Chapter 42 Getting Educated

                                                      Chapter 41   Getting Educated

 During our son’s grade one class, though he appeared to be listening to the teacher, because of his daydreaming, she referred us to the guidance officer. He assured us that Ashley was a bright student who should, "be in the top three of any class he is ever in." 

     “He’s very good at maths, too,” he asserted.

    I'm afraid we took him literally, and expected our son to be in the top three of his class, and it was some years before we came to the realisation that it takes more than academic ability to achieve results.

    Unfortunately, we imposed unrealistic expectations on poor Ashley, and no matter what he did at school, it was never quite good enough for us. By the time he reached grade six though, we had read a wonderful book called 'Hide or Seek' by James Dobson, which taught us a lot about the need for a child's self-esteem. I have since given the book to our son who is now a father of three, (and I hope one day he reads it!)

    In grade two they were experimenting with an open class room. That meant there were two grades in the one big room separated only by a curtain. It was okay some times, but if one class was doing music, the other class might be doing maths, and any child with poor concentration had no chance of concentrating. In an effort to improve matters, his teacher sat Ashley at the front of the class where she could keep an eye on him. When she saw him daydreaming, she tapped on the desk in front of him, and pointed up to the blackboard. I was grateful for her assistance and understanding, but then we had another complication.

    Ashley developed night terrors. He woke in the middle of the night, calling out and crying in fear. Peter and I rushed into his room and tried to wake him, but we’d immediately become part of his mind picture.

     Taking me by the arm and pointing up, he’d say fearfully, "Up there, up there!  The board, the board!" Then his arm covered his face as if he was sheltering from the board crashing down on his head. Finally he woke, but almost immediately went back to sleep, and in the morning he had no memory of what had happened in the night. One night Peter and I were just drifting off to sleep about ten p.m., when we heard the front door shut. We jumped out of bed only to find our son returning from goodness knows where. The front door led down the stairs to the street. Without a word he got back into bed and immediately was asleep. Thank Heaven he only did that once (that we know of,) and we’ll never know where he went that night, if anywhere.

    In Grade Three things changed again. When I spoke to yet another young female teacher about his poor concentration, she brushed it aside, saying she hadn't noticed anything.  One day, worried by his poor home work performance, I drove to the school to speak to her again. When I got to the door of her classroom, I found the room in disarray. About half of the children were not at their desks, but were moving around the room in all directions, fooling and playing, while the teacher calmly stood at the board writing with the chalk. I was appalled! And Peter and I felt frustrated and angry by our son's lack of progress and the apparent disinterest of this teacher.

    We had been discussing the possibility of his attending the new Lutheran school in the area. So at the beginning of Grade Four we made the change, and the following year Stephanie started there as well in Grade One. The difference was staggering. If I drove up to the school during the day, everything was quiet and only the birds could be heard over in the bush. With the quiet and peace in the class room Ashley's work improved.

    I was so happy to have them both start there, because we’d encountered problems with Stephanie’s preschool year as well. At three she’d attended a beautiful kindergarten with two loving, nurturing teachers. But at the state preschool where the 4-year-olds went, I found the teacher treated the little ones harshly, and by the third week I had to drag my daughter in to the room as she cried and pulled back in fear. I was incensed. This was a little girl who had always been happy to get rid of me as fast as possible when she arrived at the door of the day-care centre or the kindergarten. I took her out of the preschool that day and was lucky to get a cancellation in her old private kindy preschool class. Stephanie has only pleasant memories of those first two years.

   Peter and I were so happy that she had a beautiful young teacher in Grade One at the Lutheran School who was simply born to teach little children.

    During Grade Three we took Ashley to a place in Brisbane called ANSUA, which stands for: A New Start for the Under Achiever. Specialising in children's development, they enrolled him in a two-year course. As a baby he had spent long hours in a walker and too much time propped in front of the television. This resulted in lack of tactile stimulation which babies spending more time on the floor get naturally. During his assessment with ANSUA they asked him to draw a person, and he drew a figure without hands. They explained that this was because he had a lack of sensation in his hands and so his brain was not aware that he had hands at all. 

    Every day before school we spent half an hour doing cross crawling exercises with him and other tactile things like stroking the palms of his hands and his arms with a paintbrush. At a later assessment he again drew a person and this time the person had hands and fingers. I was elated and cried with joy.

    We did see some improvement, though not a dramatic one,  in his academic results, but the move to the Lutheran School was wonderful. If I drove up to the school for any reason to approach the teachers, I noticed that all was quiet in the school class rooms. The children in Ashley's grade four and five classes sat quietly doing their lessons, undisturbed by noise from outside. His teachers patiently listened to my appeals for help and appeared to fully understand his concentration problem and did their best to keep him engaged with the work. His behaviour also improved. The teachers were encouraging, praising him when he produced good results.
          
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    Meanwhile at the ambulance centre things had changed. Two years before, Peter had become very restless and dissatisfied with his life and this led to depression and what we refer to now as his midlife crisis. The family all attended Laurie Power’s chiropractic clinic, and because of knowledge I’d gained, when the children had minor infections or colds, I now restrained myself from taking them to the medical doctor for antibiotics, and I learned to be cautious about handing out analgesics, like aspirin and baby Panadol. For ear ache we used onion juice, which settled the pain and infection quickly. I was learning so much about good nutrition and good health practices generally. 

    Laurie used Kinetics and I sent a hair sample to a laboratory in the USA for testing of heavy metals, pesticides etc, which showed I had an excess of mercury, cadmium, and lead in my body, to name a few, and the pesticide arsenic. Dad had used arsenic on the farm to bait dingoes, and I'd broken thermometers when nursing, inadvertently releasing the mercury. I had also messed about with mercury in the laboratory during my high school days. I'd found it fascinating, watching little balls of silver roll together to form one big blob. It would be some time after that before I learned that anything on the skin is quickly absorbed into the bloodstream, including pesticides, petrochemicals and heavy metals.

    At a clinic visit to Laurie one day I told him about Peter's depression, and his advice was to go downstairs to the bookshop and buy a book called Passages by Gayle Sheehy.                 

    In the Lioness Club we often conducted lamington drives to raise money for charity. We made the lamingtons by ordering large slabs of plain cake from a bakery, cutting it into squares about 3" x 3," dipping the squares into a liquid chocolate mixture which we made from cocoa, water and sugar, then rolling them in coconut. When the lamingtons were ready we packaged them into half dozen lots ready for sale. The whole process took a few hours.

     Just at this time, the Lioness Club was having one of its lamington drives, and I called in to assist on the way home. By the time I had delivered some orders, collected the children from school, and returned to the ambulance, most of the day had passed. As I backed into our car space behind the ambulance centre, Peter came out from his office and exploded in anger because I’d had the car away for so long and he required the tools from the boot. 

    Silently I returned upstairs. I'd had a big day and I burst into tears, throwing the book down on the kitchen bench and forgetting about it.

    When her father returned upstairs, four year old Stephanie remarked indignantly, "Daddy, you spoiled our day. You made Mummy cry!" This had the effect of deflating his anger balloon. 

    He came into the kitchen, picked up the book from the bench top and asked, "Did you buy this for me?"  His remorse was touching.

    The book turned out to be life changing for him, and as he read he frequently  remarked, "This is just like me!  This is just how I feel!”

    I had been accepted to do my Child Health training in Brisbane, beginning in August of 1982, but before I started training I had to submit a medical certificate. A word in the ear of my trusty chiropractor friend pointed me in the direction of a trusty medical doctor.

    After a thorough examination he asked, "Is there any reason why you can't do this training? You look very fit to me.”

     I answered, “I can’t wait to get started.”    

    Towards the end of 1982 Peter got a job in the Ambulance State Council. A new job was enough to change his outlook on life. I felt it was the hand of God. The State Council was the government body which controlled the running and finances of the ambulance for all the centres of Queensland. He would commence the job as assistent secretary in February of 1983.

    My course ran for six months and I lived in Brisbane, mostly with Peter's mother, while I underwent the training and exams for Child Health. We didn't have a second car so I rode a pushbike to work, unless I could get a lift in a car with one of the other students. That meant a warmer ride to work as it was August and I was cold on the bike. Not only that, but the other students treated me like a bit of an eccentric when I was riding the bike, shaking their heads and smiling benignly.

    The six months course would be completed in January of 1983, and until I was officially finished training I was determined my MS would not interfere. No one in our class knew about it, but I stuck closely to my diet and again attracted curiosity because of my eccentric ways. Nevertheless I was healthy and felt well throughout the course.   

    The hardest thing of all was missing the children and Peter. When I had a couple of days off I caught a Skenners’ coach back home. Those trips were the longest two hours I've ever endured. I’d ache to get there, pondering the passing scenery to pass the time, but when we reached the last town  half an hour from home, there was a half hour stop to relieve the madness of the poor addicted smokers. It drove me insane...so near and yet so far! And then the final phenomenon had to be endured before the bus at last pulled out to continue. The smokers out on the footpath deeply inhaled one long, last, sucking breath and as the coach wheels rolled forward, they rushed to stamp out the butts and leap onto the steps of the coach, exhaling as they scrambled for their seats, giving us all a second-hand sample of their addiction.

    On days off I used the time to study for the exams, as well as catch up with things at home. I walked the beach alone, not seeing the beauty, but trying to memorise information about vitamins--where was vitamin E found and what foods contained iron etc. And I memorised commercial formulas,  cows’ milk formula recipes, and how to calculate the calories a baby needed per kilogram body weight per day. It felt overwhelming...so many years since I had studied for an exam!

    As far as possible during my training I stuck closely to the diet, but one day during a toddler clinic, I had to run the gauntlet of the female doctor’s disapproval of my tendency to use honey instead of sugar. 

    I tried to explain about the advantages of raw honey over sugar but she cut me off curtly saying, "Makes no difference!  Makes no difference! It’s still sugar." So I gave up and kept my knowledge to myself from then on.

    When I was within only days of sitting for the final exams my anxiety levels reached a new high. I couldn't eat, but at meal times just drank camomile tea, the only thing that would settle the butterflies in my stomach. The 'system' gave us a pass or fail, no 'in-betweens', and as they used the Bell-curve for marking, there were always two or three unfortunates who failed. Thank God I passed. It hadn't been easy. Because I was 37 I was one of the oldest in the class and before I finished the training some of the more senior staff made it quite clear they thought I was too old for the job. I foolishly let it out that it had been 10 years since I did any nursing and they made derogatory remarks in my hearing about that too.

    I was embarrassed and self-conscious, partly about my age, but also, having to keep quiet about my medical condition. I always felt like an impostor. I tried to keep a low profile in regard to the diet, to attract as little attention as possible. It only worked to a degree. 

    Girls often said, shaking their heads in disbelief, "What do you eat that stuff for?"  Or, "You’re funny..... the things you eat!"

    Or even worse, "Oh yuk!  How can you eat that?"