First-grade felony
Guns don't kill children, children kill children.

by Terri Mauro

Okay, that's it. My kids are never leaving the house again.

The news from Michigan yesterday was not the first tale of school violence, goodness knows. But I could always rationalize it before. They were always older children---high school, middle school. There always seemed to be time before my 1st grader and 2nd grader would have to deal with armed classmates, and maybe by then America would have seen the light and gotten rid of guns once and for all. Big kids might be disturbed enough to instigate violence, but little kids? Maybe someone might bring in a pocket knife for show and tell and be suspended for it, but that's about as dangerous as it gets, right?

Wrong. Now we have 6-year-olds killing 6-year-olds. The incident in Mount Morris Township started with a playground dispute, one child hitting another. The kind of thing that goes on every day, at your kids' school, at my kids' school. But at these kids' school, the animosity between the 1st-graders didn't end with somebody going to the principal, or somebody getting time out. It ended with a little boy bringing a gun to school and shooting a little girl in the neck.

How does a 6-year-old get a hold of a gun, anyway, much less one with bullets and no lock? As of this writing, authorities were still trying to figure that out. What they do know is that whoever put that firearm where a child could find it is in a heap of trouble. The boy is too young to even be held accountable for murder, but the adults in his life can be held accountable for giving him the murder weapon. I'd suggest that that accountability be extended to lawmakers and lobbyists who are more interested in protecting gun owners than protecting 6-year-olds, but that would probably be the ravings of a now-paranoid Mom with no perspective on the issue at all.

Has it come to this--that we need metal detectors at elementary schools? Do we need to teach gun safety like we teach fire safety? Does Sesame Street need to run through a few armed-gunman scenarios to show kids appropriate defensive maneuvers? Does Oshkosh need to add bulletproof vests to its clothing line? What does Mr. Rogers have to say about all this? Does Blue have a clue?

Surely some scrap of evidence will surface that will let me believe that it couldn't happen at my kids' school. But I'm not so sure. The boy is being described as a behavior problem--but my son has been described as a behavior problem, too. So have most of his classmates. So, I'd guess, have a goodly percentage of boys in any elementary school around. Must we consider them all potential gunslingers? How do you tell the ones who'll stop at hitting from the ones who'll stop at nothing?

It's a dangerous world, and in one way or another it always has been. But I didn't think it was going to turn out to be this dangerous, this soon. I know I can't protect my kids forever. But for now, homeschooling is starting to look mighty good.

Obsessed with OT
I'm trading in my Land's End catalogs for Sensory Comfort.

by Terri Mauro

It's not unusual, these days, to be a compulsive catalog shopper. Some people order entire wardrobes from them. Some people decorate their home. Some order gifts, or books, or stationery, or knickknacks galore. There are catalogs for toys, for music, for address labels, for office supplies, for computers, for pantyhose. It's not at all unheard of for people to horde catalogs, pore over them obsessively, wait eagerly for the next one.

But I may be the first person to be addicted to occupational-therapy catalogs.

Guinea-pig central
Uncle Sam wants you to be experimented on.

by Terri Mauro

We've all seen those ads in the paper recruiting participants for studies of some homely ailment or other--wrinkles or spider veins or cellulite or bad breath. But now the government is getting in the act with an enormous Web site dedicated to nothing else but recruiting subjects for medical studies. Hypochondriacs, start your engines!

Gym shoo
Working out never works out well for me.

by Terri Mauro

My husband is starting to make noises about me joining a gym. Not because of my weight--he values his body parts too highly to make a crack about my weight--but because lugging an iMac from one room to the next left me moaning and groaning and munching Advil for several days thereafter. Your muscles are out of shape, he says. You're losing strength, he says. You should join my gym, he says.

Now, this implies that my muscles were once in shape, I was once strong, and I might enjoy going to a gym. Patent falsehoods, all. I did go to his gym for a brief time while we were dating, but--oh, gee, you know, you do things when you're dating and trying to establish common ground with your beloved that you would never do in real life. He watched "The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd," and I went to the gym. Now, going on 10 years of marriage, he can't say the name of that program without gagging. And I feel much the same about the gym.

I have many excellent reasons for not wanting to go there. I'm a busy woman. I work full-time, and even though I telecommute three days of the week, I'm supposed to be sitting at my desk watching soap operas...um...doing work, not galivanting around, lifting weights and riding bikes that go nowhere. After work hours, there are the kids--homework to do, activities to attend, stories to read, computers to haul. Should I neglect them to sweat with strangers when I can perfectly well neglect them at home by checking my e-mail every 35 seconds? Then, of course, there is this Web site, which I must spend hours and hours procrastinating over before finally hammering some bit of blather out at 2 in the morning. Go to the gym? My life is overflowing as it is!

Of course, if I really wanted to go, I'd find the time. I don't really want to go. I really want not to go. I hate going to the gym. I hate everything about it. I hate exercising. I hate lifting weights. I hate climbing stairs. I hate looking at my lumpy self in large mirrors. I hate aerobics. I hate seeing skinny people in spandex. I hate seeing fat people in spandex. I hate spending money to do something I hate.

And besides, it's not like I don't have options. I could walk. Walking is free! Walking is something I don't actively hate! I could take my discman and walk while listening to tunes and have some nice time to myself. I won't, but I could. I could also work out to one of those TV exercise shows, although last time I did that, doing step aerobics in my basement, I blew out my knees. I could invest in some quality home equipment, maybe that contraption Chuck Norris and Christie Brinkley feel so strongly about. That way, I could exercise anytime, day or night. I'm sure my mother-in-law, who lives downstairs, wouldn't mind hearing weights clanking up and down in the middle of the night.

Or I could let my gym-toned husband lift the computer next time, while I lie on the couch conserving my energy, watching old "Molly Dodd" tapes, and polishing off the truckload of candy we accumulated around Valentine's Day. Some of those chocolates are heavy.

You've got a friend
But it's only your boring old mom.

by Terri Mauro

My son has no friends.

For a long time, this didn't bother him much. He was a self-contained little unit, perfectly happy to line up cars in his room for hours, all by himself. If kids were uncomfortable with him--because he stands to close, because he touches them or hugs them or kisses them according to his impulses, because his play is too inflexible--he didn't seem to notice. His large gallery of pretend friends liked him just fine.

But now, at almost 7, he's starting to notice. When his sister has friends over, he wonders where his friends are. I have to keep him from jumping all over her friends, but playing with Mom is not as fun when there are other kids in the house. He's in a special-ed class this year with older kids, and though at various times they find him funny, weird, or icky, he's mostly just a baby. Not much friend potential there.

I've tried finding an after-school activity for him, in the hope of finding a peer group, but his overactivity, heedlessness of adult wishes, and impulsivity make it hard for him to get with any programs. Already this year, we've been drummed out of a mother-and-child music class because he was trampling all the younger children in his wake. He's been asked to leave gym and swimming in the past because he just won't follow the leader. Many hyper kids seem to do well with karate, but I can conceive of no way that this boy will stand in a line and follow directions. He'd probably wander too close to someone else and get kicked in the head.

With conventional social activities out of the running, I've recently been trying to find him a group of kids with problems like his. His neurologist recommended a social-skills program, and goodness knows that social skills are something he could use. I talked to the child psychologist in charge, and it sounded like a good possibility: They work primarily with children on the autistic spectrum, and since my boy has autistic behaviors in his large grab-bag of problems, it seemed he might fit in.

But today, we went to the evaluation. It was at the house of a speech therapist who would be assessing him while the psychologist talked to me. The house had many lovely knickknacks. The house had a cat. The house had a lady waiting with her baby for her son to come out of speech therapy. The house had a psychologist who was willing to share his keys. My son was in his element, chatting up grown-ups, touching every breakable thing in sight, petting the baby, scaring the cat. He was talking, moving, bouncing, zooming, behaving as he always does in an unfamiliar place full of delightful stimulations. The speech therapist couldn't get him to do any of her little tests, and determined that his language skills were insufficient for admission to the program, and that he would run her ragged trying to constantly redirect him anyway.

Part of me is sad that even among special-needs kids, he doesn't fit. Part of me blames the therapist for not having sufficient tricks up her sleeve to get his attention; his wonderful school speech therapist can get him to pay attention for much longer than even I can. And part of me wonders at the wisdom of evaluating distractible children in such a distracting environment. It doesn't matter, though--another door slams.

My husband is unconcerned by all this. He's a loner, and thinks friends are somewhat overrated. Our son is not actively miserable, and with time and maturity he may become more appealing friend material to others. And there are signs of progress at school: Today his teacher told me that he has been asking another boy in class to play store with him, and they have been happily interacting. So maybe he'll find a way to make it without mom's help.

Until then, I'll just have to be his best friend myself.

copyright © 2000 by Terri Mauro