Tuesday: ESY Drama

T. went to his ESY program today. I heard the garage door open around when my alarm went off at 9 am (I get up before I technically have to, so that I can walk before it gets hot). I don’t think he was on time, but I also don’t think it matters.

I made cauliflower tempura for lunch, along with rice, and some other veg and spices. I used the air fryer for the tempura part, then stirfried the rest of it all together and served it over rice. It turned out pretty well. I used the rest of the batter to make a crepe. I mean, it was flour, egg and water, so seemed like a no brainer and made a lovely dessert with strawberry sauce and peanut butter. I think the batter could have been a little thinner.

Anyway, when he returned in the afternoon, he had News. But first, some backstory.

Back in August of 2017, A. told us, in slightly incoherent snippets while eating dinner at Julie’s Place, that she didn’t want to go back to school. It turns out her summer program had made her extremely miserable, because there was a boy there named P., who kept yelling her name at her. A lot. And it had been going on for weeks. And the people running the ESY that she was in were telling her to just ignore him. At the time, her IEP had as a goal item to _pay attention when her name was called_, and that had been a goal item for over a year. And now, they were reversing that.

We did _not_ send her back for ESY after that; we found summer day camps including a horse thing, Camp Empow, and a karate place. She continued to do Camp Empow thereafter. No tragedy there.

This past school year — so, 2021, 4 ish years after the previous event, P. reentered The Walkitout Show, doing more or less what he was doing before, but with a surprise twist. He approached A. during a shared class (which should not have happened), and asked if A. was his friend. She sensibly did not sign up for that, while also not out of hand rejecting him, because that’s A.’s style. He blew past that, and went to his Ask: Tell S. that N. is not for him. A. did not recognize either S. or N. At that point in time, neither did I. I emailed people. They committed to having P.’s aide keep them separated, and that was pretty much it for that season.

However, after some contemplation, I remembered that T. had had some friends over from his school for a party. And I realized that two of those friends had the names S. and N. And that was really weird! My kids have different last names. I have no idea how P. even worked out that A. was T.’s younger sister, and thus probably at a party where she might have met S. and N. S., N., and T., after all, _are all in high school_. Also, this is a _lot_ of social math for someone with autism. I kinda don’t believe that P. has autism. This is too much social math.

We are now caught up to T.’s first day of ESY! P. is in his class!!! Why! P. is my daughter’s age — a rising 8th grader. But this ESY is for high school. OK, explanation makes no sense, so let’s move on. What does P. do?

P. does _exactly_ what he was doing in 2017: yelling people’s names, repeatedly, from across the room.

P. also keeps calling T. by his childhood nickname. T. corrected him, persistently, until an adult stepped in and got P. to knock it off.

P. hassled A., who is also in this class.

Finally, P. asked T. how T. would feel if T. were raped.

Yeah, didn’t really expect that sentence to end that way.

T. said, whoa, that is completely inappropriate.

At this point in the story, I told T. I would definitely be writing an email. Which I did, and which was promptly answered and they are taking this seriously, and P. will be separated from at least T. and, hopefully, A. and another kid, C., who was his 3rd major target. T. was paying a lot of attention to who P. was focussing on. I’m very proud of my son.

Anyway. I could really do without any additional drama.

What’s next?

To recap: last Friday, someone who does not normally attend FF showed up, which was a delight initially, because he had some fun travel stories to tell. But then he started saying we should support the police, because some of them are good, and some of them are also appalled by recent SCOTUS decisions. I’m like, no, because I host this thing, I moderate this thing, and most if not all of us have been participating in protests against police in recent years. I mean, come on. It went on for a while, we finally got onto another topic without agreeing with him or letting him think that we were okay with what he was advocating, and then another person thought he had a clever way to resolve the disagreement, brought it back up and we did it again.

To be absolutely clear, as I was with him: we don’t view all police as The Enemy. But also, they have a problem in terms of firing for cause and making sure those who are fired for cause don’t then get hired somewhere else and continue being awful. Until that problem is fixed, by them — we can’t fix it for them, at least, none of the people at the cocktail hour can — we are not supporting them beyond paying taxes which in turn pay for them to do their jobs. There is a _ton_ of space between support and enemy — the various people on the zoom occupy a broad range of that middle ground. And as I kept mentioning, a bunch of us have friends and/or family who are now or who were police officers; it’s not like we’re ignorant or have no direct contact with the group in question.

It took a while to get back off the topic, and by the end I was wishing I’d just booted him off the zoom, and then unfriended him and some other people on FB while I was at it. Which I’m still thinking about doing. I spent Saturday trying to understand what state of the art psychology advice is for interpersonal conflict. Then, Saturday evening, I fired the sitter, because the sitter was texting with my son and then telling him to delete the texts so that I wouldn’t see them.

Sunday and Monday were calm (by comparison, at least). And then Tuesday, a problematic person from my daughter’s school life popped up in my son’s ESY.

I feel like it is sweeps week on the Walkitout Show and I am looking forward to the end of the nonsense. I really _wish_ all this shit was about me, because then I could go, fine, I clearly need to go to therapy and become a better person. But everything about the world right now is telling me that drama is fucking everywhere right now. I’d have to be incredibly narcissistic to think that any of this had anything to do with me at all.

If by some miracle, you are reading this in 2022, and your life is calm, please know that I am so happy for you. Also, make sure none of this rubs off on you.