I should be at school. I shouldn’t have selfishly taken the bike out at 5:15 to ride thirty-four miles because I already missed a day due to weather. Instead I should have slept in a bit, gotten the girls up, taken them to school myself. But in truth, I just couldn’t face that and everything else. I needed the ride to listen to a book, to think about someone else’s problems, fake or not, worse off than me.

Instead of meandering the middle school hallways, I sign her out of the class she can’t sit still in and drive across town. We sign in and wait. I have ample time to stare at the walls: mismatched pictures in plastic, falling-apart frames, a fairy scene in one, a child’s teary face in another. A bulletin board with peeling paper posters. Walls that are scuffed and chipped. Chairs that are so worn down and bally they appear to have been donated to this office by some up-and-coming doctor twenty years ago. Behind the receptionists’ desk, four-drawer filing cabinets so overflowing they are stacked on top with excess folders. An overweight man and his two chunky children check out and discuss Medicaid co-pays for labs with the over-the-counter-hair-dyed receptionist who wears a faded set of Broncos scrubs in the middle of April.

I can’t fit this day, or the last two weeks, the last eight years, into a poem.

I could be in seventh grade social studies right now, telling students the important information they need to add to their Chinese time lines. I watch Isabella swing her legs back and forth, jump from chair to chair as frequently as the plump toddler who just walked in with her seven-year-old sister and not-more-than-twenty-two-year-old mom, and I think, Wow, I bet no one I work with would ever be caught dead in this office. And I think, I bet no one I work with has anything less than perfect children (I’ve heard all their stories of reading-by-four, good-citizenship awards, best-ever on the basketball team).

Fifteen minutes tick by. We pay our five dollar co-pay. I hand her a battered bill that looks like the mental hell I’ve put myself through over the past two weeks. When we are finally called into the office, the nurse assistant writes down in ten words all I can say at this time about my daughter. It is not enough. Nothing will ever be enough.

The PA comes in, tall and thin as a stalk of beans, questioning my motivation. “Anyone else in the family have this problem? This tends to run in the family–to be hereditary.” Of course it does. I think back to my fearful days in the classroom, my head on the desk, my nose in a book, my lips sealed for fear of punitive action from the adults surrounding me. I weakly mention that my husband got held back in second grade, that his parents never took him to a doctor.

Were they wrong, or am I?

She tells me about the forms I already knew she would give me. I get the process, I want to say. I’m a teacher. I deal with kids like this every day. But I don’t. She’s got a screaming two-month-old, a snot-faced toddler, and fifty other patients on her list. I know. I get it. I take the papers and nod, shuffle Isabella into the hall, into the car, back to school.

She asks, “If there’s something going on in my brain, are they going to take it out?” Rephrasing my explanation of why we came in here today. “No, Isabella, of course not. If they took out your brain, you would die. It controls your whole body. They might give you medicine that you have to take every day.”
“Oh, OK, I was wondering about that,” and she finishes her lunch, silent for once.

We step in her school, tiptoe to her class. She hovers in the hallway, hesitant as a kindergartner on the first day of school. But she’s in second grade, I think. She shouldn’t hesitate, she should be fine. And that’s when I realize that everything about her, every twisted way I see her in my eyes, cannot be explained from my perspective.

My perspective is that she’s been in trouble twice within five days of school. That she had a note on her report card first quarter about excessive talking. That we took away her favorite things for twelve days and she had no visceral reaction to punishment. That when she was two and a half and sitting in time out, she couldn’t sit still for two minutes. For thirty seconds. For ten. That when she was three, she couldn’t either. Or four, or five. That she has to be told ten times to do any task we ask her to do. That she won’t read a book, not because she’s incapable, but because she can’t stop moving long enough to focus. That I think she has ADHD. That I feel like a failure as a parent because my child won’t listen to me. That I have considered spanking her because nothing. Else. Works.

I clutch the forms in my hand, place them in the passenger’s seat. I could leave them there, a scapegoat that I don’t have to follow through on. Or, I could go down to the basement and unravel the trash bags full of every special item that I’ve taken that belongs to her, blaming her “illness” for her behavior. What will it be? The truth? Or the scapegoat?

I drive to my school, unable to answer.