Post#15A Learning Disabilities Who?
“Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?”[i]
Yasik came into Dave and my life at four and a half from an orphanage in Russia. Within an hour of meeting us, he had discarded fear, showing his parents-to-be full on Yasik, coming with us and the driver and the translator, total strangers, and charming shopkeepers along the way. Twenty-four hours later, while he was submitting to being stripped of a pink T-shirt, tights and scuffed, too small girl’s shoes in the office of the orphanage and then re-dressed in clothing we had brought for him, we were being told he liked to play with cars, to draw, learn poems by heart, watch cartoons and he liked to be read to. They said he was a gifted boy, musical, helpful with others, very good. And I noted he was bright and didn’t look boring at all.
During our first few days with Yasik as we waited for his papers to be processed, I noted that he chattered in Russian, laughing and teasing. We had been told at the orphanage that he wasn’t a talker, so why did he seem a little yakker to us, at the table while Dave made a meal, in Russian far beyond our 10 words? Was it because this little kid now had someone of his very own to listen?
And the unrestrained curiosity about how things work? It seemed boundless – from switching on lights to every gadget he came across- the TV, a flashlight, a water pistol, and earphones on the airplane with the added wonder of the music filling his little head. He seemed to be more interested in things that really worked than toy cars he had to push or paper airplanes he had to hold and zoom around.
Being confronted with a new country, a new home and surrounded by new people who were pulling him into their lives, why did this happy yakking and curiosity show no signs of restraint?
Nor was there any hesitancy displaying natural charm. When Dave delivered a fatherly warning, Yasik came back with, “Be Happy Poppa”. He would remind me to “Kiss Poppa” as we set out on a bike ride. Watching his first movie, “Men in Black”, he crawled into Dave’s lap, not sure about the size of the creatures.
Do I sound like a proud momma. Wouldn’t you? He was picture-book beautiful, with soft blond hair, a heart-captivating smile and exuberance about every little daily thing.
One of my favourite pictures of him is lugging a watering can to the flower bed in the back yard. He was all into helping. Another is kicking a soccer ball to his Uncle Ted. There was no hesitation around chores – at least the fun ones, or playing with any shape of ball.
I wrote: His parents think he is amazing.
A friend brought her kid over to play from time to time. This kid, Jake, was a bit older and bigger. When they first spent time together, Yasik was shy and tried hard to impress Jake who was not impressed with this little kid with a slightly left of center eyeball and little intelligible English. Barely 2 months later, Yasik was not interested in trying to impress. He was confident that he knew how things worked, he was good at ball and bike (though I think he was still supported by training wheels and fearful of having them taken off). He was oblivious – he was just having fun, singing Russian songs while biking, full of happy confidence. When he fell or couldn’t quite handle something he didn’t quit; he tried again until he got it. Or told us that telephone pole was in the way and needed to be moved. He set Jake back on his heels a bit and soon they were partners in fun.
Bit by bit the songs he sang, while biking or in the van or on the couch, began to resemble a mix-mix language, like maybe Russlish. One song sounded like the Zeller’s Dollar Day ditty. Another he said he wrote was about a dinosaur, and must have been a dirge about the death of this dinosaur.
All of this was unrestrained imagination. One free weekend we took the ferry over to Lake Cowichan and while we are driving Dave noticed Yasik reaching out the window and grabbing handfuls of air and putting them in his mouth. At first shy to say what he was doing, he told Dave, “I can’t eat the sunshine. I am just pretending”.
Another time as I was urging him to brush his teeth, he came back with, “I don’t have to. I have a gun so I can shoot them”. He picked that up from some TV ad promising that their product could shoot down the monsters in kid’s mouths.
This is how we, his parents with love glazed eyes, saw our son. We must have communicated this quite successfully to the social worker. Her post-adoption reports said, Yasik “is a bright and good thinker. … His parents describe him as “compassionate, mischievous, direct”. He is curious about the world around him and is capable of being very focused and is very observant…[although] he is bossy and tries to get everything right… He likes to figure out how to do everything himself. At the beginning of a new activity, he stands to the side and observes. Once he decides to commit himself, he does it fully. He can at times dissolve in frustration when he cannot handle something difficult. We have noticed marked improvement in this area lately as he is learning to take a step back and try again to conquer the difficulty. He still tends to let friends take the lead, but from time to time asserts himself. He is quite capable of making independent decisions, despite the choices of his friends”.
It seemed to us that the report recognized Yasik at his core. Or because the report was merely the social worker’s write up of her interviews with Dave and I, we recognized Yasik at his core. But somewhere along the way between grade 1 and grade 2 that core was being tampered with as I will look at in the How post. That effect of that tampering shaved away at this core. Or forced it down deep in his being to somewhere he became steadily more and more reluctant to bring back out into the sunshine.
This change began with Dave and I and then settled into a constant with each year Yasik was in school.
Sally Shaywitz believes “that behind the success of every disabled child is a passionately committed, intensely engaged, and totally empowered parent”.[ii] As I have brought forward in earlier posts, I can’t confidently say we were up to any of those adverbs fronting such fierce adjectives.
We slipped immediately into the parenting roles we understood: providing a routine with regular eating and sleeping hours, school and play: tree forts, soccer, computer games and cartoons. We wasted little time getting on him for letters and numbers and getting him into piano lessons with short practice sessions at home. We watched videos together on the weekends and read each night, some for school and always as a bedtime routine.
He’d been in kindergarten only a month when we read a book with him called Bump, Bump, Bump; for us, bedtime reading was as much about helping Yasik learn to read as it was about easing him into sleepiness. I don’t remember what this book was about but likely it said very little more than ‘bump, bump, bump’. Our plan was for Yasik to repeat the words after us. He only wiggled and listened but wouldn’t read. Instead he asked for ‘confety’ (Russlish for candy?). We bargained, “OK, if you read with us”. And just like that we were bargaining, some might say bribing in exchange for reading. And what do you expect? It worked, so far so good.
Parents are not always quick to see that their child’s experience is slipping toward problematic for it happens often gradually and mixed in with all the gloriously normal parts of a day.[iii]
And Elizabeth Guthrie suggests that maybe that is a good thing, “probably the gift [parents give] was not being around enough what with work etc. to interfere more”. Besides which, “It is hard to gauge what is “normal” and what is less than normal within the confines of home and family life”[iv]. Convenient too, considering the demands of our daily life.
We thought we saw improvement in his printing, reading and piano. He even did some practice on his own and he seemed to like getting the music together, showing an interest in hearing and creating his own sounds and putting words into the songs sometimes.
There was a time Yasik and I were reading; at one point while he was reading, he looked up at me and gave me the most brilliantly sweet smile I have ever seen. It made me blink. Something about reading made him happy.
As many reading advice books suggest, children are most likely to be lured into reading when it offers them something they want to know. Yasik’s first ‘real’ reading was with the TV Guide. He was checking times for a movie called After the Silence and there really was one that came out in 1996 about a deaf and illiterate woman. He found the title, sounding it out and showing evident happiness with his success.
We, his parents who engaged with him for all the hours outside the five week-day hours at school, were not seeing any reason to be concerned about his progress in reading. And as Kelly Fradin says, “we also have a deep need for our children to be all right. … Sometimes it’s much easier to bury our heads in the sand and deny that there is a problem”[v]. I actually wrote at one point that life works better for me if it’s more black and white.
After all, we were doing what decent, loving parents do: provide as best they can for the physical, mental, emotional well-being of their children. The little school down by the community playground said we needed to sign Yasik up for school three weeks after he arrived in Canada as our son. We signed him up and lock stepped with all the neighbourhood parents in walking him to school each morning and picking him up afterward, armed with more homework than most of the kids in his classroom.
The change was gradual but with each passing year we were seeing that curious little charmer become weighted by something he certainly didn’t like or understand. And so the time came when we had to begin to recognize we too didn’t like what was happening nor did we understand it. As Naomi Fisher says, we were caught between Yasik’s unhappiness and our school system’s expectations for it was “the only answer”[vi], yet we slid into this struggle because ultimately we agreed with the school that it was ‘for the best’ even though both Dave and I had also experienced some level of difficulty navigating grade one. And now I wonder, best for whom, the school system, expectations we place on ourselves, or expectations of those around us?
But yes this is a question I temper with the ‘essential paradoxes’[vii] of life in our times.
From that first attempt to bargain with us for ‘confety’ to more and more frustrating tug-of-war engagements alternating between bribes and threats, we felt we are working in the dark, looking for a break through. Yasik, in turn alternating between snarky and sweet, needed our support, not our push, but we fervently believed he also needed to read. We tried competitions, made up stories, found games on the computer. I kept pushing piano practice to develop the love of music the orphanage staff had encouraged. Was it developing a love of piano?
One morning I was sitting with Yasik, pushing him to put in his 15 minutes of pre-school practice. He made some mistake playing Sweetly Sings The Donkey, and ended up pounding the keys, yelling “Stupid, Stupid, Stupid”. I wondered if that was the usual route to great music.
In our defense we weren’t all about expectation and push. We tried most of the ways we heard about to help. We considered enrolling him in a Waldorf school about an hour’s drive each morning and each afternoon. Yasik was on board because it offered learning through play. Dave took an intense Orten Gillingham training course to tutor Yasik. Dave spent 4-5 hours the night before each class prepping the lesson with games, exercises, rule-teaching cartoons to offer a lesson as multisensory as possible. Being the only male and the only non-teacher in the group there were times he felt so defeated that he cried all the way home. The silver lining perhaps was that it left him, not with a teaching certificate, but more sensitive to Yasik’s struggle. And most importantly Dave could tell Yasik with sincerity that the problem wasn’t his, but the tutor’s, if Yasik wasn’t getting it.
Dave helped Yasik finish a gingerbread house he didn’t finish for cooking class because a food fight ensued. Together they set up an internet site to try their hand at a business having something to do with paintball online. I tried to brush up on Algebra 9 to help Yasik work through it.
Joan Didion’s wry comment on parents helping with homework: “I said my own efforts to help Quintana with her homework- which were extensive- were probably in retrospect too based on taking it over, showing her how to do it rather than prompting her to discover herself how to do it”[viii].
Dave and I even resorted to prayer, lying in bed asking God to help us get an effective tutor, or maybe at that time any tutor. Pascal’s wager…
Nonetheless, slowly and steadily we were letting go: cancelled piano, didn’t sign up for soccer, actually switched to golf for the three of us. It worked for a bit. Paintball was a strong draw for a while too. One semester in the self-paced school he went to for grades 8 and 9, he tried to keep his report card from us, a report card that revealed some serious incompletes. We pulled a coming paintball tournament out of our dwindling arsenal of threats. He got right at working on some of the lesson packages. I noted at the time (optimistically?) ‘so with threats and bribes we limp along to maturity’. Elizabeth Guthrie would not agree, saying, “Reward effort, not results. Don’t punish poor marks”[ix].
As a student with learning challenges struggling against parents who believed nothing, and I mean nothing, was more important than a solid education, fighting about doing homework was a nightly ritual by now. Yasik probably had more homework than most students, certainly more than he ever wanted.
One night stood out. It started out as just another night with a flare up over getting homework done. Of course there was more than just the tired, after work, homework conflict at stake. We were in the midst of another threat of flooding. TV weather reports had us uptight about the North Allouette pouring down the road instead of flowing sensibly under the too narrow bridge at 224 St. and 232nd Ave. If Yasik was angry, we were tense too; none of our tempers would have been at Calm on the emotional dial.
My journal entry of the night does not detail the fight we engaged in but does note that Yasik was arguing to go paintballing or skiing and we are countering with a negotiation of homework first. The fight escalated. Yasik, who deeply, though sometimes selectively believed (you might read ‘stubbornly’ here) in justice, wasn’t giving in. He left the house. Did he grab a coat? Did he slam the cheaply made front door? The journal doesn’t say, but it is likely on that cold, wet night threatening a flood, he was jacketless. Going outside into a night that did not warmly embrace his anger probably gave him a slow down as well because apparently he went only as far as the front patio. A probation officer once noted that most runaways opt for warm summer nights.
The first time your kid does that, you stop a moment.
Dave clicked in first, pulling a jacket on and going out after him, thinking Yasik was running off somewhere more in line with a great teen drama of fiction than merely hiding out under the eaves. I guess when it is your first move into rebellion you don’t always work out a detailed plan. Yasik let his dad go off on a goose chase, slipping back in the house while Dave was out blindly checking up and down a rainy street boasting one lone streetlight on the corner.
Those of you who have a Bible-infused background may remember the verse in the gospel of Luke (my version) that goes, “Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart” referring to the unusual activities of her firstborn, Jesus. This was the piece of the evening I continued to ponder in my heart for a long time after: when Yasik came back into the house it was not with more fighting or cold slamming of doors. Instead Yasik came into our bedroom; I reached out to him and held him. While we stood there mute, me crying and shaken, Yasik said, “I always wanted to do that.” Whaaat?
We took Yasik out for dinner when he turned 21. We were hoping it would be an opportunity to seduce him into going back to school. He went direct on us, letting us know that he was his own boss, “Now I don’t have to learn anything anymore.”
[i] Google: Charles Bukowski Quotes. Charles Bukowski: A Little Book of Essential Quotes on… Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?
[ii] Shaywitz, Sally, M.D. and Jonathan Shaywitz, M.D. Overcoming Dyslexia, 2nd ed. Alfred A Knopf, 2020, 9
[iii] Fradin, Kelly, MD Advanced Parenting: advice for helping kids through diagnoses, differences, and mental health challenges Hachette Book Group, 2023 13, 14, 15
[iv] Guthrie, Elizabeth M.D. and Kathy Matthews The Trouble with Perfect: how parents can avoid the over-achievement trap and still raise successful children Harmony, 2002, 192
[v] Fradin, Kelly, MD Advanced Parenting: advice for helping kids through diagnoses, differences, and mental health challenges Hachette Book Group, 2023, 13, 14, 15
[vi] Fisher, Naomi A Different Way to Learn: neurodiversity and self-directed education Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2023, 36
[vii] Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in reading Random House, 2003, 86
[viii] Didion, Joan Notes To John Alfred A. Knopf, 2025, 134
[ix] Guthrie, Elizabeth M.D. and Kathy Matthews The Trouble with Perfect: how parents can avoid the over-achievement trap and still raise successful children Harmony, 2002, 180
