Joie de Vivre
Applying to nursery schools in New York City is a little like applying to college, complete with essays. I was required to write a personal statement about Hayden’s strengths and weaknesses and what he wanted to be when he grew up.
I had signed Skye up at a French nursery school, because Hawa spoke French. Since Hayden was a late talker, I had enrolled him in speech therapy, and I was told that speaking another language would be a disaster for him with the speech challenges he already had. So that narrowed the field of possible schools, and he had to go on interviews and staged playdates where he would be scrutinized. So did I.
“We signed you up for nursery school in a church basement,” my dad said when I told him about the impending process.
“There is nothing like that in New York City,” I told him.
“You’re losing your grip on normalcy.”
Hayden hit his New York City interviews with the strange stubborn quality that characterized his very existence. Even though every nursery school educator tried to wrangle my son, Hayden’s life force could not be tamed. I wanted to explain to those teachers about the spot on my lung, and my risk in having Hayden. They didn’t care—they were only assessing my son as a potential risk to their venerable institutions. What exactly happens in a two-year-old’s interview is a closely guarded secret, but I will tell you. And I will also tell you that each interview seemed to be about finding the same thing, using different methods: a well-behaved child who followed rules.
At the first school, let’s call it the “happy” school, Hayden and I went upstairs to a smallish, dark rectangular room in a church. This school’s philosophy was about “play” so a collection of toys was laid out in the middle of the room, and a group of children were all allowed to “play” with the toys. Now, I am not a child psychologist, but I can tell you that most kids I know are not good at sharing toys, especially new ones. So maybe this was a subterfuge type of exercise to see how the kids negotiated the conflict of having to share those toys. But the teachers were so nice and earnest that it didn’t seem like that was actually their intention.
I sensed the disaster about to strike in the room. Hayden walked right by the toys and over to a door in a wall. I had no idea where he was going but next thing I knew the lovely teacher Patty was over Hayden’s shoulder. “No, Hayden. We are not opening the doors today.” That was all it took for Hayden to try turning the door knob harder and harder until he gave up and noticed that right next to the door there was another door and another. Hayden had to try to open every door. Of course every door was locked, and of course every time Hayden was told not to open the door, he ignored Patty and tried to open another. Patty was so kind and gentle, putting her hand on Hayden’s wrist while he was turning the knob. “Hayden. We’re all playing with toys. We’re not opening the doors.” Hayden still tried to open every single door. I think there were twelve. By the eleventh I was about to burst out crying.
I started fantasizing about the kind of kid I wanted. The kind of kid that I would have if I were a better mother, if I had better parenting skills and DNA. I wanted a child who followed the rules. The other kids were so content playing with the toys in the middle of the room. There was a cash register with a drawer that opened, with fake money inside, and an airplane and blocks. After Hayden tried the last door, he turned and looked at me, slightly mischievous. I said, “Honey, let’s go play with the toys.”
I had been diagnosing Hayden with every door turn. Maybe he had ADD. Maybe he had oppositional defiant disorder. Maybe he had issues with authority. Maybe I was overreacting, but his next behavior concerned me, and no doubt Patty, even more.
Hayden lunged for the airplane that some other little boy was making go “Wheeee!” really fast. There was almost a midair collision. Patty tried to intercept Hayden and explain sharing, but Hayden took this as a reason to start pushing the cash register buttons, making the cash drawer open, while another girl already was trying to close the drawer. It was clear that Hayden couldn’t share.
When I related the scene at the nursery school to Tyler, who was anxiously awaiting my call to report in, he asked, “Why couldn’t you control him more?” It was tempting to blame my children’s flaws on my husband, but he wanted to blame them on me.
I was dreading the next interview and I had a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. It should have been the dream I’d longed for: to be back in a pretty nursery school classroom with my second child. All the little chairs were arranged in a horseshoe around the teacher at story time. All the adorable little boys and girls were sitting around the circle clinging like Velcro to every word the teacher read. Lots of oohs and aahs and occasionally a sweet interruption with a very polite hand-raise to ask the teacher a question about the storyline, which demonstrated intelligence and poise. But there was an interruption. A child had dragged his chair away from the horseshoe and was standing on it, while the other kids were still straining to hear the story. The child garbled something crazy and totally indecipherable and pumped his little fist up for emphasis.
I knew that he was trying to scream “To infinity and beyond!” and channel Buzz Lightyear. Hayden was Buzz for Halloween. He was in speech therapy twice a week and it wasn’t really working. Yep, that was my boy. While the other mommies congratulated their kids on how well they’d behaved at their nursery school interviews, I was left with a sense of hopelessness. I could feel myself losing my gratitude for my little miracle guy, and with it, any sense of perspective.
The next interview was even more daunting. I had lectured Hayden about not opening doors, but that was the least of my worries. The very proper headmistress greeted us in the lobby and we were put into groups of two kids (and moms). Hayden and I were assigned to a young boy with a button-down shirt tucked in, who shook hands with the headmistress. Even worse, he greeted her in Italian. “My son speaks Italian, Spanish, and French. He’s a bit rusty on his English so I’ll help translate if he gets confused. We are speaking Italian today.” The headmistress seemed impressed. Hayden was now in speech therapy three times a week.
The headmistress went to greet Hayden with a handshake and Hayden shook! Phew! He seemed to be imitating the boy he was with, and I was so relieved. I longed for my son to be more like this boy; even a tucked-in shirt would make me so happy. When we entered the classroom, the other boy went straight to the kitchen area. He did a quick survey and started speaking rapidly in Italian to his mother. “He wants to know if there is a butter knife,” his mom translated to the headmistress. “He wants to make you fresh pasta. We cook together all the time.”
Mamma mia! Hayden was crashing pots and pans together and had taken a butcher-size plastic knife and was chopping everything in sight, including the counter and the pan and his fingers. A butter knife? Next thing the other kid did was take some of the Styrofoam fruits and vegetables and arrange them in a bowl. I was sure the mommy was going to explain that they only ate organic produce, because the little boy was holding up an orange and saying something very quickly again in his perfectly accented Italian. Hayden had put completely inappropriate things into his pot to pretend-boil. One was a large fake container of orange juice.
The mommy was laughing hysterically and took the Styrofoam orange to show the teacher that Hayden had taken a real bite. “My son only drinks fresh-squeezed.” The boy put away his toys and almost bowed to thank the headmistress on the way out. I was crushed.
I wanted a kid who uses a butter knife and makes me fresh pasta. I knew I could never trade Hayden—to me he was so perfect. But couldn’t he just behave a little bit more?
The next interview was at a synagogue, and I was hoping my prayers would be answered in this place of worship. I was anxious, because frankly the whole interview process was dredging up something very strange inside me. I started dwelling on every interview I had ever had, and my dreams at night began with, “Tell me about yourself.” I remember reading advice that if anyone asks you about a flaw, turn it into a positive. Like, “I tend to be very perfectionistic, so that can be a problem.” Interviews are a lot like first dates. Fake and wrong, everyone pretending to be the best at everything and every small social interaction feeling awkward and magnified. Like the time I unwittingly wore perfume to the office of my future boss, who had an extreme migraine reaction to fragrance.
I always tried to be a pleaser in interviews and I usually succeeded. I remember one interviewer almost hired me on the spot after he asked about my waitressing experience. “The customer is always right,” I said, an overt assurance that I would never challenge him if he hired me. I longed for approval, the pat on the head, the ribbon.
Again, at this synagogue interview, toys were put on a rug in the middle of the room, and this time the kids were instructed to play with those toys, which had been selected for them. All the other children walked over to the rug, sat down and picked a toy, and started playing. My son started scoping the joint. He walked over to a shelf in the corner of the classroom and found exactly what he was looking for: He hauled down the biggest toy he could find. It was an airplane with an entire airport, including a tower, people, and a runway. After watching Hayden drag three more oversize toys off the shelves, I sat down on one of the little wooden chairs, shaking. Why can’t he just pretend he’s normal for these interviews? I thought to myself, willing myself not to cry in the classroom.
I knew how wrong this was. I should see only his joie de vivre. I needed to live in the real world, which included nursery school interviews. I had to find the bridge between the mystical and the mundane. I wanted to remember the weeks of my cancer treatments when every day of living felt like a triumph and life didn’t get in the way. So what if Hayden didn’t get into nursery school? I should have my priorities straight.
After Ms. Weingarten at the synagogue gave me a look that seemed to say, “Didn’t your mother ever teach you how to follow rules?” I tried to apologize.
“Hayden is a really good sharer. He just seems a little tired today.”
“Did he miss his nap?” Ms. Weingarten was looking for a reason for this appalling behavior. I felt like she was trying to help me cheat. “We’ll just let him play with the toy he’s taken out,” she said. “But, Hayden, it’s almost time for snack. We’re going to sing the cleanup song together first.
“Clean up, clean up, everybody everywhere. Clean up, clean up, everybody does his share.”
I was singing the cleanup song, but Hayden wasn’t. All the other kids were singing, in tune, like precious little windup robots perfectly going about the plan. As the sounds of “clean up” hung in the air, Hayden started dragging more toys to the middle of the room. He never made it to the table for snack time. Snack time unfolded in slow-motion horror. The graham crackers were distributed and every child managed to say “thank you.” The kids even had napkins on their laps. They chewed with their mouths closed. They said the magic word when they wanted more juice.
“Please, Hayden! Please go have a snack! PleAaaaaaaaSe!”
The “please” I was saying was desperate, foul smelling. A beg instead of a plea. It stunk of I’m-about-to-lose-my-shit-help-me and didn’t sound polite. I must have said “please” a little too rudely because a mommy in the corner stared at me. At first it was a judgment stare, like a those-shoes-don’t-go-with-your-outfit stare, and I felt so embarrassed. I didn’t have the wrong shoes! I had the wrong kid! I wanted the kid who was smiling back at his mommy and carefully cleaning the crumbs from his place at the table so as not to dirty the floor.
Then the mom’s look became pity. She was smug, until she noticed what Hayden did next—then her look changed to shock. He ran over to the table, grabbed a graham cracker, and went back to playing with his own huge airport in the middle of the room.
The interviews continued, and my already-fragile self-esteem was about to shatter. I think it was Jackie Kennedy who said that if you bungle your kids, then you haven’t done anything right. I tried to keep my game face on when Hayden went over to a dollhouse and made the people fly out the windows. First the babies flew out. “Wheeeeeee!” Hayden thought it was hilarious. Then the daddy doll flew out. Then the mommy went headfirst. If this was play therapy, then Hayden had just killed his entire family in about ten seconds. The other child playing with him said something like, “Don’t make the mommy jump out the window!” And in the softest, most reassuring tone I could find, I suggested to Hayden that maybe they should just walk out the door instead, and I reminded him that we had window guards for babies in our apartment and people can get hurt flailing themselves out of windows. But I had lost him. It was the door! Damn it, why had I brought up the door? Hayden turned and sprinted out the door of the interview classroom. He was running down the hallway, fast, top speed, to a slide he had spied when we’d walked past another room on our way to the interview. Panting, I chased Hayden down the hall into the slide room. Hayden had climbed up and was whizzing down. “Mommy! WheeEeeeeeEeee!”
“Hayden, get off of that! We’re not supposed to be in here.”
The next thing I heard was screaming. The entire class had followed Hayden out of the room, Pied Piper–style. The kids were in line to get on the slide. They were screaming so loudly that other kids in other interviews heard them and ran out of their rooms and also tried to get on the slide. Hayden was a Pied Piper of pandemonium. Finally the school director ran in and blew her whistle. “Who started this? Get back to the classrooms! Now!”
I prayed again. This time I prayed for Hayden not to raise his hand. I had become more religious as a result of these interviews. Hayden refused to leave the slide. I finally enticed him to go back into the other classroom by suggesting that he throw more people out the window of the dollhouse. At the end of the day, on the way out of that classroom, parents were asked to sign pictures of their kids with their names, so the teachers could remember who the children were, and presumably how they behaved. I rushed by and didn’t sign the photo of Hayden. Ms. Weingarten followed me into the hallway to ask if I had signed.
“Don’t worry. I’ll remember Hayden. Exactly.”
I could only imagine what her notes would say about him: Ran out of the room and caused major disruptive episode. Bad influence on otherwise orderly kids. Threw people out the window of the house.
“I’m so sorry about my son’s behavior. I feel awful that I can’t control him.”
She gave me a sort of puzzled look.
“And my husband blames me for that. At the park Tyler looks around and sees all these well-behaved kids waiting on line for a turn at the slide. . . . When we’re in restaurants Hayden is under the table, but the kid next to us has his napkin on his lap, eating his chicken nuggets with a fork and knife. . . .” I shouldn’t be confessing my son’s weaknesses to the woman about to evaluate his fitness for nursery school.
“Don’t worry. We look for all kinds of kids to make up our classroom. Your kid . . .” She started to whisper.
Mentally I filled in the blanks: Is an example of bad parenting. Needs Ritalin. Will never get into our school.
She looked over at Hayden. He had taken a baby doll away from the fake washing station and was standing her under the real faucet. It looked like he was drowning the baby, holding her upside down.
“Your kid has a CEO personality.”
I personally don’t know any CEOs, but I remember reading lots of articles in Fortune magazine about the “type.” I remember words like “risk taker.” “Leader.” “Visionary.” I pictured Hayden in a tie, behind his desk, leaning back in his chair. My little Mr. CEO.
I hugged the teacher.
When the envelopes arrived, Hayden had gotten into every nursery school except one: the school where the interview had gone so well and Hayden had said “please” and “thank you.” The school where the director liked him so much that she gave him a Spider-Man toy. Go figure. The school where he threw the people out the window was upset because we decided to send him somewhere else. I actually felt like I was letting them down by saying that we had selected another school.
We decided to send Hayden to the one school that spent time with the parents, not the kids. When we met with the director, she said, “Tell me about yourselves.” Oh, crap, another interview. Tyler jumped in: “My wife had breast cancer.” It seemed odd, because he was usually in denial about the C word, but now he was playing the Cancer Card. He knew it would work because he’d used it when we applied for our co-op, and it got us past the board.
The director leaned forward across her desk. “I like you. You’ve had a bump in the road.”
· · · ·
Hayden continued to have challenges: He was in speech therapy and occupational therapy, and eventually—in kindergarten—he was diagnosed with dyslexia. I found it painful that Hayden had to practice and practice the things that came so naturally to other kids. He faced rejection again in the kindergarten interview process, but by that point I was sort of over the whole thing. After one particularly bad kindergarten interview, Hayden came out and started cursing in the taxi. “Cwap! Cwap!”
“Hayden, what happened?”
“I couldn’t dwaw a twiangle.”
I thought about the last time I had to draw a triangle at my job. Drawing a triangle might be a bit overrated. When I opened the rejection letters, I mumbled to myself, “Your loss. My kid has a CEO personality. So what if he can’t draw a twiangle.” Hayden was an out-of-the-box thinker, as many dyslexics are, and they are disproportionately CEOs and entrepreneurs. That teacher had been right about my boy. Her genius was in recognizing Hayden’s.
Hayden had speech therapy three times a week, and I tried to go to show support. The therapy sessions were long, and I was often asked to sit on the floor and participate.
“Hayden, we’re going to practice the letter ‘R.’ Let’s think of some things we can eat and drink that have the letter ‘R,’” the therapist said.
“MaRgaRita?” Hayden looked so impressed with himself and his eyes twinkled the same way they had during his disastrous interviews. He knew that this word was not a word most kids practiced in speech therapy. He was trying to show off, despite his issues. Maybe all those nursery school interviews were cwap and Hayden was right. He had just been trying to have fun and play, and that is what two-year-olds should do.
So how did my two-and-a-half-year-old know what a margarita was? I was clearly drinking too much. I was terrified he might ask the speech therapist if she wanted sugar or salt. Before I could explain that we ate Mexican food a lot and that it was his dad who was the big margarita lover, his speech therapist added, “RRRRRRum.”
“RRRRReally?” I cracked up.
I want normal cells in my lung and breast. But who wants a “normal” kid? Hayden was in my life to remind me to keep wonder alive. He was a gift to me, to help me always remember how sacred my present life was and always to find the joy in any situation. Hayden was pure life force, barreling at me and nursery school rules, reminding me to live harder. I would not be undone by nursery school interviews after surviving cancer. No bad interview would ever take away the joy of his life and mine.
During my cancer treatments I kept a quote from Winston Churchill near me. It was printed on a magnetized card, and it said, “Never, never, never give up.” But did Winston Churchill ever worry as much as I did?