EH

I leave the morning meeting at my son’s school feeling oddly relieved and even happy. My son’s team and I have just agreed that in spite of their Herculean efforts at integrating my son into kindergarten, it is now time to consider a smaller setting. A quieter, calmer place, with other kids like him. We have all just agreed to move my son into a special ed classroom.
As I sit in my tiny cubicle at work that day, a strange fuzziness fills my head. An idea, a memory, is trying to force its way to my consciousness, but I cannot allow it, because my department is busy and I need to work. My day though is almost completely wasted. I cannot think about applications and audits. I cannot focus on anything. My mind keeps pushing aside this thought demanding to be acknowledged. My happiness is leeching from me slowly and by the time I put on my coat to leave work I no longer feel any happiness or relief. I am simply exhausted.
It isn’t until I climb into my car and put my key in the ignition that I allow this thought to slide into the opening where it becomes tangible to me. There, sitting in the parking lot as the sun slides below the nearby freeway, I burst into tears. I realize now what I have done. I have failed my son in the worst way. I allowed something to happen that I had vowed I would never allow. I have made my son an EH kid.
Over thirty years ago I went to an elementary school built on prime real estate half a block from the beach. Our school was special, but not only because of its close proximity to the ocean. It was also special because it took in special needs children from all over the school district. Most of us kids walked to school, but some kids arrived on short yellow busses which drove in from other parts of the city. These were the EH kids. Most of the local kids were under the impression that EH stood for “Extra Help”, but my mother had explained to my brothers and me that it actually stood for “educationally handicapped”. The busses would pull up, and we children would stand and stare openly. We gawked at the kids who climbed off those busses. We wanted to see what made them different. We scrutinized them without mercy.
We called them the “EH’ers.” They were endlessly fascinating to us. Most of them looked just like us, but we knew that they were different. They sometimes talked funny or walked funny, or made strange noises in the back of their throat. They were kept apart from us in their own classroom. Even at lunch and recess they were kept together in a small group and watched over by their own teacher, while we other kids had the run of the playground. We were repulsed and thrilled at the same time by their presence whenever they were brought out.
It was an unspoken rule that none of us could be friends with an EH’er. We knew that their taint would rub off on us if we were seen talking to them. They were social pariahs, and even though none of them actually looked scary, we avoided them whenever we came across them anywhere in the school.
For a short while a neighborhood child was one of the EH’ers - a mentally slow boy named Doug who was sweet but had a terrible temper and would get instantly violent for no apparent reason. Outside of school we neighborhood kids all played together , but even though I played with Doug for hours at a time all summer long, I would not speak to him at school. I knew the consequences of associating with those kids, even if one was a friend.
In middle school the group of EH’ers was broken up and the children were, I am guessing, sent back to their respective school zones. The small group who followed us to middle school were placed in ordinary classrooms. The adults who made the decision to simply toss these kids in with the general population apparently assumed that they would blend into this larger setting amongst mostly kids who did not know them, and that they would then be accepted. But those of us who had been in their elementary school simply could not leave them be. We quickly spread the word about their old EH status and once again they ended up marginalized and rejected by the rest of the kids. They could not escape their stigma.
It must have been miserable for them. I look back at how cruel we were to those kids and marvel at how easy it is for children to destroy each other without a second thought. I think of their parents, feeling sad and helpless because they had probably been told by the school that their kids would be just fine, that nobody would know they had been in a special classroom. When their children came home and told them of our cruelty, the parents must have been devastated.
Many of the EH‘ers eventually left our middle school. My hope is that their parents forced the school district to place these children in schools that did not have us kids - the ones who knew. I hope these kids found someplace where their pasts could be left behind, and they could simply be regular kids.
Now I am the mother of a special needs child. When we got the diagnosis for our 4-year-old son, I was forced to confront the child I had been. Cruel. Prejudiced. Judgmental. If someone was different, we all turned our back on him. I didn’t even feel bad about it. It never occurred to me that these children might be lonely, or hurting, or sad. I never wondered if they cried at home because they had no friends. This was how small my life was. This was how pinched and small my heart was.
Children have changed. Everyone has assured me of that. Children are so much more accepting now of children who are “different”. So many more children are integrated and the other kids are used to having these special needs children around. Teachers are teaching their students that each child is unique and that “disabled” is just another descriptor, like “left handed” or “tall”.
I hope and pray that this is true. I worry that my sins will come back to haunt my child and break his heart. If someday my son ends up back in a “normal’ classroom, I hope the cruel, pinched-hearted children aren’t there to tell those who don’t know about him. I hope that other kids can talk to him without being shunned by their classmates. I really hope everything is different now, for my son’s sake. This is too much for someone like me to ask for, I know.