Counting

“The number will not be high. It is going to be pretty low.”

I find it funny this has to be stated both ways, as if my own personal IQ is not high, and pretty low, and I wouldn’t understand this news said only once; or, as if this news is so incredulous, it must be reaffirmed.

It isn’t incredulous news — it isn’t even news — but the school psychologist delivering this two-headed summary of my son’s intelligence couldn’t have intimated either of these things, having met me and my son just weeks before. He’s uneasy, busy with a lot of bodily readjustment, as if he hopes the words might somehow otherwise exit him and his mouth won’t have to do the dirty work. We sit in his storage-closet office as he shuffles these first few pieces of paper — the foundation of a skyscraper file constructed of my then 7-year-old’s triennial assessment. Floors and floors of forms noting my son’s shortcomings, a paper-intensive way of saying my son is not standardly — by academic standards — smart.

“Oh, well, I really don’t care.” I mean this, and not in a dismissive, defensive or denying way, or a flagrant way where I’d wear the sentiment emblazoned on a camo jacket. I’ve reached a point where I can speak this sentence with full-on acceptance, regarding what I might have once considered consequential fact as fully inconsequential.

Maybe the psychologist thinks he is dealing me my first numbers of fear and disappointment. He isn’t. I am already flush with them: there is 1 in 15,000, the occurrence of my son’s severe epilepsy to begin with…