And Zen What

So I asked Five to read some Braille books for me--he was at loose ends and he always ends up getting into trouble when that happens. His school doesn't have uncontracted Braille books in its library so I found a bunch online (Seedlings) and ordered them. (Grownup Braille has umpteen zillion contractions in it--contractions for common words and for common letter combinations helps speed up the reading process and lower the tonnage of the average Braille book.)

He moaned. He groaned. He held the pages up flat on his face to try to read the tiny print over each line.

So we had the Braille Conversation again.

He staunchly maintains that Braille is harder than print reading and that he doesn't like it and doesn't need it. His teacher last year treated it like a pain in the you-know, making a big deal out of having to put Braille over the print in the first grade curriculum reading items--you know, the ones with the 6 inch font. She doesn't know Braille herself as it turns out (go figure--she works in a school for the blind), and we often caught errors in her transcriptions.

I decided the gloves had to come off.

"When you are a grown-up you will need to have a job, and you will want it to be interesting. You will also need a job that will pay you enough to have clothes and food and a good place to live. If you don't have a job, or if you have one that doesn't pay enough money, you might not have those things. And you can't get a job that will help you have a nice place to live and enough clothes and food with being able to read. And Braille is how you will be reading when you are a grownup and have to read grownup stuff."

While I was talking I felt like the Wicked Witch of the West (or is it the East? I'm directionally challenged). He's only 7 years old for crying out loud.

Then he said it: "When I are big, I will read with my eyes."

Oh boy. Having decided to take the gloves off, I was committed now and had to continue.

"No, no you won't. Your eyes will not be able to read little teeny grownup print. You will have to read with your fingers."

He set his jaw, lowered his eyebrows, and shoved his Braille book off the table.

You see, he's really pissed about all this. Who can blame him? And anger, deep down impacted anger, has actually been helpful to him in some ways. It's made him push himself socially, for instance. He was painfully shy as a toddler, apparently. When he noticed, somewhere around 3 years of age, that that wasn't helping much, he worked on himself and turned himself into a glad-hander, a volunteerer, a hyper-conversationalist.

Sometimes anger is a good thing. I understand that.

But that doesn't help me. Because this time it's not a good thing. And it's my job to make sure he's not living under a bridge when he's 30. So, my stomach in knots, I grabbed a big fat tome off the bookshelf, handed it to him and told him to read the letters on the first line.

He couldn't do it of course.

Sometimes you have to be an axe murderer if you want to do right by your kids.