Sam's Mental Health Day

“Your tail is getting weird.”

That seems as good a place as any to start a story about Sam. Except it wasn’t Sam who said it. It was Tess, and she was referring to the unicorn tail Sam had constructed out of yellow legal paper and had taped to his lower back.

It was Monday morning and Sam should have been in school.

And no, it wasn’t a snow day or a quarantine day.

Just a Sam day.

He had come downstairs that morning dressed in his school uniform, but when Tighe asked him what he wanted for breakfast, he said, “Nothing. I’m not going to school today.”

“Okay,” Tighe said, diving into his own breakfast and returning his attention to Sports Center. 

“Okay?”

“Yeah, okay. You don’t have to go to school today if you don’t want.”

Sam was surprised by the lack of resistance from his dad. Not wanting to draw any more attention to the situation, he inched his way back upstairs and returned in his black Adidas pants and red Baywatch t-shirt.

Nate looked at Sam like he was crazy. “Sam! I have perfect attendance! I can’t mess that up!”

So did Sam actually. The difference is that Sam doesn’t care.

“All right, fine, Sam,” I said, trying to persuade him to go to school, “You’re going to copy all the words from these books today. This isn’t going to be a fun day! You’re going to be productive and you’re going to learn!”

My brain was spinning with all the tasks I would have him do.

“Okay,” Sam said, taking the legal pad from my hands, “but let’s make it a picture book so I can practice my art, too.”

“Fine. And when you finish that book, you can start on another book. This is what you’re going to do all day!”

“No,” Tighe said, putting on his jacket and preparing to take Nate to school. “Let’s not make this about teaching a lesson—“ 

“Wait,” I cut him off. “Let’s not have this argument in front of him.”

Sam had pulled out an Easy Reading book and was using a pencil to draw giant block letters at the top of the legal pad.

I followed Tighe into his office.

“Let’s set up some rules about this,” Tighe started.

“Okay, he has to go to school,” I replied. That seemed pretty straightforward.

“No, let him do this. Let’s see what he does. No screen time, and he doesn’t get to go anywhere, even to a friend’s house this afternoon. But otherwise, let him do what he wants. We’ll give him one of these days each quarter.”

“Okaaaay…” the idea was growing on me. I don’t love formal education for Sam anyway. He has pretty high standardized test schools, and he’s very driven, but school seems to put a damper on his curiosity and creative spirits. I mean, maybe we’re just spoiling him, but military school can always fix that problem for us down the road. 

And so he stayed home. 

“Come on, Tess. Let’s do some experiments!”

By 8:30 I hadn’t even had my coffee yet, but Sam and his very willing assistant, Tess, were asking for gummy bears. 

“Just one!” Tess pleaded with me. But one just didn’t seem like much to me, so I handed her four gummy bears. 

“She gave me four of them!” she called to Sam, hurrying away into the dining room where they were conducting their experiments. 

“Okay, but they’re not for eating, Tess,” he instructed her, taking them from her and dropping one into four of the dozen or so cups they had positioned on the table.

Apparently—I was trying not to pay too close attention for fear my clean house anxiety would cause me to have an aneurism at the mess accumulating around me—each cup had a different liquid in it and we were waiting to see which one would dissolve the candy the fastest. Sam predicted it would be the mug of “hot lemonade.”

He was using Scotch tape to secure lids to each of the cups and lecturing to Tess about the changes he was already observing. I guess when Nate’s not around, he turns into Nate?

“We’ll come back and check on these later. Come on, Tess!”

They scampered up the steps to the second floor and I could hear all kinds of thuds and scuffling and stomping and furniture being dragged across the floor. I took a deep breath, sipped my coffee, and returned to the writing assignment I was working on.

Except I didn’t have a place to work. There were cups and spills all over the dining room table, which is usually my workspace. And damp piles of napkins that had been used to “clean up” the spills had been discarded all around me. 

“That’s it. I can’t take it anymore!” 

“Sam and Tess,” I called, rising from my seat and marching up the steps. There were toys on every single step up to the second floor. Then there were toys all over the second floor hall, every six inches or so, and it took a lot of effort not to step on the littering of puzzle pieces and wooden train cars and Legos and doll clothes and plastic food and headbands and board books and all those miscellaneous toys that have accumulated over the years and of which no one even remembers the origin. 

Lou had joined them and he was getting great pleasure from picking up items from the mishmash and hurling them against the wall or down the hallway, shrieking in the process. I stood in front of the bathroom and glanced up the staircase to the third floor. The toy clutter continued up those steps, too, and though I hadn’t seen it yet, all throughout the third floor hallway as well.

“I don’t mind if you make messes today, but you need to clean up one mess before you move on to the next mess. Go downstairs and clean up the spills from your experiment, then you can come up and finish whatever this is.”

“But Mom,” Sam protested. Sam is the best But Mom-er of them all. “We’re doing parkour!” He was so proud of it and had already awarded Tess a medal for her efforts, which she wore around her neck.

She lifted it in my direction, cocking her head and raising her eyebrows as if to say, “well, what do you have to say for yourself now?”

“And I get to wear it forever IF I clean this up all by myself,” she bragged to me. “Sam said so.”

I dragged them downstairs and made them clean up the spills and the trash on the table. Tighe added the exclamation point to my threats by telling Sam that if the house is in turmoil at the end of the day, he’ll lose this Ferris Bueller privilege forever. That worked for Sam, and I could hear them upstairs, tossing the toys back into the toy box.

“Tess, Erin and Tighe call three things on the floor ‘a mess,’” he mused to Tess. 

Like we’re tyrannical perfectionists or something. 

We’re not.

The rest of the day went by in fifteen minute increments, the pair of them darting around from one project to the next and rarely succeeding in cleaning it up unless Tighe or I nagged them to.

Using chopsticks, he turned his turkey sandwich into “cake pops;” they jumped on chairs to compare how they felt and sounded; they collected and painted rocks and bricks; and there was some sort of experiment that required a shoebox, a flashlight, and a raw egg. 

“And do you want to know what we’re looking for, Tess?” Sam was saying, removing the egg from the box.

“Yeah!” She was hanging onto his every word.

“Fuck.” 

My head shot up from my laptop, and I followed Sam’s eyes to where they were staring at the floor.

The contents of the egg were perfectly splayed on the hardwood floor, the bright yellow yolk a perfect contrast to the dark wood stain. Sam was motionless except for a few quick glances to me, then back to the floor, then back to me again.

Sam’s egg experiment gone horribly wrong

“Oopsy.” I could hear nervousness in his voice.

“Get some paper towels!” 

He cleaned it up as best as a 7 year-old can, but after he left the room, I had to do it for real.

“I’m about to lose it on someone, I’m just warning you,” I said to Kyle as he was preparing his lunch in the kitchen.

“Uhhh…” he replied, as if looking around for an escape.

“It won’t be you,” I reassured him. “It will be Tighe. He condoned this.”

I stood in the dining room surveying the scattered remains of Sam’s morning projects and experiments. He and Tess had migrated upstairs again, Lou was wandering around sipping his pre-nap milk, and Tighe was in the office with his door shut.

I could feel the anger building, as though it was rising in my chest, ready to explode from my throat.

“It will be Tighe,” I said again, gritting my teeth, keeping the anger in.

“Maybe they just shouldn’t get dessert for a month,” Kyle suggested, sliding his plate onto the table and sitting down to feast.

“Why would you say that?!” I snapped, not waiting for an answer. “And why would you put your hand there, that’s clearly my personal space!”

Kyle slowly retracted his hand back toward his own plate, keeping his head down and avoiding my eyes. 

“Dear God, make me a bird so I can fly far, far away from here..” Kyle mostly communicates in Forrest Gump quotes. 

“Hey Mom, how do you tie-dye?” Sam asked sometime after lunch.

This is a small fraction of Sam’s day

At that point, Lou was asleep, but my coffee had long worn off, and I was picturing myself crawling back into bed.

“We’re not tie-dying today, Sam,” I said, tucking my laptop under my arm and trudging upstairs away from Sam’s debris. 

By the time Nate came home, the dining room table was in its third wave of turmoil for the day. The rocks and bricks, which had been thoroughly painted, were drying on pieces of card stock. Tess and Sam were still nibbling on the remnants of their lunches as they disassembled a gift bag and were using scissors to shred the legal pad into long strips. I have no idea what the endgame was.

A workout had helped me channel my frustration, and I almost kept my composure as I micromanaged the cleanup process, but neither Tess nor Sam were very cooperative. 

The very first person who commented on my blog, almost six years ago now, did so anonymously, or at least using a handle that I didn’t recognize. I deleted it because it made me uneasy, and although I don’t recall it word for word, I remember the gist of it: it said my writing reeked of a sorrowful, self-pitying human who made terrible life choices and was now filled with remorse. 

In all honesty, that couldn’t be further from the truth, but on a day like today…