My kid broke
A year in which a global pandemic was the highlight, will forever be known as a bad year. This, my friends, has been a bad year.
in February 2020, the school year began. It started well enough, with one child in year 9, one in year 3 and the other in year 2. Oh yes, it started well enough. And then, on the fourth day of term 1, something happened. I don’t know what happened. I only know that my eight-year-old son came home from school crying, fell asleep whimpering and woke up on Friday refusing to go to school.
I’m not talking about a “I’d rather be playing Mario Cart” school refusal. I’m talking about an “If you send me back into that fucking hell hole I’ll die” school refusal. It was extreme and it was dramatic. He cried himself to sleep every night. Every. Single. Night. He woke up crying. He screamed and cried as he was wrestled into his school uniform. He screamed and cried in the car, kicking my seat and threatening the unthinkable. He screamed and cried when we arrived at school, pinning himself into the back seat of the car and refusing to move. I carried this child into school over my shoulder, under my arm, dragged along the floor. I got him there, but at what cost? I’ll tell you the fucking cost. It nearly cost us everything. My mental health, his mental health, our family, our marriage, my friends, my job (already on shaky ground), my general will to live.
It broke us.
The difficult thing to recount about this period is the lack of help that was offered. The sense of abandonment was acute and crippling. When Frankie had a panic attack and vomited at the prospect of entering his classroom, no one helped us. No one looked after him. No one looked after me. No, that’s not true. Other mums took care of me; they consoled me and hugged me when they saw me leaving Frankie’s classroom wobbly-kneed and tear-streaked. No one looked after Frankie. I begged them to look after him, but they didn’t. An older female teacher advised him sagely that “big boys don’t cry”, accused me of being the primary cause of the problem and promptly scarred him for life.
I don’t say this lightly.
Frankie’s trauma is so profound that our psychiatrist and psychologist – working in tandem over the last six months – believe that we’re wasting our time trying to work through it. Instead, we’re working around it. That’s a big call for a psych, but there you have it.
I can safely say – without exaggeration or dramatisation – that this was the worst period of my life. This was no monkey funk; this was hell.
A particular highlight from this period was my public humiliation in the school mums’ Facebook Group. Ahhh, memories. Ahhh, Facebook. Ahhh, school mums. For every kind-hearted hugger there’s a brutal, hardcore bitch with a camera phone. On this particular occasion, the brutal, hardcore bitch was targeting BAD PARKING. Which is a good and constructive use of your time when you have no fucking life to speak of. Now, I dislike bad parking as much as the next person (by which I mean, I can move on from it quite easily), but I believe that one should find out the circumstances behind each parking misdemeanour before one publicly names and publicly shames the parking violator. FOR INSTANCE, on this particular occasion, I parked in something of a wonky fashion in order to, kind of, throw Frankie into his class. He was hysterical; I was desperate – I didn’t know WHAT ELSE TO DO. The brutal school mum knew what to do, though! She knew! Rather than help a poor, broken bitch out, she instead snapped a photo, posted it in the school mums’ Facebook Group and accused the wonky parker (me) of PUTTING CHILDREN’S LIVES IN DANGER. Oh, fuck offfffffff. I’d parked in a bit of a wonky fashion; I hadn’t driven over a toddler and used a teenager as a fucking loading ramp.
And I’ll tell you, there’s nothing a gaggle of bored school mothers love more than endangered children. They really get their teeth into that shit. Fuck. Those. Mothers. Fuck them. Until you’ve peeled a child out of a car’s footwell, while they simultaneously kick you in the face with one sock on, you can stick your sanctimonious parking up your middle-class Audi arse.
Frankie’s final day at school was on March 20. I documented this day. It was a bad day. After I was banned from the classroom (“We believe, Mrs Shearon, that the problem lies with you, entirely), Frankie was dragged in by a teacher, whom he promptly kicked. Another teacher – her cruel sister-in-arms – took me to one side and patronisingly told me that the kicked teacher would have “one heck of a bruise!” and while it certainly wasn’t my fault, it certainly was my fault. If she’d looked at me closely, she’d have seen that she was patronising an empty shell of a human. There was nothing left to patronise. I’d vacated, checked out, LEFT THE BUILDING, which was abundantly clear when the school office lady rang to tell me I’d forgotten to pack Frankie’s lunch a couple of hours later. Of course I fucking had; I’d forgotten my own name by this point.
Think it can’t get any worse than forgetting your child’s lunch? Well, I’ll take you your forgotten lunch and raise you a forgotten child. Two, in fact. That’s right. I forgot to pick the children up from school.
That’s not entirely correct. I thought Paul was picking them up. Paul thought I was picking them up. We arrived at Frankie’s shit psychologist appointment separately that afternoon and said, simultaneously, ARE THE KIDS IN THE CAR, which, obviously, they weren’t, because they were both still at school, weeping.
Ain’t nothing a traumatised kid needs more than being abandoned at school on a Friday afternoon.
Ah fuck, that was a bad day. We rescued Frankie and he immediately announced that he wouldn’t be returning to school on Monday. He kicked my car seat and made me cry. Mucho tears later, I tried to run away from home myself, except I forgot to open the garage door when I reversed out, in a bid for freedom.
As I said, that was a bad day.
On Sunday, Paul, Frankie and I went for a walk along the coastal path. We tried to talk to Frankie about school; at the mere mention of the word he collapsed on the path and howled into the mid-morning sky. Thus, we decided to temporarily end Frankie’s primary-school career.
The relief was immediate and profound – for Frankie and for us. Conveniently, a global pandemic took hold at around this same time, so I had a legitimate reason to work from home and look after the kid; it was only a couple of weeks later that the two other kids were sent home from school, and life under lockdown began.
I feel a little sheepish to admit that what was a living hell for some was an isolated slice of heaven cake for me. As a socially awkward introvert, I’d been practising for this shit my whole life. The kids got on my nerves, yes, certainly, but they got on my nerves when they were going to school every day, so it didn’t make a great deal of difference. I didn’t bother with the home-schooling thing; frankly, they learnt all they needed to know from School of Rock and besides, I had bread to bake.
This lasted – what was it? Two months, three months? The days merged from one socially distanced week into the next and the real world (remember that prick?) began to blur, until in June – or could’ve just as easily as been July – we got the news: school’s back, work’s back, time to face the shit you’d so neatly swept under the carpet a solid 12 weeks ago. It was at this point that I was forced to face up to the mess that had been made of my little boy. And god, what a mess he was. I thought it would be funny, once, to mimic a school siren to indicate that lunch was ready. The kid cowered and cried like a fucking grenade had gone off. Alice had to be taken to and picked up from a school by a charitable friend, because Frankie couldn’t pass within 100m of the place. I’m not making this shit up. We couldn’t even drop Alice off at kiss ‘n’ ride without Frankie hyperventilating on the back seat. Activities that Frankie used to do with ease became torturous – we made the mistake of going to Latitude (a jumping, climbing place) during the school holidays and Frankie crumbled. He gripped my arm and whimpered, “I used to be able to do this.” He couldn’t anymore. We had to leave. It was the same story over and over again, to the point that I wondered if Frankie would ever leave my side again. He followed me everywhere and panicked when I was out of sight, even when I was hanging out the fucking washing. It was suffocating.
And then, the inevitable: after four solid months at home, Frankie forgot how to properly human and slowly morphed into a small, wild, jungle creature who wouldn’t get a haircut and ate with his hands. When his hair covered his face, Paul took the scissors to it, resulting in a jungle mullet. Appalled, I attempted to match the back to the front, giving my poor child a jungle bowl cut. Put him in a bucket hat and give him a maraca and he wouldn’t have looked at all out of place in the Happy Mondays, circa early 1990s. He looked a fool, and that was the least of our worries.
Bear in mind, too, that I was supposed to be working at this point. I’d picked up more classes at the gym and was meant to be in the office as well, but it was almost impossible to juggle. Mum and dad picked up the pieces where they could, but I couldn’t ask them to become full-time home schoolers while I pranced about at the gym. I took Frankie to work with me (one more black mark against my name) and tried to balance a small child, gainful employment and a colleague who followed him around to correct his use of the shared toilet facilities.
It was at this point that we – as a family – hit breaking point. A peculiar and debilitating type of despair descends when there is no end in sight … and there was no end in sight. We didn’t know what to do. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t write. I’d written my way through adolescence and first love and heartbreak and everything in-between, but – this time – I couldn’t write a fucking word. I think, perhaps, I was terrified of what would tumble out of my aching brain if I opened the trapdoor. So, I didn’t. Instead, I read books and I ran miles. I lost myself in other people’s lives through books and podcasts. That was my therapy. That got me through – reading, running and 5.15am F45 classes.
Finally and eventually, a small army of well-meaning, well-paid individuals joined us in the battle to get Frankie back to school. The school’s associate principal stepped in, along with the school psychologist, plus the school psychologist’s boss. One could reasonably ask where these people were when Frankie was having a panic attack at the door to his classroom, but it became a moot point – when they were finally called to action, they did so admirably. Joining these soldiers on the battlefront were a heaven-sent psychiatrist and psychologist, who I really do remain forever indebted to. It should be noted that it was not the same psychologist to whom we fronted up to on that Friday afternoon missing a crucial component of the appointment (the child); we dumped her after four sessions, after which she’d seen and spoken to Frankie for a grand total of three minutes. That’s three minutes across four sessions, mind you, at $200 a pop. Fuck that psychologist. In desperation, I’d returned to our GP, who recommended us to a colleague in Subiaco. This guy – THIS FUCKING GUY – turned out to be the king of all psychiatrists. His psychologist – a lady he works alongside – is the queen of all psychologists. They fixed Frankie. I mean, Frankie fixed Frankie, ultimately, but they played a big part. So did Paul and I. And the associate principal. It was a team effort. We are all fucking excellent.
Spoiler alert: there’s a happy ending.
It took weeks, but there’s a happy ending.
We went slowly. Very, very slowly, beginning with a re-introduction to the school (part of the desensitization process, I’m told), then building up to dropping Alice off and picking her up. Then, short sessions with a kindly EA, far, far away from his old class and his old teacher. Then – the big guns. The school agreed to change Frankie’s class and his teacher. One week was set aside for Frankie to build a relationship with his two new job-sharing teachers. An EA was brought in, just for Frankie, just for the second week. He wore his own clothes – the uniform still obviously meant something bigger to him, and he couldn’t go there. He went to school for an hour, then two, then until recess. All on his own terms. Then he stayed for a full day and the next day, “Yeah, I’ll wear my uniform today.” No bribery, no bargaining, no bullshit. All on Frankie’s terms. It had to be.
Along the way, we were completely honest and upfront with Frankie. That was a mistake we’d made right back at the beginning of this bullshit; blurring the edges of the truth and sugar-coating lies hadn’t done us any fucking favours. Whereas once we’d waved our arms about and muttered about turnips in answer to the direct question: “Are you going to make me go back to school?” we now answered frankly and directly: “Yes mate, we are.” To his screams of, “I’d rather die!” we stayed calm and replied: “It’s not going to be like last time.” To his pronouncement that he couldn’t do it, we said, “Not yet, but you will. You will be able to do it.”
And there we are. Here we are. Frankie’s been back at school for close to a term now and he skips in, every day. He’s okay. Which leaves two questions: could we have avoided the events of 2020, and should we have handled the situation differently? The answer, of course, is yes to both, which is precisely the reason I’m writing this down, as I’m well aware that Frankie is by no means the only child to have ever had a mental breakdown, and Paul and I are certainly not the only parents to have been left floored and broken by their child’s fragility.
So, friends, know this: if your child suddenly and inexplicably breaks, then you are not alone. You are not the first parents to have an inexplicably broken child, and you will not be the last. Don’t try and stick your kid back together with band-aids and lollypops; this is a problem that is beyond your capabilities and bribery. Get the proper help, from the proper people, and never stop fighting for your kid. Look after your own mental health and your own physical health (that one’s important). Remember: it will end; quite suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, it will end. You’ve got to hold on to that. That, and biscuits.