Introductions All Around

Hello, world. The universe has been crying out for another blog — hasn’t it? — and I am happy to step up to the plate.

I’m the X-Dad, a 40-year-old father of two. I’ve got a happy marriage and a decent job, a very messy house and a lawn overrun with weeds. I solve crossword puzzles just about every day. This blog will almost never discuss these things.

I’m here to talk about the ups and downs of raising my son – Sonny (not his real name) — an eight-year-old born with Fragile X Syndrome, a genetic disorder that results in profound mental retardation, with some serious delays in physical development thrown in to boot. Every day is a new challenge, and I thought it high time I start documenting what it’s like to be an X-Dad. Maybe other X-Parents out there can benefit from my wisdom or, more usually, lack of it.

As we join our program already in progress, Sonny is about to enter the third grade, or so it would be if the special education teachers in my town used the terminology of “grades.” However, they do not. So he’s not going into third grade at all — it’s simply a new school year, a new series of daily attempts to prepare him for adulthood.

Right now he can read a good number of words, although his comprehension of what he is reading is somewhere around zero. He can add two numbers if their total is not more than five, and if you let the wrong answers slide. He can spell most CVC words (that’s consonant-vowel-consonant, like MUD or PAN) although he has a mental block that transforms every U to O. (Similarly, he skips the letter M when reciting the alphabet. Drives me insane, it does.)

He is in every way a gentle, loving, and happy little boy, and he deserves a better hand of cards than the one he’s been dealt.

X-Mom and I also have The Daughter (not her real name). She is six years old, and does not have Fragile X. Amazingly, she is not even a carrier — she can have children with impunity, although we hope she waits a good twenty or twenty-five years before she starts doing that. The Daughter is not yet aware of the extent of her brother’s incapacity, although she’s certainly aware that SOMETHING is not quite right here. Somewhere down the line, we’ll have to sit her down and lay it all out. That’s a day I’m not much looking forward to.

We also have a dog. And a cat. Neither will get much play here.

And there you have it. I’ll try to put up a post a day. We’ll see how long that lasts.