On bullying - in memory of Bart Palosz

About a month before the end of my son’s eighth grade year*, I took him out of school for a doctor’s appointment. When the doctor asked my son to lift his shirt so he could listen to his heartbeat with a stethoscope, I was horrified to see words half written, half carved into his stomach with a ball point pen: I AM HATED.

Even as someone who spends every day expressing myself through words, it’s hard to find the right ones to describe how I felt seeing that carved into my son’s skin that morning. As a mother, you want to protect your children, from danger, from physical pain, and from emotional pain dealt out by the kind of insensitive kids who hurt you when you were their age. Seeing “I AM HATED” carved into my son’s skin, made me realize the depth of my failure.

It was no great secret that my son was having a difficult time in middle school. He has Asperger’s Syndrome, and while that means he got into Mensa at nine and his brain works in ways that never cease to fascinate me, it also results in the fact that he’s not your “typical” kid.

He is now in college, and fortunately his peers have matured enough to recognize that differences are what make our society and the world such an interesting place. Indeed, many of our greatest scientific discoveries and cultural achievements we made by people who didn’t fit our definition of “normal.” Albert Einstein, Andy Warhol, Vincent Van Gough, Satoshi Tajiri (inventor of Pokemon), Alan Turing, Thomas Jefferson, Sir Isaac Newton, are all thought to have had Aspergers. My son’s fascination with, and almost encyclopedic knowledge of international affairs makes him a great person to know if you’re interested in politics. He also has remarkable sense of humor.

But middle school, as I know from my own difficult experiences back in the Stone Age when it was called Junior High, is about fitting in. For those who don’t, it can be a tortuous, unforgiving place.

I’d been to my son’s school too many times to count to talk about the problems he’d had with bullying. There were phone calls. E-mails. Meetings with administrators. At one point we tried to set up a meeting the parents of a child with whom there were continuing issues. As a single mom, I asked to bring someone with me for support. The other parents refused to meet unless I came alone. The vice-principal shrugged and said, “What can I do?” The meeting never happened.

That pretty much summed up the school’s attitude. With the exception of one person in the building, the school psychologist, without whose genuine compassion and caring I’m not sure my son would have made it through middle school intact, the rest of the administration threw up their hands in helplessness and said, “What can we do?”

Perhaps if I hadn’t been engaged in a protracted divorce from my son’s dad I would have been able to devote more energy to fighting the school. In my “I’m a bad Mom” moments, I punish myself for not doing more. But that day in the doctor’s office, I was filled with an anger so fierce I wasn’t going to take any more excuses.

Shaking with rage, I drove back to school, had my son to wait in the car, and told the administration what I’d seen. I said my son wouldn’t be setting foot back in the building until they could guarantee him a safe environment.

For the next few days, I home schooled my son, while the administration tried to figure out what to do. Their solution? He would finish out his eight-grade year doing independent study in the guidance office. In other words, rather than dealing with the actual bullies, they would just hide him away, out of sight, so they could get the year over with and be done with the “problem.”

And sadly, that’s how it happened. The good news is that my son wasn’t being tormented for that last month and a half of eighth grade. But the tragedy is that once again, it was the victim who was punished.

As I contemplated with dread the thought of my son having to navigate the local high school with its student population of 2,700 students, Winston Preparatory School, a New York-based school for kids with learning differences announced it was opening a Connecticut campus. When headmistress, Beth Sugerman told me that my son was accepted, I burst into tears of relief.

You’d think it would be a happily ever after story from here on, but it wasn’t. My son was so used to being bullied, so reactive against everything and everyone, that it took him almost a year to realize that the world wasn’t his enemy. That’s one of the many reasons bullying sucks. The pain is deep, insidious and lasting, and that’s why we find that sometimes the bullied end up becoming bullies themselves.

I’m eternally grateful that there were resources within the family to send my son to a school where, once he realized that life was no longer going to be a day-to-day struggle for survival, he thrived. But as I am all too well aware, not everyone is as fortunate, and the Greenwich school district fights such placements tooth-and-nail, despite the fact that it’s clear they do not have the will power to deal with the problem of bullying themselves.

As research for my upcoming book with Scholastic, BAITED**, I read Barbara Coloroso's book, THE BULLY, THE BULLIED, AND THE BYSTANDER: From Preschool to High School How Parents and Teachers can help break the cycle of violence. I think this should be a town wide read, and basis for discussion. We have to stop the denial, stop pretending that this doesn't happen here in perfect Greenwich with our high SAT scores and our manicured lawns. It DOES. And Greenwich Public Schools is complicit in the denial and the enabling.

I learned something important when I was a docent at the Anne Frank exhibition at our high school back in 2003– Don’t be a bystander. As Edmund Burke said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Okay, Burke’s one of those old dead guys who wrote a long time ago when women didn’t have the rights they have now, so I’m changing “men” to “people”. But here’s the thing. If you watch someone being bullied -in person or online - and you do nothing, you’re an accomplice. We all need to stand up to bullies – each and every one of us. It’s the only way to end the pain and prevent more tragic deaths.


*My son attended Western Middle School, the same middle school at which Bart Palosz allegedly experienced bullying. What makes me so furious is that so much time has passed and nothing has been done. GPS continues to protect the bullies over the bullied.


** Edited later:  The title of BAITED has been changed to BACKLASH. 

A little rant from the mom of an Aspie

On Boxing Day, the New York Times published a really lovely article about two college students with Asperger's Syndrome, Jack Robinson and Kirsten Lindsmith, and how they are navigating the difficulties of a relationship in which both of them have similar problems reading social cues. I don't say "lack of empathy, because as the mother of an Asperger's son, I've found him to be extremely empathetic. It's just that he has a hard time reading faces and social cues, so he doesn't always know when you're upset unless it's VERY CLEAR. (Crying hysterically is usually a dead giveaway, but I try not to do that in front of my kids too often.)

I mean let's face it. It's hard enough to manage relationships when you're allegedly "neuro typical." How many of us have misinterpreted our partner's expressions or actions? *raises hand*

When my son was going through the diagnosis processes at age five, I pretty much knew it was Aspergers because it explained everything I'd been worried about since he was 18 months old perfectly. I read everything I could get my hands on, and although in some ways it was comforting, because I finally knew what I was dealing with and could take action to help him, instead of having all these amorphous worries, in other ways it created a whole host of new anxieties. I woke up at 3am, crying, and asking my now ex-husband, "Do you think he'll ever get married?" It wasn't the actually married part I worried about - it's that I want my son to have connections, because to me, human connection and relationships are the most important part of being on this planet, and I could already tell from observing him on the playground at school that unlike kids perhaps further along the spectrum, my son wanted them but couldn't figure out how to initiate them.

So I loved this article. It gave me hope.


But then I started seeing people making jokes about a correction that the New York Time posted afterwards.

Okay, I admit. It's kind of funny to see a "My Little Pony" correction in relation to a front page New York Times story.

BUT...here's the thing. I don't think the a lot of the people who are laughing about this understand why this correction is so important to Kirsten Lindsmith, who referred to Twilight Sparkle as the character she visualizes to cheer herself up when she feels sad or anxious. What they need to understand is that a person with AS could perseverate about a mistake like that for days. Months. For my writer friends, imagine you were featured on the front page of the New York Times and they got the name of your book wrong! Do you think you'd be laughing? I think not. I can just imagine the angsty phone calls to publicists and agents. "THE FRONT PAGE OF THE NEW YORK FREAKING TIMES AND THEY DIDN'T EVEN GET MY BOOK TITLE RIGHT!!!" *sobs* *reaches for tissues and chocolate*

So imagine you're Kristen and you have this safe place, a strategy that you have to help calm yourself and you just told the world about it and then...some reporter effed it up!! And now people are laughing about it when you try to make it right.

All I'm saying is, it's okay to have a chuckle. But at least while you're chuckling make an effort to understand.

The OMG, Where did it go? LIFE, AFTER Contest

I was talking to someone last week and she observed, "You have a lot of transitions this year." I'd been feeling very stressed and unsettled recently and ascribed it to any number of things but that was one I hadn't pinpointed. But it's true. It's been a year where I've had to confront some very major life issues - like realizing I'm really in that "sandwich"generation part of life when we had to take the very difficult decision to put my dad, who has been suffering from Alzheimers (how I HATE HATE HATE that disease) into an assisted living facility in March. On my birthday. Happy Birthday, Sarah. You are really ARE middle aged.

And then there are the happy, joyous moments, like when my son turned 18 recently.



We had a big barbecue for his birthday, with family and his friends. His college and high school age friends played soccer and video games easily with his 1st grade and nursery school age cousins. It was a wonderful celebration. As I posted on Facebook that morning, "Eighteen years ago today, after 48 hours of labor, this smart, handsome kid was born. Like all really meaningful things in life, I had to work hard for him."




On Wednesday, Josh is graduating from high school. I keep hearing my Grandma Mollie, whose amazing singing voice I did NOT inherit, singing "Sunrise, Sunset" in my head, as teen me accompanies her on the piano.

Four years ago, in what I feel was a gift from G-d, but was probably more the vision of Executive Director Scott Bezsylko and Head of School Beth Sugerman and the wisdom the the school's Trustees, Winston Preparatory School decided to open a campus in Norwalk, CT.

When Beth told me that Josh was admitted, I started crying, so great was my relief that my son would finally be at a school where I thought his strengths would be appreciated and his areas of weaknesses supported. And most importantly, where he could feel safe. Things had gotten so bad that about a month before the end of 8th grade, I pulled him out of his middle school and said said I wasn't sending him back until they could provide him with a safe environment. The school's solution? To have him complete the year by doing independent study in the guidance office, thus further stigmatizing him.

Attending Winston Prep changed his life. It's not to much to say that it saved his life. When he was being bullied every day, his grades suffered. He was so depressed he was on medication that, it turned out from a later neuropsych we had done, slowed down his cognitive functioning, but it had helped him get through the pain of living through each day at school.

He touched on the both the depression and the bullying when he asked about "life is hopeless" and "mortal enemies" in our now famous StoryCorps interview, which was when he was in 7th grade:



The environment at Winston has allowed Josh to thrive and grow into the young man he is today - someone who really cares about what is going on in the world, who has been following the Arab Spring as avidly as some other teens follow the World Series or the World Cup, who will greet me first thing in the morning with "Did you see what is going on in Misrata?" or "Who do you think is worse, Gaddafi or Assad?"

His teachers have inspired him, helped him, pushed him, and coached him through the social issues that he needed to work on. Since his junior year, he's been taking classes at Norwalk Community College, to further broaden his education and to help him learn to transition to college and learn to start advocating for himself in a college environment.

On Wednesday, he's graduating. I've spent a lot of time over the last few weeks thinking about all the work it's taken to get him here. The PPT's when he was in the public school system where getting every accommodation was like fighting a battle with Goliath - particularly the one in third grade where the Vice Principal of his elementary school sat across the table from me and told me that his problems in school weren't because he had Asperger's Syndrome, they were because I'd been hospitalized with a nervous breakdown. (I'm looking at YOU, Damaris Rau, you EVIL woman, who should never, ever, be allowed near special ed children or parents). When we left the meeting, the psychologist who'd done the neuropsych eval of Josh asked me if I was okay, and said she'd never heard anything like that in her entire career.

It's been a long road, and it's been a very hard and bumpy road at times, like that PPT. But when I look at my son today,I am so unutterably proud. And happy. And sad. Because I'm going to desperately miss his morning political reports next year. And his hilarious, sardonic one-liners, delivered in that deadpan English accent.

So you're probably wondering by now, where's the contest?! Didn't she mention a contest?! I thought I was going to win a book and I get all this freaking mushy stuff!

WELL, HERE IT IS!

Josh is giving a speech on Wednesday at graduation. I am going to cry.






GUESS HOW MANY TISSUES I WILL GO THROUGH AT JOSH'S GRADUATION.



The closest answer wins a signed copy of LIFE, AFTER - if you already have LIFE, AFTER, you can wait till WTGP comes out and I'll give you a copy of that.

Enter in comments. If you tweet contest +1 entry. Make sure you @sarahdarerlitt so I know.