Dear Miss Bus Driver;
I’m sorry. I truly am. We don’t know how to fix the situation, yet we keep trying, every single day.
My son is a pill. We know that… we’ve known that for 15 years. We tried every punishment imaginable… No TV, no Xbox, no Nintendo DS, restriction from bikes and friends and beloved toys, and even a swat on the butt once in a while (hey… did wonders for me. Ask my grandfather. I didn’t like it at the time, but you can’t argue with the results).
No matter what we do, Chris still misbehaves. He breaks expensive toys and games. He writes on walls, is loud and obnoxious, and oftentimes ignores us altogether. He does poorly in school, He fights with his sister. He does wildly inappropriate things at wildly inappropriate times. He’s had some messy personal hygene issues that I won’t get into here, because believe me… you don’t want me to get into it here.
He’s shaved the dog.
…and he’s shaved the cat.
It’s the reason my wife doesn’t work. Chris is her full-time job, one she doesn’t get paid for. That puts us in a bad position financially much of the time. A family of four buying a house and a car and living on one income. Certainly not by design, yet, there it is. (As an aside, if you’ve ever invited me out to a bar, or an event, and I politely beg off, or impolitely no-show, I’m sorry. Most of the time, We just don’t have the money to spare… But that’s another post waiting to be written.)
So imagine our dismay when we discovered that Chris has a disability. All this time, we’ve been punishing him, trying to get him to conform to societal norms… but he can’t.
Not won’t. Can’t.
Christopher has been diagnosed with every issue under the sun; ADD, ADHD, Asparger’s Syndrome, Autism, ASD, etc etc etc… you could make a freaking living just developing acronyms for the medical community. There was one genius holistic crackpot that suggested Chris had Celiac disease, that he was allergic to wheat. (Could be worse… one could be allergic to corn. Have you seen all the crap that HFCS is in? Again, another post for another day.)
I’ll give you one more acronym: PDD-NOS. Pervasive Developmental Disability- Not Otherwise Specified.
This means “There’s something not right about your boy, be I’ll be damned if we know what it is.”
Let me enlist it for you:
- Chris doesn’t pick up on social cues. He has NO trouble driving right through your conversation, or saying very inappropriate things…especially to the black ladies at the supermarket, or the drunk guy at the baseball game, or the homeless guy with one leg.
- He has NO anger control. This is part of his bipolar disorder, which at it’s root is a mood disorder. For those of you that have heard the term bipolar before and don’t really know what it means, I’ll lay Christopher’s situation right out here, clearly;
Rapid cycling, recurrent, intermittent hypomanic and depressive episodes with psychotic symptoms.
Fun stuff.
- Chris has no sense of time. None whatsoever. Think about that for a minute. It kinda freaked us out when we discovered it, too.
- Chris is 15 years old, and has advanced no farther than the 3rd grade level in school. This is not to say that Chris isn’t very smart. I’ve seen it. Supernova flashes of brilliance that force my ass to the nearest chair only to utter “Wow… where did that come from?”
- Cognitively, Chris is about 6 years old and doesn’t seem to be advancing much.
- Chris is a little guy. He’s 15, but stands about 4-7.
- Chris can’t maintain relationships with peers. All of the kids from church and family friends, and even his younger sister, have grown into teen adolescence, and have left Chris in the pre-teens. They’ve all outgrown him. On this point, stop and think for a moment… his peers are aging at the same rate as Chris, but they are maturing much faster. Chris then makes friends with younger children (which is an awkward situation in itself)… and they out-grow him.
For all of Chris’ challenges, this last one really gets me the most. He’ll never be able to form mutually rewarding, long lasting relationships.
So again, we’re sorry. We know it’s easy to get frustrated with him. It happens 8, 10, 12 times a day.
But it really pisses me off to think that I should need to apologize to Chris’s school bus driver. You know Miss bus driver, you signed up for this duty… driving special needs kids back and forth, to and from school.
Did you know what you were getting into?
There are times when you’ve left Chris at school, because you didn’t want to deal with him. I then have to come across town, Southgate to North Highlands to pick him up. Thanks for the help.
There are times you’ve been so rattled with him, you’ve shown up at our door shaking with frustration. And now you’ve suspended him from the bus. That means my wife and I have to take him back and forth to school this week.
That means he’s not going to school this week.
What qualifies you for this job? What kind of training did you get? Did you get any training on handling special needs children?
If you can’t handle a bus with one tenth as many special needs kids, much less my one little boy, what makes you think driving a bus FULL of loud, obnoxious high schoolers is going to be any easier?
As I said, I know he’s hard to take.
But you’re certainly not helping.
Tags: Bus, Christopher, School