags on our cars. I ended up explaining vehicle registration as well as automobile and homeowners insurance. He asked about the flood we had in our basement some years ago, which led to a conversation about sump pumps and the water table. From there, he gave me an impressive run-down of the causes and stages of a tsunami, which, like so many things, I have no idea where he picked up.

By this time, we were at the library, where, in a characteristic absent-minded professor slapstick, we had quite a bit of trouble figuring out how to open the unlocked door.

Once we were in, we browsed his favorite section, Juvenile Non-Fiction. He found a book on the Arctic and Antarctic; I found him a book on predictions people in the past have made about the future, which interestingly enough is something he had asked me about recently, so he was pretty thrilled. He found a Calvin & Hobbes collection he hadn't read. I found a book on Ideas that Changed the World that I decided to bring home just in case anybody wanted to look through it, and a book on teeth I bet Word Boy will like eventually. I found a book called Real-Size Animal Babies to show the Tiny Tornado, and then I slipped around to fiction and grabbed some Beverly Cleary for bedtime reading, because TT is all about the chapter books these days.

At this point, Word Boy, who is excessively conscientious, began to be concerned that we were checking out too many books. "Do you know how many things I'm allowed to check out on my card?" I asked him. "Fifty. And you could get your own card, and also check out fifty things. And the Lego Savant could get his own card, and then we could check out..."

"A hundred and fifty things," Word Boy said. "That would be a lot to carry."

He seemed reassured, but said again as we walked toward the circulation desk, "I don't know, it just seems like an awful lot of books." I spotted the librarian, who was just finishing up a conversation, so I hauled him over to her. "Librarian," I said, "This is Word Boy. Word Boy, this is the Librarian."

"Hello, Word Boy," said the Librarian. "It's nice to meet you."

I said, "Word Boy is concerned that we are checking out too many books."

The Librarian looked at him and said, "I don't think there's any such thing."

We ran our stack through the self check-out and hauled it to the car (Word Boy: "I have an idea for a new workout...it involves putting a strap around all of your books and then carrying them around.").In the car on the way home, he started reading about Antarctica, reading aloud little tidbits that interested him. "Did you know that the largest animal that lives on land year-round in Antarctica is a tiny insect? Did you know that there is evidence that Antarctica had a subtropical climate 70 million years ago, suggesting that the land that is now Antarctica used to be located near the equator?"

I kept saying, "I didn't know that. Wow, really? That is interesting." Finally, I said, "Ha, I guess it's your day to homeschool me."

Word Boy said, "Mom, I'm just reading stuff out of a book to you!"

I said, "How do you think I do it most days?"

He's reading in the big recliner now, having dealt with the perennial post-library problem of which book to read first.

I actually bought him a curriculum this year, because with me being in school it was very hard for me to keep up with homeschool planning last year, and things really fell apart somewhere around March. I was willing to pay someone to do my planning for me. It's been a mixed thing. I bought him a fifth-grade curriculum, and much of it is focused around grammar, spelling, and vocabulary lessons he doesn't need, so we don't waste our time on that. He finds the assigned books very interesting, but they're short and he goes through them quickly. This week, to try to address that, I assigned him a book that was supposed to be two weeks' worth of reading. He finished it Monday morning. Over breakfast. And then went on to read the next book, which was supposed to be for the next two weeks. And then read half of a biography of Alexander that is part of his big brother's curriculum and that happened to be in the stack on the table. I wanted to be able to hand the reins over to a curriculum. But this curriculum is not running the show the way I hoped it would. Word Boy's insatiable curiosity and drive for knowledge is. He's a fast horse galloping ahead at full speed; I'm doing my best to keep up; and our curriculum thinks maybe he's ready to learn a genteel trot.

 

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Please Forward

Raider and I have been through gender transition with enough people that the process feels familiar. When Tiny Tornado asked us to use male pronouns back in May, we had a pretty good idea how it would play out: you start out using the new pronoun and it feels a little strange. You slip a lot. Gradually the new pronoun starts to feel more comfortable and the slips get less common--I'd say at this point I'm slipping less than once a week, for instance, usually when I'm tired. Eventually, the new pronouns feel so natural and right that the old pronouns start to feel wrong. Even more eventually, it gets hard to remember using the old pronouns, to imagine that person being the old gender. I've already had a taste of this--the other day I came across some photos of the Tiny Tornado from just a few days before he finally talked me into cutting his hair short. It's right around his third birthday. He's wearing jeans, sneakers, and a hand-me-down red t-shirt from his older brothers; it has a lizard on it. Only the sloppy puff I've pulled his hair into on the top of his head suggests that he is a girl.

Already these photos looks odd to me. At the time, he looked to me like a beautiful little girl in jeans. Today I see my beautiful boy, and wonder why it took me so long to cut his hair after he started asking me to do it.


Here is how he looked just a few days later:



Now the Tiny Tornado has asked us to use a new name for him, because he became worried that his name might make people think he's a girl. His name is uncommon; it's a Russian girl's name, and people here don't seem to pick up on its gendered-ness. But he prefers for now that we use a shorter version of it, just in case, and, with his teacher's cooperation, he'll be starting school under the new name next week.

So we've started this process again. It tends to go much like the pronouns. Eventually the old name so completely loses meaning that you almost forget about it. One time when we were trying to think of baby names, I said, "How about Margaret?" and Raider looked at me with one eyebrow up. "Are you serious?" he said.

"Sure," I said. "It's a nice name."

Raider said, "It's also so-and-so's former name, from before his gender transition."

Honestly, although I had called this dear friend by that name for many years before his transition, saying it hadn't called up any associations with him ten years later. In our experience, that's how the mind works. It does an extraordinary job of forgetting.

We call the stage we're in right now with TT's name "the mail-forwarding stage." Uncle Toots coined that term a long time ago, and it's the period when the change hasn't become automatic, when your brain has to pause as it tries to access the new name or pronoun. Your brain goes to "she," sees the forwarding order, and produces "he." And you can feel it happen, like a stutter or a pause. One so short that the people you're talking to probably don't notice it, at least not most of the time. But you do.

The new name has become automatic when the mail-forwarding stage ends.

The most hilarious part of the mail-forwarding stage is that your brain starts checking to see if other names and pronouns need to be forwarded as well. You call non-trans friends by the wrong pronoun from time to time as the system over-corrects. When one close friend was transitioning a decade or so ago, I was once stopped dead because I suddenly couldn't remember whether one of my closest friends--a non-trans woman, as I know perfectly well--should be referred to as "he" or "she." Tiny little postal workers in my brain were dashing around chaotically, running back and forth between stations, flipping through piles of memos, trying to find the paperwork. I was frozen and stammering for a moment until they got it sorted out.

The first syllable of the Tiny Tornado's name and the first syllable of Raider's name end with the same consonant. Raider strongly prefers to use his full name--think Michael instead of Mike, Christopher instead of Chris, Daniel instead of Dan. I know this perfectly well. I have called him by his full name for the duration of our relationship. I have never called him Mike, Chris, or Dan.

Except in the last few days when, primed by my efforts to call the Tornado "Torn," I have also been calling him "Raid." He'd be cranky about it except that he knows it's just an error caused by an overloaded mail network and the coincidence of consonants, and it will pass.

You may wonder if I ever feel sad about the Tiny Tornado's gender. Once in awhile, I do. I feel particularly sad about the dress Word Boy is wearing in the picture below, a dress he chose for himself at the consignment shop and wore all summer long the year he was two. I could not wait for my daughter to get big enough to wear her older brother's hand-me-down dress, both because that's an amusing thing and because I find this particular dress adorable.

For a long time, I kept girl clothes around in the TT's dresser and closet, "just in case." "I want him to know he has options," I would say, although it was more and more clear that he'd already chosen. At one point, he asked me to stop suggesting those clothes to him when he was getting dressed, so I stopped including them among his choices for the day, but I left them where they were.

Gradually, I came to accept that he would probably never want to wear girls' clothes. I stopped accepting hand-me-down girl clothes from friends, and I sorted most of what we had into bags for Goodwill. Except a few of the cutest things. Except the daisy dress.

One day, the Tiny Tornado came to me carrying the daisy dress. "I don't want this to be in my drawer anymore," he told me.

"OK," I said, and I didn't let him see how disappointed I felt as I added it to the donations bag. "It's foolish to hold onto it," I told myself strernly. "Just because you loved that Word Boy wore it, just because you think the Tornado would look so cute in it. You're just the mom; you don't get to choose. Give it away."

I hope some boy or girl out there enjoyed the daisy dress. I loved that dress. I loved the little boy who wore it. And I love the little boy who refused to.

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