Small blessings

My older son, Origami, had tae kwon do last night. There is nothing unusual about that -- O goes to tae kwon do five or six days per week. Tae kwon do is his second home -- something we did not fully appreciate until O returned to class last Friday after having the flu for an entire week; O walked into the dojang, sat down, removed his shoes, breathed a sigh of relief, smiled, and exclaimed "much better!"



Unfortunately, for reasons we do not fully understand, O's tics now are at their worst during tae kwon do. Master K is teaching O to use breathing control to overcome his tics. Given that O already has gone from having over 100 major tics in class to having ten or fewer, I have to say that breathing control is doing something.



Origami and I have provided some of the classes brief explanations of what is happening. Most of the children and teens in the classes have either asked O a question or two about TS, or they have shrugged and accepted that this is just part of how Origami is. Some of the adults in class find O's tics amusing, which puzzles me. In the "flipping" tic, Origami's arms are trying to wrench themselves out of their sockets; the pain inherent in this tic should be obvious to any adult.



O's major tics, when they are especially severe, are unnerving for some of the other children. I can understand this. Imagine being ten or eleven years old and watching someone else your size being flung to the ground, squealing in pain, by some invisible force several dozen times during a class. I think that would alarm most kids. Two weeks ago, I watched one boy's eyes grow large like saucers even though we had explained what was happening. He ran out of class to tell his father "Dad, that boy can't control his body. That's why he keeps doing that!"



I wondered how this boy would act around O during future classes. In the past, we have encountered people who turn and flee upon learning that O has Tourette's, making little effort to conceal their terror. There have been plenty of children who just assumed that O must be contagious, and treated him like a leper. This time, did we manage to make our message clear?



So, there we were last night at tae kwon do. It was a fairly large class, with several new adults who did not hear our TS mini-lecture. O is relaxed during small classes, but the larger a class is, the more he tics. The class lined up for kicks and blocks, and O flipped to the ground. Then it was time for forms, and O flipped to the ground at the beginning of nearly every form. After forms, Master K taught the class some self-defense and hap ki do moves. O was paired with the saucer-eyed boy; how would this pairing go?



I was most relieved to see that everything was -- absolutely normal. The other boy forgot his own strength and flipped O, who is lighter than ever after being sick, onto the mat. O got up and patiently explained the moves to the other boy. They practiced for a while, then devolved a bit into pretending and slow-motion fighting, and fits of giggles. There was some serious work, some goofiness, and no major tics. They looked like two normal boys doing normal boy things -- which is our goal, I think.