Dirty Chick Read Free Page B

which meant we usually kept her in a cute little pixie cut.
    Our daughter was both sweet and relentless in equal measure. “Mama?” she’d ask, “can I have a juice? Mama, can I have a snack?” Then, once she’d been fed and watered, the real questions began. “Mama, when a crocodile would bite me, would you get a gun and dead him?”
    â€œOf course,” I’d say, “of course I would.” Then I’d pop anotherantidepressant, pour a second glass of wine, and dream about moving to the country.
    Five years into our life in New Zealand, we finally did it. And Silas was the reason.
    Until we became parents, Peter and I both had led the sort of devil-may-care lives where a normal thing, at thirty, was to get on a sailboat and go cruising for a few years. Neither of us was rich, but we were both from comfortable middle-class families whose parents had paid for our educations and thought everything we did was wonderful. Majoring in English and History? “How marvelous!” Backpacking through Central America? “Oh, how rugged!” Working a shitty job in retail to help pay the bills? “What madcap adventures you’re collecting for your novel someday.”
    We’d always been lucky, with the sort of privileged confidence typical of our middle-class, American lives. From the day we met, Peter and I were best friends, compatible in everything, from our taste for good food and travel to sex. We didn’t need anyone.
    And then we had Silas. When your kid is born disabled, you need. You need help navigating the labyrinth of public services available, from medical treatments to therapies. You need help deciding which interventions to pursue, which might be useful and which will just bankrupt you and disappoint. You need counseling, antidepressants, and wine.
    Correction: you probably don’t need any of those things. I did. And do. And most of all, what I needed was to know that people in the world would accept my son. For that, we needed a community.
    So, I guess, in the end, my brother was wrong. The boat doesn’t always bounce back upright. Once we learned what was wrong with Silas, we didn’t want to head out to sea. We wanted to come to shore.
    When it was time for Silas to start school, I knew he wasn’tready. His language was rudimentary, and he hated holding a pencil. On the other hand, I knew he was intelligent. He had a spark in his eyes, and when he got his first preschool computer game, he picked up the rules very quickly. He might never think like the rest of us, and the signals in his brain misfire, so his language might never be fluent, but I knew he could learn.
    Regular school would have eaten him alive. I visited a few of them, watching crowds of first-graders tear nimbly across the pavement, and it was clear my son would have been left in the dust. So I ground up my courage to visit our local special-needs school. The New Zealand education system prefers to mainstream kids with learning difficulties, so the students in special school have only the most serious problems. These are the kids in wheelchairs, the ones you glance at in the grocery store and then quickly look away. I tried to keep an open mind, but when one of the students leaned out of her wheelchair to start chewing on her teacher’s skirt, I knew it wasn’t the right place for Silas.
    Then we found a tiny community west of Whangarei called Purua, in the northern part of the North Island. The immediate draw was the one-room schoolhouse, with just fifteen kids enrolled. It had a vegetable garden, a beehive, and a worm farm. The school was right next to a kiwi bird sanctuary, and when a new egg hatched, the bird keepers called up the school so the kids could come pet the baby kiwi. It was a full New Zealand fantasy, minus the hobbits and elves. When I first visited Purua School, among the rolling green hills of Northland, children greeted me at the door with