It has been a rough week at school for Blitzen. She missed ‘rally’ for the first time since she started there in November. Rally, from what I can tell, is a big, free-for-all, reward-for-good-behavior type thing on Thursday afternoons in the auditorium. There are snacks, music and dancing, sometimes a video and just crazy, wild fun. Blitzen LOVES rally. But everyday this week, Blitzen has stormed out of the classroom at least once each day and yesterday, she ran out 3 times. At home, it is fight. At school, it is flight. So no rally.
At dinner, we had a lot of things to discuss. What is happening at school and an incident with the babysitter that afternoon. Blitzen doesn’t really like to dive deeply into her feelings and behaviors and will do just about anything to avoid it. But when we have these conversations at dinner, she just tries to change the subject. Last night, the conversation went a little bit like this:
Andrew — How was school today? I haven’t looked at your point sheet yet. (School employs a point system and Blitzen loves to get all 72 points – sometimes she does but this week, not so much).
Blitzen — Not good. I got a 60.
Carrie — I saw your sheet and noticed that you left class again. That has been happening a lot. What’s going on?
Blitzen — The kids, you know, the boys, they just be getting on my nerves and my teacher. But wait, wait, can I ask you something?
Carrie — Yes, you can but this conversation about school isn’t finished.
Blitzen — I know but it is about guppies.
Andrew — We can talk about guppies for a minute but we’re coming back to what happened at school today.
Blitzen – The guppy in my science class is pregnant. And when her babies are born, she won’t know they are her babies and she will try to eat them. We saw it on a video.
Carrie — Wow. Are you going to separate the baby guppies from their mom?
Blitzen — Yes, you know what you have to do? You have to put the babies in another tank.
Andrew — Are you ready to talk about what happened at school now?
Blitzen – No, no, wait, I just gotta tell you something. One time, at my other foster house, I had 100 guppies and the mom guppy tried to eat all the babies and the baby guppies were really mad at the mom so I had to separate them. The baby guppies had to live in other tanks – I had like 100 tanks too.
Carrie — That is a lot of tanks. Now let’s talk about why you ran out of class today.
And on from there.
Now I am willing to wager a significant amount of money that Blitzen never had guppies before. But mostly I think it is fascinating how, even when she is avoiding talking about difficult things, she ends up revealing so much. What an interesting tale – you separated the baby guppies from the mom guppy because the babies were mad and they all ended up in separate tanks. Hmmmm, this story sounds very familiar and it has nothing to do with guppies.
