Shall I play for you? Pa rum pa pum pum

Margaret Mead wrote, "No recorded cultural system has ever had enough different expectations to match all the children who were born within it."

I discovered quite quickly that, while society says that it's okay to march to your own drum, our schools can't handle more than one rhythm per classroom. There just aren't enough conductors. We say that we want kids to be themselves and follow their heart, but what we really mean is, "Follow instructions and do whatever the rest of the class is doing."

Before school, I thought it was great that my son expressed himself artistically. When he started Kindergarten, if the teacher asked him to paint a red circle, a detailed pencil sketch of a maple leaf's cellular structure just didn't cut it. "Making breakfast" at the play stove for the girls wasn't appreciated for the chivalrous gesture it was, if it happened to be during "O Canada" or a lesson on "ing" words.

It's a difficult task, encouraging your quirky children to express their own strengths--and letting them face their weaknesses in their own time--when you know if they don't tone down the quirks and turn up the conformity, they will get labeled and left behind. Love them for who they are, or protect them from the consequences?

In the past few weeks, both my kids have wandered or run off during school field trips. For one, the stress was too much to handle and he had to get out; for the other, the enticement of what was through the next door was too much to resist and she had to go in. So now, I'm in charge of finding, or being, the caregiver for their field trips, or they can't go. It's a safety issue. The school just doesn't have enough full time education assistants to provide one-on-one all day supervision; if they would assign someone to my child, the child at another school who needs that EA for half the day would have to stay home--hardly fair to them. Not easy for me either. I'm just starting a new job (writing/editing!) and have to be available to my employer whenever she needs me. Practically, I'm sure it will work out in my schedule, but emotionally it feels like a burden.

Unlike Ms. Mead, I've always thought that there were too many expectations on our children, but I think her reflection is more accurate. We need to have more expectations: we need to expect that some children will be more interested in being loving than it spelling "ing." That some children are born to find environmental solutions or make technological advances, and the fact that they can't "colour in the lines" is exactly what makes them able to see outside them.

I have no doubt that my kids' teachers hear the music of many drums. And they encourage short solos whenever possible. But they can't always catch the little drummer boy when he marches out of the building on their own.

All any of us (typical or autistic, young or old, parent or teacher) can do is play our song to the best of our ability, listen to the songs around us, and blend whenever we can. "I played my best for him...Then he smiled at me...Me and my drum."