SuperLuke

This is my son, Lukas. He is five years old. He has many magical powers. He has two brothers and two moms, and he loves the color pink. He likes to tell the story about how he was the "big baby" inside me, taking up all the room and squishing Jasper into the corner of my uterus. He likes us to tell the story about how he was a "vacuum baby," who would literally inhale my breast and suck with all his might, and how if he didn't latch on right away he would quickly become hysterical, frantically moving his head back and forth across my nipple, sensing that it was right there, but too upset to calm down and find it. He was a beautiful baby, with big, rosy lips and blond surfer-dude hair. He would only sleep on my chest, but once there he would sleep peacefully. I loved the feeling of the weight of him against my ribs. I hope I never forget that feeling.

He was a very physical baby and toddler. He was crawling at five months, took his first steps at 7 months, was walking at 10 months, and running by his first birthday. He was so athletic and sure of himself. But early on we realized that he was not really a risk-taker. He was very cautious about all of his physical activity, and wouldn't try anything that he didn't know he could do. He was also very tuned into his twin brother, and for a while when he was about 18 months old, I worried that he had become overly identified with Jasper. Jasper would cut his finger and Lukas would cry that his own finger hurt. Lukas would skin his knee, and insist, through his tears, on looking at Jasper's knee and making sure that it was okay. Lukas would hide behind the curtain and call out, "where's Jaz? Where's Jaz?" And then jump out and say, "here I am!" But I soon realized that he knew that he was his own person (he called himself "Gook"), he was just very sensitive to everyone else's feelings (especially Jasper's), to the point where he would internalize them, and feel them as his own. He took great joy in experiencing activities through Jasper if he was too nervous to try them himself. It wasn't at all uncommon for us to hear Jasper excitedly exclaim, "Oh I want to do that!" And to then hear Lukas, just as excited, exclaiming, "I want to watch Jaz do that!"

I first became concerned about his extreme sensitivity when he was a little over 2 years old. He was finally verbal enough to tell us everything that he was thinking, and we learned that he was thinking about a lot. He decided that he didn't like the wind, or the rain, or the possibility of wind or rain. He'd look out the window in the morning and check out the trees and the sky with the eyes of a skeptic.

"I don't think we should go out today," he'd say.
"Of course we're going out," I'd respond, "it's a beautiful day!"
"But it might rain," he'd insist.
"There isn't a cloud in the sky, Lukas, it's not going to rain."
"But it might rain, mom. It might."

Once we finally convinced him that leaving the house was a good idea, he'd worry about getting his shoes dirty.

"Shoes are meant to get dirty," we'd say.
"But I don't want them to get dirty!" he'd protest, "I like them!" And every fifteen steps or so, he'd sit down on the ground and wipe his shoes off with his hands.

He hated balloons because he was so worried about something happening to them. The balloon might pop. It might go up in the sky. There was no space left to enjoy it. He lived in a world where everything was fine in the moment, but disaster (a storm, dirty shoes, a popped balloon) lurked just around the corner.

Eventually, it seemed that his anxieties mellowed out and life became less of a daily struggle. By the time he was 2-and-a-half, he was no longer worried about the possibility of rain or wind or getting his shoes dirty. He still had some quirks (including an intense fear of things (or people) getting sucked down the drain in the bathtub), but it seemed clear that he was just a sensitive guy, an intense kid, prone to anxiety, but that's all.

When he started preschool at 3-and-a-half, we warned the teachers about his sensitivity and anxieties. They soon experienced some of them first person. At our first parent-teacher conference, his teacher showed us the notes she had been taking on Lukas over the course of the first month of school. This was my favorite:

I brought a frog to the circle to share with the children. Lukas loved it. The frog jumped; Lukas burst into tears.

Yep, that's my boy. My sweet, sensitive, caught-off-guard-by-a-jumping-frog boy. The next big hurdle came when the teachers announced to the class that there was going to be a fire drill. Actually, first there was going to be a practice fire drill. Instead of using the actual fire alarm, the teachers would simply ring a little bell, and the kids would practice stopping what they were doing, lining up at the door, and filing out onto the playground. Lukas was horrified by the idea. He refused to go to school. He cried all afternoon and all morning and pleaded with me to let him stay home day after day. I think it was mostly that he just had no idea what a fire drill was. And being a 3-year-old with a very active imagination, I think he pictured our electric drill, and he pictured a fire, and then he pictured some combination of the two coming into his classroom. I'd be terrified too! After we survived the practice fire drill, we had to endure the anticipation of the real fire drill (surely this is when the fire-breathing electric screwdriver would appear), but the teachers said that once it was happening, Lukas was actually totally fine. He had a serious expression, but didn't cry, and happily marched out onto the playground with his friends while they waited for the alarms to go off. You'd think that once he'd seen what an actual fire drill was, the fear and anxiety would dissipate, but no such luck. I'd pick him up from school at noon, and he'd run into my arms and exclaim, "mom, it was a good day! There weren't any fire drills!" Every morning before I was allowed to leave him at school, he and I would go together to the teacher and ask for reassurance that there would be no fire drills that day. He began to notice smoke detectors everywhere we went, and he eyed them suspiciously, "what's THAT?" he'd say, pointing. And I'd say, nonchalantly, "oh, I think that's just the little round thing on the ceiling." He'd ponder this for a moment, and then with his little eyebrows furrowed he'd shake his head. "I think it's a fire alarm. I think we better GET OUT OF HERE before it goes off!" For some reason, he was unable to accept the idea that there was nothing dangerous about a fire alarm itself. In his mind, any building with a smoke detector was liable to burst into flames at any moment. Why else would they even have a smoke detector?! It took about 6 months, and several fire drills (some planned, some accidental) for Lukas to overcome his fear. But he overcame it, and now he doesn't "even think about fire drills at all anymore, can you believe it?" I guess I'm starting to.


The past several months have been a real struggle with our sweet, sensitive, anxious kid. While he no longer worries about wind, dirty shoes, thunder, flyaway balloons, or fire drills, he has moved on to bigger and scarier things. Like volcanoes (apparently any mountain, no matter how small, has the potential to become a volcano if it somehow gets a hole in the top of it), and coyotes (a rumor that there was a coyote in our neighborhood last summer brought us back into fear-of-the-outdoors realm. These days he's okay so long as he's not alone out there), and burglars, and kidnappers, and dying. Not only are the anxieties bigger, but his ways of expressing his anxieties are bigger too. He doesn't just cry and cling to us anymore like he did when he was 2 and 3. Instead, he gets angry. He yells at us, he kicks and screams. He can be a perfectly happy, calm and centered kid one minute and a hysterical mess the next. It seems to come out of nowhere, but I expect that it all boils down to some anxiety or another in the end.

This past week, I've done a lot of thinking about Lukas and what I can do to help him be a happier kid. And, by some strange coincidence, he's actually had a relatively easy week. I've been seeing more of the joyful guy who melts my heart and less of the angry mom-hater. I've decided that my first act on Luke's behalf is going to be to get him allergy tested. We've long suspected that he's sensitive to dairy, and I'm guessing that we should probably add several other ingredients to that list. I'm hoping that by eliminating some potentially unfriendly foods from his diet, we might give his nervous system a bit of space to better be able to cope with things. And since I've decided to make this move, I've been feeling much lighter about the whole situation. And maybe that's why Lukas has been seeming so much happier. Because he really, truly does reflect my state of being. And I have to be better at remembering that.