The Cause (and Effect) of Being Aloof

Amelia is enrolled in the Blind School (AIDB) in Talladega, AL.   We live in Moody, AL, which is around 40 miles from the school.    She’s been living in the dorm through the week most of the year, but it’s been hard on everyone – her and Naomi especially – to have her away from home so much of the time.   When we mention how hard the dorm life is, well-meaning people often simply recount how hard it was for them to leave home after high school.   I can appreciate the sentiment, I guess, and I don’t think people realize that it’s a little insulting to compare the experience of a young adult leaving home to embark on the journey of the” Rest of Your Life” to a child being sent to live away from her parents and siblings at age 10.   But it is a little insulting.   Or maybe not so much insulting as orthogonal; it’s a bad analogy and seems like a poor measure of sympathy.

We’ve tried enrolling Amelia in the local public school system, but with her poor motor skills and lousy eye-sight, she fell way behind the other students in practical terms even though accommodations were made to keep her on track as a formality.   She also spent hours every night struggling with homework (including things like handwriting) as she continued to fall behind everyone else in her class.   We’ve tried home schooling, but we lack the resources to know how to best help her, and it ends up taking her 3-4 times as long to do her assignments as it does her siblings, and she ends up requiring a whole lot more attention than they do.    I’ve tried to make a point of bursting the arbitrary bubble of “fairness” that kids (and adults) seem prone to appeal to, but homeschooling efforts with Amelia have led to frustrations of all parties…and she’s continued to slip behind.

I have been very pleased with the progress she’s made at the blind school.   They seem to have the resources and experience to help a child like Amelia.  But it’s 40 miles from home, and continuing to live in the dorm is not a viable solution.   I’m not sure that the morning and afternoon commute is a viable long-term solution either.

All that led to us deciding to shop for houses in the Talladega area.   This wasn’t a decision we took lightly, or even one that we made favorably (just because you believe something may be the right decision doesn’t mean you necessarily like it), but it seemed like the most workable solution to a non-ideal situation.    We hope to rent our house for a few years while we live in Talladega, but since that’s not a certainty, and we didn’t want to jump into a new pile of debt, the plan was to cash out my 401-K in order to just buy the house out-right (see parenthetical comment above, again).    Through an unfortunate series of events and, what I believe to be, incompetency on the part of the real estate agent, that sale fell through at the last minute.    I’ve been resigned to the fact that we lost the earnest money, and I’ve been penalized and heavily taxed for the 401-K cash-out, and the whole experience has been rather disheartening.

And when I give people the quick summary of events, I’ve been “comforted” by the fact that, sure, it was an expensive mistake, but at least I’ve learned an important lesson.   Maybe I’m obtuse, but I’m not really sure what lesson it is I’m supposed to have learned – it wasn’t as though, I naively thought trading my life savings for a run-down, second home in the middle-of-nowhere was going to be a hunky-dorey dream come true, and even if that lesson has been learned, we’re still in the same frustrating position we were in a month ago.  Words like those offer the same level of comfort that I find when people compare their passing homesickness during the otherwise halcyon days of college to a disabled third grader being shipped away from her home to live with strangers week after week after week.

And so, I tend to be aloof.   I don’t typically share my problems, because I don’t want pithy, false comforts to difficult situations that, while may not be truly unique, do feel a bit out of the ordinary.

I suppose that knife cuts both ways, though.    As long as I maintain only a fairly superficial level of dialog, I guess I can’t expect much more than fairly superficial response.   Without divulging the nuance of the situation, I guess it’s not reasonable to expect a very nuanced understanding.