Why Do They Keep Hurting Me?

(TRIGGER WARNING: SCHOOL ABUSE/DISABLED ABUSE) 

Trigger warning: This posting contains federally legal incidents of socially accepted emotional, mental, and physical abuse of disabled children. Please proceed with caution or do not read.

As I ran as fast as my numbed legs would carry me to the front of the school, I burst through the front doors, eyes wide, limbs heavy, with deep-seated terror of what might’ve happened this time. I pushed the buzzer. The sheer terror mixed with an intimidating ferocity on my hardened face must’ve been evident, because within no time at all the secretary buzzed me through without question. A woman intercepted me.

“He’s down here today,” she began and trailed off into her usual routine of telling me just exactly what my son had done wrong today, but I wasn’t listening. How could she possibly expect me to listen when all I can hear are the horrifying screams of my baby from hundreds of feet down the hall?

A bright, funny, and friendly little pumpkin, my baby boy had just celebrated his eighth birthday. You’ll never meet a child with a bigger heart, more sensitive soul, and deep desire to love with fervor those around him. Shortly after his sixth birthday, after several years of noticing unusual incidents and prominent quirky behaviors, we found out he had Autism Spectrum Disorder and ADHD. Recognizing my role as his mother, I spent the next several years attending advocacy workshops, pouring over disability laws, learning how to be a better advocate and parent for my boy. By his eighth birthday, we’d been around the block a few times with what to expect from his diagnosis and the struggles he’d face, and I understood my role as supportive and loving parent. What we were not informed of through any of our experiences or any of my training was what we should expect from the world regarding the treatment of autistics and the otherwise disabled – even in spaces that are supposed to be safe for children. 

As my heart leapt into my chest the closer we became to his screams, I felt nauseated. How could I let my baby feel this way? Why do they keep doing this to him? Can’t they see that everything they’re doing is putting him into distress instead of relieving it? We came to a doorway where the shrill shrieking was at its loudest, ringing throughout the air. That’s where I first saw him, struggling to free himself from the restraint of a female teacher with a male teacher sitting to the side, looking on. Neither of them had an ounce of compassion on their faces, rather they seemed to be annoyed to have to be there. Meanwhile, my baby’s face was swollen, red from all the crying he’d been doing. His eyes were bloodshot and afraid, his twisted face mimicking that of a cornered animal facing its certain demise. 

“He’s wet, he will need some clothes,” someone said. 

“Let him go,” I say in a professional voice. 

As my baby continues to struggle, he finally sees me. After making eye contact, he screams in relief, “MOMMY! MY MOMMY!” and crumples onto the floor, going limp. The woman restraining him continues to pull at his limbs, so he begins to thrash a bit, sobbing and repeating, “Mommy!” The woman’s eyes are glassy as she glares at me intensely. 

“He’s all wet,” she says. “He urinated on himself,” she says matter-of-factly. 

“Let him go,” I say this time in a low, growling, today-is-not-the-day-to-fuck-with-me tone. 

The woman begrudgingly releases him. With a quickness I’d rarely seen from him, he ran over to my knees and collapsed again, clasping onto them, tightly hugging me like a toddler who clings to their mother’s legs for comfort. I attempted to kneel down but he was holding me so tightly I couldn’t bend my legs. 

“Baby, let’s go to the bathroom and get you cleaned up, okay? I love you,” I say, attempting to lure him out of this horrid air that’s tainted with apathy. 

He loosens his grip a bit as I reassure him that he is alright now. I take his hand and we walk slowly to the hallway bathroom. At this point, the screaming has ceased but the tears are still streaming down his puffy, soft face. It takes everything inside me to not cry alongside him. If I cry, I will be vulnerable to attack. If I cry, I just might never stop. If I cry, I cannot hold onto the survival persona that’s kept me fighting and alive for so long. He needs survival mode momma, not wallowing in her own guilt momma. The cutting sorrow begins to take shape in the form of my most empowering emotion these days; rage. Burning hot, seething rage. It begins to bubble to the surface, but I quell it and remind myself that it is not the time. ‘Right now, above all else, this baby needs love and compassion and you’re the only one who can give it to him.’

I guide him into the faculty restroom and begin helping him strip off his urine soaked clothes. He’s lucid, but not saying much. How could he after just being accosted by people he’s supposed to be able to trust? I remind myself that at least it wasn’t as bad as last week. 

Last week, he’d been locked in seclusion, as he was earlier that same week, and three times the week before that, and three times a week before that. School started only five weeks prior. I remember on the first day of second grade being terrified inside, but I was so hopeful he would have a happy first day like other kids his age. He did not get the same luxury those children did to have a happy or even a dull first day. 

Last week, he was secluded and it was the worst episode of them all. Seclusion, for many of you out there who are unaware, is a legal practice in the United States where a child, supposedly for his own safety and the safety of others, is locked in a small, empty room, usually the size of a walk-in closet. It has no windows, no chairs, no toys, nothing. Sometimes the walls are padded, similar to the cells of old mental institutions. Sometimes, they are not. In which case, they’re cold, hard concrete, reminiscent of a prison cell. 

The law requires that a child be secluded for no longer than a period of two minutes at a time. What it doesn’t specify is how long one can consecutively seclude a child in back-to-back sessions. Some days they would seclude him for only ten to fifteen minutes. Some days, it would be more like forty-five. That’s if I were to believe that the school is being forthcoming about the seclusions, as the parent must solely rely on the school’s judgement and record keeping system for an exact estimation. After hearing what you’ve heard so far, would you trust this school to tell you the honest truth about your child?

The day he was last secluded was the hardest. By the time I arrived, the adults in the room looked defeated. Not concerned or vigilant or even aware, just defeated, as though the only thing in the room worth comforting were their own egos. I’m sure I was talked too, but the words don’t matter; it was what I saw that I’ll never be allowed to forget. I peaked into the small, square window sitting atop what looked like a closet door to see my child laying completely naked, drenched in urine on the cold tiled floor. He had no blanket, no sensory items; nothing. The only thing that lay next to him were his sopping wet clothes and his recently chewed on shoes. As I watched in horror, attempting to comprehend what I was seeing, he caught my gaze. He stood up and screamed, cackling like a madman. He began spinning, flailing his limbs and clawing at the walls. This kind of maniacal laughter made my skin crawl and my body hairs stand on end, because I knew this wasn’t my son. This was someone who had dissociated from their body, their mind, leaving only their rollercoaster of emotions and pain behind. This was trauma incarnate. I recognized it because I had lived it. I wasn’t watching my sweet baby boy, I was watching his real-time trauma at the wheel. 

That day ended at 10:45am with my husband carrying my cold, urine soaked baby out of the seclusion room, completely limp and despondent. I tried to tell him goodbye as I stayed behind to deal with the aftermath, but he simply stared right through me, unaware of my presence. I saw nothing in his eyes, they were just cold, dead. I never felt more scared than in that moment, wondering if my sweet boy would ever come back home to his body, back home to me. I couldn’t blame him if he didn’t and I know if it were me, I wouldn’t want to if I thought this torture was all life had to offer.

Back in the bathroom, my mind was replaying the episodes of last week and the week before, as I attempted to assure myself that this was at least a step in the right direction, a step away from seeing those cold, dead child-eyes again. After he was cleaned up and we were getting the last of his dry clothing on, a solitary tear rolled down my boy’s cheek as he spoke, “Why do they keep hurting me, mommy?” Gutted, I choked on my own breath. It was an inquiry filled with genuine confusion, waiting to know if the abuse he was experiencing was at his own hands through the decisions he was making or at the hands of someone else. In that moment, I broke in two. A terrible clenching overwhelmed my throat as if someone began to choke me as I fought back a flood of tears. The next choice I would make would set the tone for the rest of my son’s life. If he thought these situations happened due to his decisions, he might think that the terror of these last five weeks was his fault, and that somehow he deserved it. If he were experiencing abuse at the hands of trusted individuals sworn to keep him safe, he may never trust anyone again. In the back of my mind I worried too that if I admitted I’d made a mistake by keeping him in school this long after everything that had happened, I would be a bad mother. Not just a bad mother, but a mother unworthy of his love. Without hesitation I looked him directly in the eyes and responded, “Baby, don’t worry because they’re never going to hurt you again. I won’t let them ever hurt you again.” Instantly we both felt relief at my decision as I finally stopped fighting my intuition which had been telling me to end this after the very first incident during the first week of school. Risking the destruction of his trust in humanity was the only viable option, for I would certainly not teach him to betray his own.

As we packed up our things and finished up, I wanted him to have all the time he needed in the quiet restroom to compose himself where no one would be allowed to bother him. Standing there, waiting with him, I wondered to myself, ‘How did I ever let it get this far?’ I blamed myself for weeks, months, after this incident. It’s taken me til today, as I write this, to recognize and let it sink in that this wasn’t my fault, that I was only making the best decisions for my child that I knew how at the time. However, I’ve spent many, many days pondering how I remained blind to the abuses of my son for so long. It took me forever to even go against the grain of others and acknowledge that they were, in fact, abuses. Understanding why is key to keeping it from ever happening to him, or hopefully now that you’re aware, any other child ever again. I realized after spending a significant amount of time replaying the moments in my mind over and again, researching, and listening to others with disabilities, that it’s easy to see how things ended this way.

No one tells you after your child receives a diagnosis that along the way, professionals and educators will brainwash you into losing your humanity. Generally, these professionals, civil servants, educators, and public health officials have no directly malicious intentions, rather they’re woefully undereducated and significantly misinformed. Our society as a whole values education over lived experience, a professional opinion over the stories and lives of the disabled themselves. Practitioners are groomed in their schooling to believe that their cause is noble because their intentions are good, and science is the end all be all. To ease their own discomfort of the realities of inequity surrounding them and their ‘noble’ professions once practicing in the real world, they hide behind the pretenses of technical medical jargon and the old adage of the spectrum of acceptability, ie., everyone else is doing it so it’s okay for me to do it also. Instead of listening to patients, listening to the disabled and the parents of the disabled, they fall back on their training which was shaped by a society that ultimately promotes ableism and discourages true equity for all. So many parents I’ve met in parental support groups put up with far worse than I did because everyone said it was the best way. Who should be the deciders of the ‘best way’? After discussing it with many of them it was evident they were all experiencing trauma through gaslighting that is guised as the practice of medicine or the institution of education. Several of their children scarred, maybe forever, at the hands of institutions sworn to first do no harm. Children growing up to become terrified, withdrawn adults with poor self-esteem, only knowing life as the place for pain. Sadly, many parents don’t have other options due to poverty, racial inequity, or some other imbalance born at the hands of our compassionless, capitalist world – but I did. 

Knowing that I had the opportunity to change the status quo gave me a sense of hope and purpose I thought had long passed, and that’s ultimately half of the reason I kept fighting for the right of public education. The other half was that deep down, I believed that a place with other children his own age and the ability to flourish with others, to gain that connection he’d so longed for would be what was best for my son. A tiny part of me also couldn’t believe that a little, four-star, country bumpkin school could actually hurt its children. I was wrong. 

None of this happened overnight, whether that be good or bad, but the school knew my son’s needs right from the beginning. Over the summer, we had our first IEP meeting to get everyone up to speed. The first meeting went well, but as we attended subsequent meetings, they always went further and further south. After five emergency meetings lasting multiple hours, I thought I’d made my position clear. Our advocate came to each meeting and provided medical documentation, as well as her opinion as a social worker who worked with disabled children regularly. I produced a comprehensive plan for my son, thousands of pages of paperwork, recommendations, data from previous schools, medical documentation, and more to no avail. Our situation was handled through every proper channel available to us with no progress. Each time we were promised progress when really all we got were empty accolades for being good parents and more phone calls about our son’s disruptive, problematic behavior. 

In the end, he and I exited the restroom that day feeling a bit lighter knowing that from now on neither of us had to face the wretchedness of this place again, but we weren’t home-free yet. As we began our journey to the front of the building, my son was confronted by the teacher who had restrained him. 

“Hey buddy, you need to come clean up the mess you made in the classroom now. Let’s go,” she said like a drill sergeant. Keep your cool, I thought to myself, knowing that the seething rage bubbling over within me was waiting for only the slightest opportunity to explode.

“I am supportive of him helping clean up, but I think now is the wrong time,” I say through clenched teeth as politely as possible. 

The fearful boy stops in between me and the teacher as though he’s a deer caught in headlights. Three educators are in the hallway at this time standing, waiting for the woman to respond. Before anyone can say a word, my son bolts for the front door of the school, terrified that if he doesn’t escape now, he never will. No one even attempts to chase after him. I yell his name and when it’s apparent he’s not going to stop, I run after him. He makes it to the lobby before I scream his name loudly. The sheer volume of my voice jars him enough to turn around and he sees me holding up an iPad. He stops. 

“If you’ll sit here on this bench with me, I’ll let you have a few minutes to play a game on the iPad,” I say coercively. Impulsively, he grabs the iPad and begins to play before even having time to make a formal decision. I recognize this as a need to mentally escape his physical need to escape, as he’s still not certain he’s safe. A teacher comes to the lobby and dryly asks if he’s alright. I reply that he is and she escorts us back to the room to get the rest of my son’s belongings. 

While I’m gathering my son’s things, my son sits playing a game on the futon in the classroom. The woman who was restraining him before appears in the doorway. This time, she’s incensed and I can feel her stare from across the room. Little does she know that a rage of my own is lying for her in wait. Not knowing she is indeed the prey in this predator-prey scenario, she starts in. Many years of experiencing my own trauma have taught me the precise moment when unleashing the searing anger is most effective. 

Blathering on like a long-winded village idiot, the so-called educator begins her lecture to me on good education and what it looks like by indicating to me that she has over twenty years of experience in the field and that her bootcamp approach to education really works. I gently remind her that maybe her aggressive, authoritarian approach isn’t the best for the ages of children she teaches, which is ages six to twelve. Scoffing at my singular comment, she suggests that I wouldn’t know, not being a teacher myself. Although true, I cooly remind her I’ve got much intimate experience raising an autistic child full-time, the most common demographic of her classroom.

“Well, I can tell you one thing – in my classroom, your son wouldn’t get a reward by playing iPad after tearing up a classroom and acting out that way! He’d be cleaning up this room. Now get him up, let’s go bud!” she exclaims.

Oh, here it is, the opening for my now overabundant rage. I don’t want to just humiliate her, I want to decimate her. Resisting the temptation to clock her and turn this scenario into a one-and-done situation, I respond in kind. 

“Firstly, I told you to back off before because I could tell my son wasn’t regulated. If you were a good educator, as a you claim to be, you’d know that before you can work with a child they must be in a state of regulation, meaning that before you can begin working with them they must feel in control and safe,” I begin, the rage beginning to drive the bus that is my reeling body and mind, “Secondly, if you were doing your job in providing FAPE, which is a free appropriate public education as mandated by the federal government, I wouldn’t be here four days a week doing it for you,” I remark sharply, cutting her like a knife. “And thirdly if you don’t get out of my face right now and stop telling me what you think a good mother should be,” I growl at her as I take a step forward, letting the rage consume me. Before I could deliver and savor my ending, the principal intervened, pushing the teacher out of the doorway and down the hall away from me. The was no doubt the principal could feel the intensity of the rage, now. I am certain it is why she hurried the woman out of the room and down the hall. She’d seen the severity of the consequences of this type of anger before and wasn’t willing to risk the reputation of the institution by challenging it. She made an excellent choice, but too little, too late. 

The principal chatted with me as I calmed myself and made a bunch of empty promises meant to pacify me in the moment, but I was too busy planning my baby’s future and plotting my revenge. At first, my instinct was to harm them all as they had harmed my child. I spent a lot of this time of my life caught up in the thoughts of ego, driven by the concept of justice. Thankfully, after deciding to let my emotions be still for a few days and shifting my focus to the best interests of my child, my husband and I made a plan. Our darling boy would stay at home with me and I would homeschool him. I didn’t know the first thing about homeschooling, but it had to be a better alternative to public school. At least with me, he would be safe and loved. So, that’s what we did. 

The first week I was still hell-bent on revenge. In time, I just wanted to drop it all and pretend it never happened, to just move on with my life, hurrying past my unacknowledged feelings. Neither option worked for me. I knew my son would have to deal with the aftermath of the abuses he faced at school, so I enrolled him in therapy right away. Little did I know until time went on that I had to face my own feelings of this experience head on, too. My boy wasn’t the only one left in the aftermath with unresolved trauma.

In therapy, I uncovered and addressed so much. Healing, for me, was paramount in my journey forward. Talking through everything really helped me to begin processing, but the pain of feeling like an ultimate failure looms. To this day I sometimes have feelings of shame related to feeling as though I didn’t protect my child when he needed me most. The therapist said I was doing everything I could do, everything I knew how to do, giving my son a fair chance to thrive in what everyone touted as a thriving environment. The therapist gently reminded me that I was still providing that safe space at home for my son to just be, however he showed up, and that was more than enough. I just hate feeling blindsided, but I especially hate feeling blindsided when I feel like I ignored my intuition at the urging of society in the name of conformity or to maintain comfort or convenience of others. That realization opened the door for me to commit to the practice of never ignoring my intuitive nature again. Obviously, I hate that my child had to endure the suffering he did, learning the harsh reality so young that not everyone is trustworthy – learning that even those who are supposed to protect and love him sometimes don’t. Some would say that at least he’s building his capacity for resilience, but that’s a bunch of bullshit. We tell people it’s wonderful to be resilient when we don’t know how else to explain that everyone around them failed them. 

In practice, legally, the law says that schools are not allowed to retaliate when people make claims against them regarding unsafe or unfair practices. While a nice law in theory, it means nothing when not enforced. It also means nothing when there are multiple ways to get around the law. Once the school realized I wouldn’t be the typical pushover parent they were used to dealing with, they began their smear campaign. This is why I was always very careful to gauge my outward appropriateness often, as I knew there would be a goal to discredit me and my son the more I bucked against the system. The goal was no longer to help the child but to set the child up for failure. They reinforced this new philosophy with having teachers report their injuries during restraint and seclusion episodes, accusing my child of inflicting intentional bodily harm to an adult as a seven year old. From my son’s perspective, he was attempting to save his own life by fending off his captors. 

It didn’t end there – during the many instances of seclusion, the school also would not use my son’s agreed upon behavior intervention program when he began exhibiting symptoms of dysregulation. Instead they waited, not intervening at appropriate intervals, watching him lose control before responding by confining him. Moreover, after confinement, they’d let him out and not ensure his re-regulation before attempting to reintegrate him into the classroom. Many times I’d get calls about how they had ‘done everything they could do’ but he tore through a classroom, hit a teacher, or threatened the teachers lives after they’d legally tortured him by locking him in a room until he urinated on himself. 

Once, they evacuated the classroom due to him being dysregulated and one of the higher-ups of the school corporation approached me afterward to let me know that the destruction of property would not be allowed to continue. It was my son’s first ever event of property destruction. I asked point blank if she was implying that the property damage was more important than my son’s well-being. Of course she denied it, but my husband and I knew exactly what she was getting at. 

Another time shortly after the property damage incident, my son made a threat to stab and shoot an educator who had restrained and secluded him. After spending over two hours dysregulated, locked in seclusion, and wondering if he’d ever feel okay again, he threatened to shoot and stab the perpetrators. As if that experience wasn’t awful enough, they suspended him, and casually mentioned pressing charges. When I made an inquiry about what they meant, the Vice Principal gave me a lecture about my son’s behavior followed by a short conversation informing me a hearing would be scheduled to determine whether the statements my eight-year-old child made while in distress were considered terroristic threats. It was made clear that the school system had adopted a new zero-tolerance policy under which if a student were to be found guilty of terroristic threatening, they would be arrested and charged as a felon. In not so many words, the Vice Principal told me that the district would need to determine if my child did or did not make a terroristic threat by threatening to stab and shoot his teacher. 

“He said he was going to stab me with a knife and shoot me with a gun he had at home. I had to take it seriously,” the teacher said toward the end of the conversation. This teacher was one of their special education teachers, a so-called expert in dealing with children with disabilities.

“We must determine the viability of that plan and if it was premeditated. It sounds somewhat premeditated since he said he would bring a gun from home,” the Vice Principal said in support, as she looked condescendingly in my direction. 

“He’s seven – well, just turned eight. How can an eight-year-old be a terrorist?” I ask, dumbfounded. 

“If he’s going to bring a gun from home to school and carry out a plan to harm the teachers then he would be considered a threat. It has to do with the viability of the threat,” the Vice Principal replied. 

“We don’t own a gun,” I responded, defensively. And we didn’t. We hadn’t owned a gun since we got rid of a family heirloom revolver my husband had when my son was under two. 

“You don’t?” she asked questioningly. The other teacher quickly followed up with, “What about knives? He says you all have a machete.”

“No,” I reiterate, “We haven’t had a gun in over five years and we certainly don’t own a machete or any other knives, other than a set of kitchen knives.”

The conversation died out once they couldn’t attempt to pin charges of premeditation onto my son. The Vice Principal let me know that my son would be suspended until the district made a decision. During his suspension, I considered all of our options. I wanted to run, move away, disappear in the night. I would not let them lock up my baby. It took four business days and me calling and sending multiple emails to get someone to tell me my child’s fate. In a swift email, the head of the district alerted me that my son would not be taken to a hearing. He was on vacation and forgot about our case, so he decided to dismiss it. This does not vindicate the system or my son, rather, I think it’s indicative of a much bigger issue. Not one person recognized that my son was disabled, that a major part of his disability included emotional dysregulation, impulsivity, and the inability to control himself. They would have rather locked my son up than dealt with the gross negligence of their institution. Only through lucky happenstance did it end up that the person they took the case to was on vacation and didn’t want to deal with the looming future lawsuit waiting to happen. The point is that my son wasn’t vindicated because they thought he was innocent, or because his judge was compassionate. Rather, my son was released from the school hearing because his prosecution would have been a larger inconvenience than just letting him go. Next time would be a different story. I knew that I had to do everything in my power, including removing my son from public school, to ensure we never encountered a next time.

Of the eight seclusions that happened (to my knowledge) in the five weeks of school, all eight ended in a pick up from school, followed by hours of me comforting a sobbing, dysregulated child, doing the job the educators failed to. Clearly, my son’s experience illustrates that seclusion doesn’t work. Isolating a child and then calling it a safe intervention is repugnant. Solitary confinement doesn’t work in prisons, why would it work for frightened elementary school children? I’d pose this question to educators repeatedly, only to be met with the response that they deployed restraint and seclusion practices in emergent situations as a last resort. I reminded them that if the emergent situations were happening three times a week, the instances couldn’t, by definition, be classified as emergencies. Surely, I would say, there must be a way to reduce the number of ‘last resort’ incidents by making a change to the implementation of the intervention plan. They ignored my requests and continued to harm my child in order to protect their infastructure, policies, and employees. 

Writing, I’ve found, helps me heal from this painful time in our lives. Looking back, I recognize that none of this was the fault of my loving baby, nor was it mine. The fault lay with the school, and on an even larger scale, with the American education system as a whole. Sharing our story helps remind me of my son’s courage and my own, and it may just help another mother out there who finds herself in a similar nightmarish circumstance. The worst part of it years later is feeling so alone. Parents who have neurotypical children who rarely struggle in the school setting usually aren’t privy to what happens to disabled students. Many have never heard of seclusion practices. None of them have been able to fathom our reality for those five weeks, and thus struggle to empathize. I don’t blame them – I didn’t have any idea until it happened to us. 

By no means am I an expert in disabilites rights or activism. The opinions and feelings of parents of disabled children should never outweigh the views, feelings, and opinions of the disabled. Since my child is so young, I’m only doing the best I can as his mother to advocate for his needs. I don’t know what it’s like to be autistic. I only recently discovered what it feels like to be disabled, but that experience as an adult is different in so many ways than my son’s. I don’t know what it’s like to be a frightened, feeling out-of-control, confused seven-year-old imprisoned in a concrete room, pleading for their mother. The intention of sharing this painful story is to bring awareness to the injustice in our education system, to bring awareness to ableism within the system, and to prevent the legal and illegal abuse of our children in schools. 

The contempt for the disabled and the parents of disabled children attempting to raise their babies in a safe environment is a pervasive issue in American society. Ableism runs rampant in America, as does injustice, as many marginalized populations of this country know. We all must work together to stop it. I want my child to be one of the last who suffers trauma at the hands of the American education system. Placing the sole burden of change on the parents of disabled children and the disabled themselves is unconscionable.

A month after everything concluded and I spent time processing in therapy, I decided to channel my rage into activism. I took my thousands of pages of documentation and sifted through them, filing a thorough formal complaint with the state’s department of education. After several emails, phone calls, interviews, and time spent waiting, a verdict was made. Three of the five counts I brought against the school system were verified. The complaint was a success, although, I wish there would have been harsher consequences. A full audit of the school was conducted. The Department of Education wouldn’t address the issue of restraint or seclusion directly, aside from the issue that the school had been mis-reporting seclusion information to the proper channels. Among the consequences, a training was instated for so many hours requiring all personnel to be further trained in the reporting of seclusions and restraints. My son was also awarded one-on-one make-up education hours for all the time he spent secluded, sent home, or suspended. Although I am grateful that an audit brought some things to light and that consequences were had, I remain disappointed that the practices of restraint and seclusion themselves were not further evaluated. Awareness is progress, though, and progress usually happens with one step forward and two steps back. 

Today, my son does well at public school. We’ve since moved to a state with better special education laws and services, and he’s beginning to really thrive. The trauma he endured hasn’t prevented him from placing his trust in others again, and I’m very proud at his ability to persist. Most importantly, he persists knowing that even when the chaos seems to surround him, he has a safe place to come home to in his mother. For that, I am most grateful. 

On the other hand, I struggle more. Each time I drop him at the door of his summer school, a pang shoots through my stomach. The heat in my face becomes unbearable. What if today is the day that we have to start all over? What if today is the day he gets hurt, the day that he runs away from staff and doesn’t come back? What if I leave this sidewalk and me watching him smile and hop into the school is the last memory I’m graced with in which he is the star? I consistently revel in the moment of happiness I feel at watching him experience his own joy, while simultaneously suppressing the utter horror I feel at leaving him. Each day gets a little better, but even years later I’m not quite over it, and I’m not sure I ever will be. 

Childhood trauma is the single biggest epidemic of our time, aside from climate change. The misconception is that childhood trauma is only experienced in one moment, or only experienced at home, or in a non-structured environment. Both my son and myself were left with trauma from a broken education system, a supposed safe place for our children, supported by a broken society in a world full of broken people – many of which have massive amounts of unresolved childhood trauma themselves. We must ask and answer not ‘Why do they keep hurting me?’ as my son did, but ‘Why do we keep hurting ourselves?’