Last month a friend who is an adoptive parent posted on her Facebook wall that she was worried about her child on his first day of first grade. Another parent commented, "I feel the same way...I want to give all his classmates and teachers the back story so they will accept him." And I understood exactly what she meant.
I always want to give the back story. I want to say, "This child is not like other children in your elementary school class. This child did not have Mozart played for her in the womb. She didn't come home to a nursery decorated out of the Pottery Barn Kids catalog. Nobody sang her to sleep and laid her gently in a cozy bassinet. She wasn't fed or held on demand or given love or intellectual stimulation until much later. So maybe she doesn't stay on task very well, but be gentle with her. She has come so far."
Or I want to say, "I know you see this child as just one of the mass of Asian kids in junior high who get straight As, but you don't know the effort it costs her. She has only been speaking English for five years, and she is still catching up. She works very hard for those As. Acknowledge that effort."
I want to give the back story. But I can't. They're too old for that now, and those details are nobody's business, least of all their classmates'. I can only advocate for them behind the scenes.
When they were younger, I could write notes on the school admission forms, talk about institutionalization and developmental delays, and the officials would nod as if they understood. But I don't think they really did. All kids have challenges, they probably thought. And maybe they do, but this is my child, and I want them to know there's more to her than what they see through the filter of performance goals and required curriculum.
And beyond the challenges, I want them to know that this child, my child, is amazing. This child may never do well on standardized testing -- may, in fact, never even pass the standardized testing. (Will they hold her diploma over that? Not while I'm around.) Certainly I want my child to be able to, at minimum, read a newspaper and write a letter and balance a checkbook (or whatever electronic forms those basic skills will take in the future). But standardized tests don't measure creativity, or humor, or kindness. They do a very poor job of gauging the worth of a square peg.
So when a teacher asks my child, as one did today, "What's the setting for Because of Winn-Dixie? When does it take place?" and my child answers straight-faced, "In alien space-time" and pauses a beat before saying, "Just kidding," my heart swells with pride. Boom! It's the wrong answer -- or is it? Because for a kid who watches Doctor Who, it's a perfectly reasonable answer. And that's just the way she rolls.
Everyone has a back story. But some are more complicated than others.
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