Are you there, God? It's me...um...you know

Gentlemen, you may want to skip this one.

Remember the book? The one that made you want to be a member of The Club, a woman, a full-grown gal in on the secrets of the Way? Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. That book. The girls who "got" their periods. The girls who lied about getting them and then got them. But in the end, they all got them. And it made us...well, most of us, anyway, want them, too. Lord, were we dumb, or what?

And then, for many of us, they arrived. And arrived. And kept on arriving, sometimes unwanted, sometimes with an enormous sigh of relief. Sometimes, they disappeared for, oh, about nine months if we were lucky and fertile and able to use the damned cycle as God seemed to have intended. Sometimes, we didn't want them there because we wanted the pregnancy, the very thing they were supposed to enable, so much. We cursed the curse, and felt cursed ourselves. We were Women, though, the ones who lived with blood from birth onward, managed it in ways that men can only--and don't want to--imagine. We know its types, probably have enough internal labels for it to rival the alleged expansive Inuit lexicon for snow.

And then, for some of us, the end comes. We've had enough children or can't have any more children or can't have children. Period. And we have decisions to make. Decisions not covered Are You There, God. Decisions that have little to do with anticipation of womanhood but more about the anticipation of middle-age, grandmotherhood, maybe. Getting old, not being fertile, not Getting It any more.

That time has come for us. We had our third child after some tribulation and I birthed him after a few life-threatening issues that necessitated that I Never. Ever. Become Pregnant. Again. The Pill--a lovely little invention, the Pope notwithstanding--served its purpose for many a year, but then the family bugbear of high blood pressure has made me kiss goodbye to that tiny little bolus of combination hormone that has kept me safely barren for many a year. I'll miss that crinkly foil pack, the monthly visits to the pharmacy. Or not. Even still, I find myself reaching every night for a foil pack that's no longer there, reminded by my 20-year habit that it is...done. Finis.

Why, is it time to write a book, Are You There God, It's Me, Emily, and I'm Menopausal? No. But I've taken official steps now that have rendered me unable to have children, even if I wanted to. There will be no late-life surprises. There will be no John and Elizabeth Edwards second act after the loss of a child. I have my three beautiful little boys, growing every day less and less little. They and their lives are It, what we have, and we will have no more, no matter what the fates have woven for our futures.

I chose this option on purpose. I was pleased to do it, tired of battling nature's insistence that I continue to enhance my fitness. I keep scanning my psyche for some remnant of wist, a little regret, something that says, "Yes, you did the right thing, but you do have a little mourning to do." I seem to have no mourning, just the days as they come. I'm not going to miss a single word from that sanguine lexicon, either, when menopause does finally arrive.

It's been quite some 30-odd years since I met Margaret and her God and became acquainted with that secret society of womanhood and its lead maven, Aunt Flo. It's been just over 10 years since I finally used that secret to become a mother. And now, I end that chapter, close that book, and move on into what I hope is a somewhat graceful if physically hobbled and barren-by-choice middle age. I think I'm going to have to find a new book to read. Has Judy Blume written anything about the secret society of the perimenopausal woman? Perhaps Are You There God? I'm Too Damned Old to Reproduce?

Age of Autism, meet shark

They've really done it now, and we have to thank Liz Ditz and the woeful reading comprehension over at Age of Autism for it. J.B. Handley, "reporting" for the "newspaper," offers up this gem: Sullivan, blogging over at Left Brain/Right Brain, is...Bonnie Offit, Paul Offit's wife.

The entire basis for this allegation--outside of just balls-out, screaming paranoia on Handley's part-- is a misreading of a comment that Liz Ditz made over on Shannon Rosa's personal blog, Squidalicious. There, she referred to knowing Sullivan in real life, then she links to a post in which Sullivan quotes Holly Robinson Peete making a few points, and then she refers to "her" points, i.e., points that Peete has made. Indeed, she refers to them by number. Somehow, Handley has transmogrified that pronoun into a reference to....Sullivan. I've got a homeschooled, autistic nine-year-old who wouldn't make that mistake. In fact, I've just tested him, and he knew exactly to whom the "her" referred.

Sure. That's disturbing that Handley would make such a glaring mistake and use this and other extraordinarily flimsy bits of "evidence" on which to build his "case." Sure, it's disturbing that this is the same person who convinces hundreds of autism parents through equally facile "reasoning" that their children are "toxic" and "mercury poisoned." But what's most disturbing here isn't really the hysteria that led Handley, an emotional and overwrought writer at the best of times, to decide that Sullivan was (a) female and (b) Dr. Bonnie Offit.

No, here's the most disturbing part. Handley pegs Sullivan as someone who couldn't possibly be the father of an autistic child, and here's his rationale (and by "his," I mean Handley; as has been established, Sullivan must be female):

What parent of an autistic child would write, “my main concern is to create a better world for all people, but especially for people with disabilities. Autism is a great challenge. People with autism deserve respect and support”? Give me a break! A real parent would only have one main concern, the concern we all share: giving our own child the best possible life!

That, my friends, is so self-revelatory that I'm surprised little angels didn't appear over Handley's likely overheated head, harmonizing over their harps as their wings fluttered gracefully around his ears in the midst of this astonishing epiphany. It's the core of the Age of Autism's entire stance, of the anti-vax movement: My child before all others. It's a short-sighted, blind stance that doesn't understand that lifting up others lifts us as well, that working for the common good works for us as well. But then, perhaps it's that short-sightedness that got Handley into this current embarrassment in the first place.

A social surprise

TH has been invited to a birthday party, one for a child who is in his social skills class for homeschooled kids with Aspergers. Yes, there is a class for that.

Unfortunately, he cannot attend because he's already booked for a social skills outing with the same practice, a hike on a Saturday afternoon. The thing is, we discussed the party openly, and...it's a surprise party. TH sees the boy whose party it is...tomorrow. Before the party has happened.

You know where this is going.

TH can't keep a secret. The truth will out. So, I've been working today on impressing upon him the importance of not mentioning a word about this party. Lecturing in fact, practically holding an index finger aloft, pontificating away.

When he interrupted me.

He has a plan, you see. He's not going to say anything to the boy tomorrow. BUT, he is going to wait until the next social skills meeting, and then he's going to say, "I'm really sorry I couldn't come to your party, but I had already scheduled a social skills hike that we'd prepaid and couldn't cancel. I hope you had a good birthday."

I don't know about you, but it looks to me like some of those there skills are kicking in. This child is practically Emily Post. Now, if he can just get through tomorrow without spilling the beans, the origin of which phrase may possibly be accurately described here.

This is it

When we learned that our oldest son has autism, we began our life of true compromise. We started to formulate a plan, one that we hoped would result in a support network and supporting net for our son, one that would make the hard years of socialization easier for him. Piece by piece, we dropped little bits of ourselves so that we could replace them with a foundation of this life we imagined. And now, after all that compromise, the foundation has essentially crumbled, and we are left with the reality that...this is it.

We'd formulated plans before, only to have to jettison them thanks to those nifty little curveballs life has a penchant for throwing. Big plans and little ones have gone astray, forcing a regrouping of minds, bodies, and possessions as we embarked on the next branching in the path. But this time? This time, we thought we had found It. We were in, for the long haul.

What did we expect, I wonder? We've discussed it quite a bit lately as play date invitations don't come in, as our sons wonder out loud why people don't invite them to their homes, as we realize that the dynamic among parents likely has as much to do with socialization and socializing as the dynamic among the children. As we realize that we were really pretty much total idiots to think that we could reinvent life, reinvent genetics, reinvent destiny and make our sons' lives something we never had thanks to genetics and destiny.

Four years ago marked our entry into this school district. The plan was that TH would enter with the kindergarten cohort, that they'd get to know him, if not accept at least tolerate him, that he'd be so familiar to them at school and in the neighborhood that this very familiarity would breed a sort of comfortable ignoring, at least, of his oddities.

Built into this plan was the purchase of a home we could barely afford in one of the most expensive--and among the highest-ranked--school districts in the state. Built into this plan was the move into a suburb, one I'd literally sworn several years earlier I'd never live in. Built into this plan was volunteering at school, forcing myself to interact with people, joining a goddamned country club, putting our sons in Boy Scouts, soccer, after school activities. Holding birthday parties. Inviting people over for play dates. In other words, the plan was to be many of the things we are not and never have been. All this compromise, all this submersion of who we really are beneath this built-up foundation on behalf of our children.

That foundation was weak. Shockingly, it turns out that we are not people who are good at pretense. We are not social butterflies, we don't care about neighborhood or school politics very much, soccer and football are not our thing, and I just can't get that wound up over whether or not the teacher's gift should be monogrammed. Everyone looks the same here, and my mind and my eyes and my ears crave difference and new insights and some seriously interesting people watching. Playground visits in our neighborhood seem more like a junior-high dance, with the mothers all guardedly eyeing one another, scoping out whether or not the other mother has on the right...oh, everything. The tennis skort, the sports shoes, the pony tail bouncing around over the sunshade hat.

We can't pretend. I started realizing this about three years in, exhausted from efforts to conform and somehow shoehorn my parallelogram-shaped children into the smooth round holes that everyone else's children seemed to fit into effortlessly. As the Viking pointed out, what were we thinking, that we--the two of us, insular, hermity, nose-in-a-book, trail-loving, non-football-watching, quiet-loving gen-X geeks--could possibly have children who'd be any different? That's like expecting a pair of cacti to produce a towering oak. Where we are, among the sturdy, fit oaks, we are just that: cacti. And you know what? Cacti just don't socialize very well.

So, we canceled the country club membership a year ago. Ditched soccer, tried one day of flag football only to walk--run--away and never look back. No Boy Scouts, which ended up being a free-for-all among the smoothly fit little round oak progeny in our neighborhood, one into which our little cacti did not do well. Haven't been to church in weeks, have only one child now left in the public school in the district, and we drive across town to the playgrounds at the burgeoning mixed-use development on the east side so that our children can play and we can bask in the people watching, not worried that we--and our children--are in some way not fitting up to wealthy suburban standards. I'd love to be above all that, and in some ways I am, but years of knowing that judgment is there in this fishbowl of a suburban life has made me edgy and paranoid about it.

For the last few days, as one child or another has cried about not having a playdate or told us mournfully of their "best" friends from school meeting at one another's houses for playing, as we realize that this district of perfection and football and clean suburban living is not It, we've done a lot of talking. A couple of times now, we've moved somewhere, thought, "This is it." And it's turned out not to be. We bought this house, invested in this life, compromised ourselves trying to make This one be It. And it was, yet again, a mistake. We think we have a plan--selling here, buying in a place we've always longed to live, one that feeds into everything about us that isn't a compromise. But will it happen again? Will what we think of, again, as It turn out not to be?

I've thought about it a lot, thought about all of these Its we believed in so strongly until we'd lived in them long enough. There were some great positives from each of these experiences, yea verily, even a tiny little batch of good friends, and of course, this dawning realization that it's sheer folly to try to compromise who you really are for the sake of your children. And what I've realized is that maybe it doesn't matter if what comes next is "It" or not. Because whatever we're doing right now, here, growing and learning and living through pain and happiness, as long as we're working toward making us and our children the best selves we can be--well, that moment, that now? That Now is IT.

Safeminds, counterpoint to public health, wants to run antivax "PSA" in movie theaters for the holidays

That's really all there is to say. The "public service announcement" features someone who likely considers herself to be a health professional (she's a nurse and the executive director of SafeMinds) urging people to fear vaccinations. There is a focus on pregnant women and young children, specifically, and one huge shot of a needle and syringe surrounded by large droplets of mercury, of course not the thimerosal preservative used in shots (see screenshot).

She strongly implies that the "mercury" used in flu shots is harmful to pregnant women, infants, and children. Where are the data showing that? They do not exist.

Fear tactics at their worst. Why? Why would they endanger people in this way? Why mislead them like this? Thimerosal is not present in FluMist at all and is present only in multidose vials of the flu shot. Yet, this nurse says "many of them" contain "mercury." Yes, at the end, she says, "Demand mercury-free flu shots." But clearly, the real damage has been done, and their real goal achieved: engender more fear in every viewer's mind about vaccines. Showing pictures of pregnant women and cute little babies and a gallon of mercury will do that to people.

At their Website, they're asking people to donate money so that they can pay to run their horrifying misinformation campaign in movie theaters during the holidays.

Don't buy into the fear. Get the facts about flu and flu vaccines here. And if you want to donate money to something that will actually help people, how about PKIDS, Parents of Kids with Infectious Diseases? These are the folks who suffer when fearmongers get their way.

UPDATE: Skepchick has identified the movie theaters to date that are showing this PSA, and a few commenters have found some ways to register your complaints about it. Take a look at her list and take the time to let the theater management know how you feel about it.

He may not be gay, but he might be naked

In the interests of a modicum of modesty, I can't specify here which child this post describes. Suffice it to say that around here, some of us remember our clothes, and some of us don't.

There's been a deal of to-do made about the great post, "My son is gay," written by a mom of a five-year-old boy who likes to dress up in "girl" clothes and chose Daphne from Scooby Doo as his Halloween costume. The response has been huge, and the favorite phrase of most people I know is her response to the "concerns" of other parents: "I am not worried that your son will grow up to be an actual ninja so back off."

In the same way, I've spent what seems like a lifetime assuring people about various unpromising aspects of my sons' behaviors. That my sons won't grow up carrying baby bottles around as teens, so please stop observing that it's time for them to quit when they're three. That they won't be walking around with pacifiers at age 18, so...let's let that one go, shall we? That eventually, they'll be able to tie their shoes, ride a bike, eat with a fork, make a sandwich, and otherwise go about--at least in some reasonably recognizable way--the daily activities of life. They might not do it quite when someone thinks they should or the way it's normally done, but...why does that matter as long as it works for them?

One thing, though, that's taking awhile to address around here is the nudity factor. Some children I know who are well younger than the son in question are also well more aware of modesty. They know if the waistline of their underpants is showing or if, indeed, their entire fanny is hanging out. They're aware that one might consider closing a door when using the restroom...in a restaurant. They might, for example, be inclined to don pajamas entirely within the confines of their room, rather than sauntering out with only the top on, looking for a drink of water. They might not comment, loudly, as we enter a public building, that they think their scrotum is larger than it used to be, as they examine said body part.

Sure, they might not. But the son I describe here sure would. And has. Nudity is like air to him; it just comes naturally. We've encountered him at the end of our driveway, buck naked, free as a bird, in broad daylight, as bemused neighbors drove by, shaking their heads. "Going commando" to him is more than being without underpants--the pants are optional, too. And doors? What good are doors?

Does that mean that I think that someday our little nudist will grow up to be, well, a nudist? Should I worry that it will never click with him, that he'll be an inveterate forgoer of pants? I guess eventually, it would simply become illegal and the long arm of the law would force him into clothes. But you know what? He drinks out of cups these days, and pacifiers are long gone. Forks are fairly common, and with the exception of mastery of the brakes, riding a bike is, well, like riding a bike to him. And even though he is, as I type this, in the bathroom with the door wide open, I have hope that change will come with time. That in his own good time, he'll learn to use a door and put on some pants. Maybe, someday, he'll even remember to zip them.

"We can win this war against forced vaccination in America!"

I had no idea we were at war (well, this one, anyway). It's odd that we would be, as we do not have forced vaccinations in America and one can exempt one's children from being vaccinated. I also had no idea that we were all being bullied by our pediatricians, getting 69 doses of vaccines for our children, experiencing a huge explosion of chronic disease that appears to be related to vaccines, and all being harassed at work unless we get vaccinated. Phew. It's rough being an American these days.

Where is this manufactured war taking place? Where are people being urged to act on their fear, their victim status, their fatigue, their worry, their anger? Notice all those emotions? Guess what? The place you can find this urgent appeal to all that emotion also offers up (1) a ton of EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!!!! and (2) the opportunity for the Dear Reader to, yes, spend money. On products being shilled on the site. Oh, by the way, if you do that, they'll send an unspecified amount of that money to a favorite "charity," the "National" Vaccination Information Center, which, I note, has nothing to do with any governmental entity and is more of a vaccine misinformation center. Also, they badly need a proofreader.

Who is this peddler to parental fear and native American hostility to anyone telling ME what to do? Why, the good doctor himself, Dr. Mercola, osteopath, peddler also of goods splattered with his good name (Vitamin B-12 Energy Booster Spray!**), a fella who has no compunction whatsoever about using one hand to smack down "Big Pharma" for being money grubbers willing to harm your child while at the same time holding out his other hand for your money for the eponymous crap he's shilling.

I think that the reason I--and likely many readers here, as well--was unaware of this war is...it isn't actually happening. Although were an unwary reader to stumble onto Doctor Mercola's Website, they'd certainly find all of the above asserted there, without an iota of evidence, citations, statistics, or anything but shadowy innuendo to back it up. That, by the way, is SOP for the good doctor. Fear is powerful, is it not? It makes people do stupid, stupid things, and there are people out there willing to make many, many bucks taking advantage of that.

Here's a bit of math that's a tad more accurate than what Mercola offers up:

Emotion + exclamation points + ambiguous, unprovable claims + zero lack of MD or specialized training + selling you stuff with promises to cure what ails ya, no matter what that is = pseudoscience

Caveat emptor, people.

The only war on vaccines is the one that people like Mercola are manufacturing so that they can sell you their "cures" for what they claim vaccines and all those other terrible ills of the modern world are doing to you. And you know what? I am angry. I'm angry that an osteopath with a good tan and a smooth forehead can come onto his Website, use the honorific "doctor," and behind that make these dangerous claims to scare the crap out of people so he can make money. Meanwhile, his behaviors and his actions and his words and his playing on emotions and his grubbing for money endanger the health of children whose parents may buy this garbage--both the written trash and the trash he peddles.

If you can call yourself "Doctor" and hand out medical advice that is counter to all science-based practice and the established guidelines of the advisory board for that area of practice for your own financial aggrandizement, you can also leave yourself open to being held responsible for the repercussions of that advice. There are repercussions here, as in...people will die. Children will die. Children are already dying. Children die by the millions all over the world because of a lack of vaccines for preventable diseases. And people like Doctor Mercola are working to bring it back to us.

It is unconscionable. And that makes me rather uncharacteristically feeling the urge to use an exclamation point myself.

**Oh. My. God. From the Mercola site: "In a nutshell, I came across an American company that uses Nano technology. This breakthrough technology uses a patented NanoMist® delivery system that shrinks the size of the B12 molecule all the way down to microscopic nanodroplets™." This is GARBAGE, people. You can't shrink a molecule, and this isn't how drug delivery with nanotechnology works.

What goes around

No, sorry, this one's not about American politics. Although everyone should pause to reflect that everything does, in fact, go around in that arena.

Some of you may remember the Great Smockity Frocks Incident of spring 2010. It began when a homeschooling mother visited the library, encountered what from her description appears to have been an autistic girl, and then proceeded to write about the child in her blog in none-to-flattering terms for either her or the little girl. The autismosphere exploded, and I was among the shrapnel flying in her direction. As I noted in my first post on the incident, Smockity and I have a lot in common. We really, truly do.

Her post and the online conversation that ensued led to a great deal of examination of our experiences as special needs families in the context of the Great Big World. Some of us remain bitter about our experiences Out There (or, maybe, that's just me), and Smockity's reaction--and those of her compatriots on her blog--seemed to justify every minute we'd spent wallowing in paranoia about what other people think of our children.

Then, Smockity apologized. It was the right thing to do, and then as now, I hope that the entire experience produced something efficacious, both for her and for any future autistic child she or anyone reading might encounter Out There.

Meanwhile, I continue to teach my own autistic child at home, and we've waded into the horrific world of long division. From what I understand, many many children have trouble with long division. TH's struggles may be compounded by the fact that remembering the steps of any process--whether it's buttoning AND zipping his pants or putting on shoes before getting in the car--is an extraordinary struggle for him. We've been working daily on long division for months now, and every day, it's been like we're just learning it all over again. I've drawn up lists of steps for him to follow, we've practiced together, out loud, etc., etc., and nothing seemed to stick in that oversized head of his.

And then, last night, I was talking to my sister on the phone and she mentioned a mnemonic her husband had used to teach my niece long division. She couldn't remember it--we're all getting older, it seems--so today, I started googling around. The third hit I got was this one at, yes, Smockity's blog. There it was--Daddy, Mother, Sister, Brother, translated as Divide, Multiply, Subtract, Bring down. Veteran teachers may have long been aware of this device, but I've never taught anyone long division in my life. I'm a biologist, dammit, not an elementary school teacher.

In awe at what the irony gods had done to me this morning, I quickly sketched it out on our dry-erase board, went over one problem with TH using it, and then cut him loose on five long-division problems. He nailed Every. Single. One.

What can I say? I hope that Smockity did absorb something ultimately positive from all our raging and hurt feelings from the great spring 2010 blog explosion, and now, I can only send over a huge "Thanks" in a big way to her for providing the solution to at least one of my autistic son's many learning struggles. He's thrilled this morning, as am I, and we owe it to her and her helpful posts for homeschooling families. As I said, she and I have a lot in common, including now, it seems, long division.

Autism and bullying

Today, I’ll be hosting one of the 24 hours of the Communicate to Educate event, uber-hosted by The Coffee Klatch. My topic is bullying and special needs, especially as it relates to autism. Hope you can make the chat. Please try to join in.

Communicate to Educate 24 hr Event NOW at http://tweetchat.com/room/tck

And now, here's our bullying story.

It began in preschool. TH, our son with autism, would "get in trouble" with the worthless lazy cows at his "play-based" school (read: "teachers" sit on their asses all day while the kids re-enact Lord of the Flies for hours on end). He'd get the blame for an altercation, and since he couldn't communicate to us in any way we could understand what the actual sequence of events was, he couldn't defend himself verbally when the other child was standing there, pointing the finger.

It wasn't until the day that I stood there, looking over the fence and watching, that I finally got confirmation of what we'd thought all along: Another child would hassle TH, physically attacking him or pulling him off of the playscape or rip a toy from his hands, and after a brief struggle, TH--often the much larger child--would finally exert some of his strength to extricate himself or his toy. Very often, the child involved was a mature child for his age, savvy and aware. TH, as I noted, couldn't even communicate to us--at almost age 4--anything about what had happened in any intelligible way.

When he was diagnosed, we removed him from that school, which we should have done much sooner. Regret #1, noted.

When we moved from San Francisco to Austin, we entered TH in a great school to start kindergarten. His teacher was fantastic. The only problem was that our son, with autism, was paired with a child who had emotional disturbances, and they shared an aide. Guess which child required and got all of the one-on-one attention? Indeed, I spent that year volunteering in TH's classroom almost every day as his "aide" during the most work-intense period of the day. And that meant that I spent every day encountering some child who would approach me to "tell on" TH, to relate how he'd bumped them or grabbed them or made a face at them or said something weird enough to them that the incomprehensibility of it came off as ill intent. It also meant that the same-old, same-old started all over again, with a child antagonizing our son to the point that TH would finally retaliate in some way, only to be named as the one who began it. As before, it took adult observation--this time his aide--to confirm that he did not start these things. But what we didn't know was that he'd already now earned a reputation as a bully, thanks to his odd grimacing, garbled echolalia, relatively huge size, and body space issues. One woman--whose son, by the way, had threatened in the second week of kindergarten to cut off TH's head and throw it in the trash--emailed furious letters to the teacher and the school, complaining about "that kid" and requesting that he be removed from school. It wouldn't be the last time a parent made such a request.

His bad reputation snowballed in first grade and hit a nadir in second grade when it spilled beyond the school walls and into our neighborhood. Parents accused him of all manner of grievous offenses, yet we managed to establish that every single event was one of TH finally breaking down and retaliating. In one case, a parent complained to the school that our son had pinched his boy's arm "black and blue," when in reality, this child and another on the bus had been putting spit- and snot-soaked fingers in our son's ears, pinching him so hard as to leave crescent-moon-shaped marks all over his arm, and otherwise torturing him on the bus. TH had responded with a single pinch to one of their arms. Yet, thanks to his built-up background as a "bully," this translated into our child being the resident grade 2 monster, and to two parents showing up at the school to complain, demanding that our son be removed from the school and preferably locked up in an institution. One parent--a woman who is now, I believe, trying to obtain certification as a special needs educator--went ballistic about him and tried to blackball him from soccer in addition to slandering him to every person she could find--because he called her son by his name and attached the suffix "pooh" (as in Winnie-the...his favorite movie at the time). Meanwhile, our son was experiencing real, genuine bullying on a regular basis. Regret 2: That we let this build up to that point.

We went into crisis mode and presented the Circle of Friends program to the entire second grade. It was a great success for the most part--even though some parents made fun of it and our son and us, and people we had mistakenly thought of as friendly to us didn't sign off on it and even provided bizarre, half-assed rationales for not doing so--but when third grade rolled around, things changed. The students moved from class to class instead of being self contained, and TH lost his bearings completely. Kids once again started taking his strange utterances as mystifying insults, looked upon his grimaces as a threat, partly in the context of his huge size, and the distaste for our child arose again, like a malevolent Phoenix or at least a soul-sucking, existential-hellish game of whack-a-mole. Girls, in particular, started being emotionally abusive to him, telling him that they wished he were dead and in hell. One boy told him that he'd like to crush his skull into pieces and eat it like cereal.

The final blow--or, really, slice--came when a girl sliced our son's face with her fingernails during a playground scrum. He came home with open abrasions in three places on his face. No one had called us. No nurse had seen him. And this is where I have Regret 3.

I emailed a picture of his wounds to the school, including the principal. While TH's special education teacher and his language arts teacher got right back to me, we heard radio silence from the principal. Nothing. Finally, my husband sent an email detailing the entire history of our son's association with this girl, which stretched back to kindergarten and involved systematic targeting of our son on her part. I add that the school was well aware of this history and had gone so far as to ensure, at least for awhile, that she never came near our child. This goal fell away in third grade, and she targeted him daily on the playground. The principal declined to engage by email and we arranged to meet in person. The first words out of that man's mouth at this meeting were, "There doesn't seem to have been any ill intent involved." My regret? That I didn't immediately leap onto his desk, reach out and abrade his face in three places with my fingernails, and then ask, "You tell me how someone does that without ill intent."

Instead, we listened to him bullshit us for an hour, ducking and dodging my husband's pointed and persistent questions, and then we left. We then withdrew our son from school, and he has been happily homeschooled ever since.