Superstar

I'm not a very good liar. So when Carly asks me a question point blank, I find a way to answer honestly. This means many of our discussions take me by surprise. True, from the time she was little I've been informing and preparing her, and anything I've left out she learns about at the skate park. But being equipped with hormones is not the same as being equipped with brains, and Carly and I talk a lot about the difference.

Carly has broached topics with Eliot too. She has been fending off his light sabers, nerf guns, or simply his appendages which make good weapons, from the time he could walk. And in a fit of frustration one day she burst out with a new nickname: “Disability brother!”

I sucked in air and looked at Eliot. He had that glimmer in his eye, what Blue calls Dr. Evil.

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t contemplated it before. When he visited the Bay School for the first time, he studied the student self-portraits framed and hanging near the entryway. “Who’s that?” he said, pointing to one, and I read the student’s name. “Does he have a disability?” he asked, and I said yes. We went through this several times, and he never asked the next question, but I could see the wheels turning: Why am *I* here?

My gut tells me if we leave room for a bit of mystery our children will ask the hard questions when they are ready. And Carly has always been relieved to hear the answers. So it was that Eliot seemed to relish his latest nickname, Disability Brother. Probably he figured it would get him out of doing his homework or taking out the compost.

That would explain the lyrics I heard him add to an original song:

“I’m in the grocery store
I don’t know what I’m doing,
Where’s my wife.”

Of course Carly has called him worse, and I come down on her for that. The skate-park may have helped raise our daughter, but I don’t want our special needs child walking around using the F word. Still, even as a die-hard Obama fan, I know the African proverb Hillary Clinton brought to light is true, that it takes a village to raise a child. A lot of people in our community have had a direct hand in shaping Eliot, and what they do I first noticed with his teacher Robin: they love the kids, give them their dignity, and maintain a sense of humor. What these mostly young adults possess, though, that allows them to succeed in the face of behaviors like Eliot’s is much simpler; it is not their gift so much as a willingness.

Eliot has no idea how to relate to the peers he so desperately wants as friends, and adults, I have come to realize, are more easily able to relate to him and facilitate his interactions with other people. He feels safe with these adults, especially the heads of Kid Quest Colleen and Nichole, who provided stability and consistency when his school life was all over the map.

Another critical adult is James, who works with Balance4Kids and is Eliot’s guitar teacher. Seeing Eliot’s resistance to learning chords, James takes a back-door approach to lessons, jamming with Eliot to build calluses and finger strength. Occasionally he slips in a suggestion like, “Dude, I want to see you play one of your power chords during this song.” One afternoon after countless hour-long ear-splitting jam sessions, Eliot hit a power cord and held it through one whole song with James. At the end of the song his teacher erupted: “I have to give you a hug because I heard your power chord and it sounded really good.” James floated out of our house that day.

Eliot may be short on chords but he has all the moves of a rock star. Plus he can sing. He puts on Carly’s Crème, Hendrix, and Sublime cd’s and sings into the microphone for hours. Once in the waiting room of the dentist’s office, while other children listened quietly to their mothers reading tooth fairy books, Eliot sang at the top of his voice, “Those were the days, my friend, I thought they’d never end!”

And when he got tired of that, “NaNUH nanaNUHna NUHna, Tequila!”

But Blue’s and my favorite was Eliot’s refrain during the Bay School’s one week of summer vacation: “School’s OUT for Summer! School’s OUT for EVER!”

Poor kid, we thought, he’s going back next week, but by Sunday he was excited about returning to school.

A few weeks later we took Carly and Eliot to the musical Jesus Christ Superstar at Cabrillo College. There was nothing a museum or play could teach Carly, and she was feigning sleep, but each time she closed her eyes I slapped her leg with the program. Eliot, on the other hand, was riveted. When Jesus was dying he kept asking in a loud voice, ”Is he taking a long time to die?” and “Is he dead yet?” This made me think he might be ready for the opera.

"How did Superstar die?” he asked the next day. I posed the question back to him, and he said, “By drinking the Jesus drink.”

I was about to say no when I realized that in the profound sense it was true. “You’re right,” I said. Besides, in the musical version of the last supper the twelve disciples fell asleep drunk from wine and were lying all over the stage. So you could see how Eliot would come to the conclusion that Superstar died from the Jesus drink.

I decided to leave it at that. Sometimes preserving the mystery is the way to go.