Thursday was Charlie's last day of summer school. In past years, this has been a moment when I've felt my anxiety meter going up. While everyone else seems to be talking about "making the most of the summer," I've worried about how Charlie will fare without the structure and routine of school. Even though Extended School Year (ESY) is only a half a day (and, in our town, for four days a week instead of five), it's still school with, indeed, structure and routine. And now here is August looming ahead with hot days and hours and hours to fill. And then this summer got off to a tumultuous start. Charlie's last days of school in June saw a stream of incident reports sent home and then we got the message from the school district that they thought Charlie should no longer be a student in his current middle school. (Looking at it another way: Charlie was in effect being expelled from his current school.)

Here it is the 8th of August and things have been pretty much peaceful-easy feeling.

That's a phrase Jim started using a couple of years ago when Charlie's (and, consequently, our) anxiety level was ratcheting up. Charlie himself says the phrase now, sometimes with a secret smile (and still without the "l" in feeling---articulation and clarity of speech remain a work in progress around here). Just saying the phrase when things are not so peaceful-easy feeling doesn't make the pressure drop but I like the ideas embodied in the phrase. It's not about being "calm" or "quiet," words that have often been said to Charlie and that may well have unpleasant associations now to him (really, how do you feel when someone says to you "will you please just calm down, now"?). 

Friday we all slept in. We'd gotten up extra-early for the previous two days as the school district had scheduled a speech evaluation for Charlie before school (and informed us that our presence would "tamper with the results"---I'll leave discussion of that for another post when I'm not celebrating the peaceful-easy-feelingness in this household). Saturday (today!) we leave for the beach for our annual two-week vacation in the same beach house we've rented for five years. So Friday was Get Ready day, as in making sure that got our mail held, went to the pharmacy, cleaned out the refrigerator, did a couple of loads of laundry, paid bills, started packing (started because we always seem to do something at the last minute; I also think that something about having a stationwagon makes us more prone to just keep throwing things in). And Jim had to prepare for his appearance last night on WNBC. He's got one copy of his new book and so, our household being our household (there's a lot of stacks of books and papers in every possible place), a small goal was to make sure we didn't lose track of the book so Jim could show it on the air.

Through all this, Charlie was, yes, peaceful easy-feeling. He got up before us and got himself dressed. He spent a good deal of the day with his iPod on, some watching YouTube (while I ran to and from the post office in 10 minutes flat). He had his usual bike ride with Jim and almost missed being barked at by the white dog who seems to have made it his sole purpose in life to bark at passing bicyclists. The dog was asleep when Jim rode by but then woke up and starting barking. The dog’s behind an electric fence but it’s the barking that troubles Charlie, who froze; Jim turned around and they went down a different street. Once home, Charlie rummaged in the refrigerator and helped himself to soy ice cream and put the carton back without eating the whole thing. We went to the supermarket and I talked him into getting a smaller watermelon than he had his eyes on. It was a very nice Friday.

Especially notable was that (so far) Charlie’s anxiety meter has not gone up several levels. In past years, he’d be a nervous wreck, saying “beach house no beach house” over and over and crying, weeping, and more. Last year, for the first hours at the beach house, Charlie cried and yelled “no beach house” non-stop and Jim and I wondered if it would be the first year we weren’t going to be able to stay. This past week he was, well, peaceful-easy feeling.

As for why Charlie’s been having that feeling. Sure, a new combination of medicine has helped a great deal. But most of all I think our attentiveness (not attention, attentiveness) to him and his ways of communicating and being, and our respect for these, have meant a lot. He’s still had some “behaviors” at school (though none as intense and extreme as he was having earlier this year) and the one thing that’s different at home is that attentiveness.

And I found myself looking forward to all of August, while reminding myself---as classes at Saint Peter's College start the Wednesday we come back from the beach---I'd better not get too much into this relaxing thing.