Catching Rainbows

7

The caffeine and sugar got me through the morning. The adoring thoughts I had about her helped too.

"Luuuna," my aunt called around lunchtime. She was in her room down the hall, "resting". She'd had an extra glass or two of wine the night before.

"What?" I answered, trying to sound like I wasn't rolling my eyes. I was making chicken for enchiladas and shook some cumin into my trusty soup pot.

"Has Hailie eaten?"

I glanced at the little girl, who was building a city out of magnet shapes and talking to herself. She'd just gotten up from her nine a.m. nap.

"Four times three is twelve, and four times four is sixteen . . . " she placed another square tower on one side, stood up, flapped her hands as she jumped up and down in satisfaction, and settled back into a cross-legged position to continue building. "And four times five is twenty, of course. And five times four is twenty and five times three is fifteen and twelve times twelve is one hundred and forty four." 

This child had told me what a rhombus was when she was two. It's a diamond shape, by the way. 

I thought about how I'd been determined to do the gluten free thing the night before, but now I was exhausted. I didn't even know anything about it. Was it just flour? So nothing that had flour in it, how hard could that be. Lunch meat should be safe.  

"Luna? Did you hear me?"

"Nine times nine is eighty one, nine times ten is of course ninety . . . " 

"Luuuna?"

"I'm on it," I hollered back, too loudly. I added a good amount of coriander, and some garlic powder. The boneless, skinless chicken breasts floated around as I stirred. 

"Lulu, I want you to play with me," Hailie said, getting up. "I played and waited and built an amazing tall city and now I'm done waiting!" She tugged on my hand. "Play with me," she whined, because in her brain there was no waiting zone. 

"Hold on, this is hot," I cautioned her. 

She understood that perfectly well but pulled again. "I feel like I've waited forever already!" 

She was dramatic, but not intentionally. She had "overexcitabilities", so her emotions were not only delayed (more like those of a two or three year old) but often hugely exaggerated. The way a two year old will feel like it's the end of the world when their banana is cut wrong, that's how any little thing could feel to her. 

"Mickey's on, let's have some turkey on a fork, okay?" I rolled her big-kid stroller closer to the TV and handed her the red binkie. 

"Is it clean?" she asked with it halfway to her mouth, as part of her routine. 

"Yes," I said, having no idea at that point and too tired to care. Nathaniel was at school, but there simply was no school for her. She was way too meltdowny and at the same time dying to learn things way advanced for her age. Special education wasn't the right place, and neither was regular ed. That left homeschooling, which meant she learned what she wanted along the way. With her insatiable need for knowledge, that wasn't a problem.

I was also determined to keep her from being put somewhere that she would be labeled the bad kid, coming home with a red card or whatever idiotic system they had in place now to publicly shame and humiliate little kids for being different. Or just for being kids.

I refused to let some teacher ruin her because she wasn't a cookie cutter kid and had some differences that made things hard for her to handle sometimes. It wasn't her fault.