Catie Ushers in Black History Month

Sundays at our house, as I'm sure is the case at lots of houses, is a marathon of homework and laundry and bathing and hair-combing and grading. And sometimes, into that mix, a teacher will throw a project.

Frances loves school and loves the chance to show off, so projects with her, while exhausting, are, at least, manageable.

Cate is in second grade now and doesn't at all enjoy the same relationship to school as Frances. She tolerates it, at best. Throw anxiety and sensory processing issues on top of all that, and you can imagine what school projects are like for all of us.

Today she had to complete her 100th day of school project. She had to pick a person or event or invention celebrating it's 100th anniversary this year. The crossword puzzle is 100. Sir Alec Guiness was born 100 years ago. As was Joel Siegel. Cate rejected all those ideas. When Wikipedia told her that Marcus Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Jamaica in 1914, she immediately decided this was her project. "I love black people, Mommy," she said.

She happily read all about Marcus Garvey and the U.N.I.A., listened to me clarify things and fill in the blanks. She was genuinely interested in all the details. (She was especially upset that arrest and deportation were Garvey's reward for trying to uplift black people.) When it came time to put all these details down in a 1-page summary and creative presentation, well, let's just say wailing and gnashing of teeth would have been preferable.

After hours of cajoling and bargaining and pleading and assisting, we managed to get her to prepare a powerpoint presentation and type up a summary of what she's learned.  Here is what she's turning in to her teacher tomorrow:

What I learned:

Marcus Garvey founded the UNIA in 1914, in Jamaica to help improve black people's lives. He was later arrested for mail fraud, and was sent back to Jamaica, where he recreated the UNIA, and they stumbled in the Americas. Later, at some point in 1940, he died, and I don’t know why. Age, or somebody straight up killed him, like Dr. King.

Throwing Out the Script

There should be more stories about Cate on this blog.  Not just because Cate is amazing in all sorts of ways that still surprise me, but also because hers is a happy life and more parents with kids who have Sensory Processing Disorder probably need to be told that.

At a birthday party recently I talked to another mom whose son just got a diagnosis that's different than Cate's (she has SPD), but whose therapies are similar (OT, social stories, among other things).  I was struck in this conversation by two things.  First, she had all the same concerns and questions and feelings that I had before and after Cate's diagnosis.  I thought we had done something wrong (we didn't read enough to her in the womb, we should have put in her childcare earlier, we should have sung more songs), I didn't know whether I should tell people about her SPD, it continues to be difficult to explain to Frances why Cate has modified rules.  We had a great talk about strategies for all those things.

I was also struck, though, by how much of our conversartion was about re-writing the story we had in our heads about our kids.  We both have first daughters who are gorgeous and smart and outgoing and fabulous in all the ways you might want for your daughter.  Those first daughters have done very little to challenge our notions of what it means to be a parent or what it means to be a member of human society.  But these second kids--so many things we had planned, so many things we assumed to be true, so many things we took for granted are suddenly gone.  We are having to write this new story as we go along.

It's been more than a year since Cate got her diagnosis and I find myself loving this task of writing a new story (though it's not without its anxieties) and also realzing that Frances' life should also be lived without a script.  This mom just got her child's diagnosis and I sensed that she had a lot of grief about having to let go of her script and that it helped to find someone who understood how that felt.  And who wasn't still grief-stricken about the process.

So maybe I'll share some more stories about Cate in all her awesome-ness and about Frances, who also continues to be amazing (even if she is moody all of the time now), and how life goes on, even off-script.