The Po Show

Stop the World

When I was a teenager, I was in a community theater production of "Stop the World, I Want to Get Off," a great musical that no one seems to do anymore. It was really dated, but then so are a lot of shows. Anyway, the main character goes through his whole life, and repeatedly, when things get overwhelming, he suddenly says, "Stop the world!" and everyone else on stage freezes, and he addresses the audience directly with some soliloquy.

I like the whole idea of yelling "Stop the World" and having everything and everyone stop. I would have done it several times in the last two weeks. as Matthew spiraled back down, for no apparent reason. He was sick and missed school for a couple of days, three weeks ago, and then went back and everything went to hell.

He wouldn't pick up his pencil in class. He screamed and raged at everything. He cried and kicked things. He threw stuff, sometimes at people. He was incredibly on edge, very anxious, with zero frustration tolerance. He asked constantly to go to the nurse, complaining of a headache, a backache, a stomachache. Wandering ailments, I called them, which disappeared when he went home. He ran around, stimmed, jumped about, fine. Then the next morning, getting ready for school, he would suddenly have another headache, or backache, or stomachache. He felt like he had a fever. He felt like he couldn't breathe. He made his first attempt at self-medication, which scared the shit out of me. He didn't know what to do, didn't know how he was going to get through the day, so he took two melatonin tablets last Wednesday morning, hoping that they would make him fall asleep at school, so he wouldn't have to deal with anything.

And he had been doing GREAT for several weeks. It was a horrible reversal, and no one could tell why it had happened. There was no big event, no change in what they were doing in school. He just said "School is harder now" without being able to say exactly WHAT was harder. He didn't mean the schoolwork was harder. Just being at school was harder, in some inexplicable way. His therapist tried to parse it out, saying they had to be "detectives" to try and figure out what was going on, but nothing definitive came out.

So last week I asked for a conference with his teacher and the inclusion teacher. His teacher asked the school psychologist to attend as well. His aide showed up also. This conference was today (though it was somewhat up in the air as to whether it was actually going to happen, since it looked like we might end up with school cancelled due to ice, and we did have a 2 hour delay this morning).

Ross and I walked into the conference, expecting everyone to be in crisis mode, and the first thing the special ed. teacher said was that things have been much better in the last two days, basically back to where he was before this recent downturn. Well, okay. That's great.

So the whole meeting ended up being about how they want to start, in slow, gradual increments, to make greater demands on him academically. He's been getting a free ride a lot of the year, as they've been working to integrate him into the classroom and work on social issues. So he isn't expected to take the spelling tests each week, or write the paragraphs that the other kids are asked to do, or write out explanations of how he solves his math word problems (that he does in his head and can't tell you how he reached the answer). They feel he is ready to start doing this, though it will be a struggle at first.

Well, okay. That's great that they feel he's ready to do this. Because really, if they gave letter grades, he'd be failing almost every subject at this point, because he won't write. As resistant as he's been to the afterschool tutoring he's been getting once a week (that we are paying for), apparently it's really helping his phonemic awareness, which has been the major stumbling block to his being able to spell.

So I thought we were on a downswing, but apparently we're on an upswing, but one that may result in another downswing as he is challenged more academically. I'm bracing myself for the screaming and crying to come during homework time.

Stop the world.