Noah's Comfort Blanket
a love letter to teaching preschool
Been a bit wistful about my time in teaching and reflecting on its complexity lately.
Ever miss where you were but really don’t want to be back there? That’s the emotional morass we find ourselves in today. Teaching preschool is an incredibly difficult line of work that is very often impossible to build a stable adult life on. It also can take a compounding emotional toll that, for me, eventually required leaving the profession altogether.
But, it was also fun. I worked with toddlers, and they were hilarious. Experiencing their linguistic explosion year in and year out was nothing short of astonishing. Most kids taught me a little something new about myself. Most also taught me something about both the universality and infinite diversity of the human experience.
This week, a love letter to one of those kids who I still think about a lot. Noah isn’t his real name, but hopefully that doesn’t need saying.
Noah’s Comfort Blanket
Noah got dropped off at the preschool right at 6 a.m. most days. I typically started my shifts at 7, so I would pick him up from the opening teacher. He would usually be fast asleep, clinging to a manky old comfort blanket. A comfort blanket was common among young kids, though usually abandoned at school by his age. He was 2 at the time.
Noah’s comfort blanket was unusual, though not unique. He did, however, have uniquely volcanic meltdowns when anyone tried to take his blanket from him. My assistant teacher and I had to take his blanket from him every day. It was a matter of hygiene and state regulation that it not be accessed during meals, snack time, crafts, and outdoor time. Usually, we snuck it from his grasp as he was sleeping in the mornings and hid it from view. As long as it was hidden from view, he did not ask about it or cry to be separated from it. His complete lack of object permanence regarding his blanket should have been our first clue.
I never thought much of it until months later. I just thought it was a lucky coincidence that Noah didn’t seem to realize his blanket existed when it was out of sight. I had (and still have!) plenty of items of clothing that are stored out of my immediate sight, and I routinely forget those clothing items exist and will instead wear the same 3-5 outfits week in, and week out.
If we got Noah’s blanket away from him successfully, circle time was our next mountain to climb. The mountain was more getting Noah to successfully switch tasks from semi-structured play to sitting in a circle with his peers. He also had to pay attention to, and participate in a few songs and listen to a read-aloud. The circle time activities, at most, took 5 minutes.
The transition was what made this process difficult for him. There is significant chaos in toddler classroom transitions. Kids are chucking toys back into boxes, sometimes smacking each other, singing songs loudly on their way to sit down, bumping into each other on their way to sit down, it’s a zoo. The sensory stimuli are plentiful, and are incredibly chaotic. Most neurotypical children automatically filter out the sensory stimuli that aren’t relevant to their immediate task, and they get to where they need to be.
This task, filtering out irrelevant stimuli, was extremely difficult for Noah. It was downright impossible most days. If my assistant could get him to sit down for circle time at all, he usually immediately started kicking his feet or vocalizing, unwilling to participate in circle time. This became so loud and so often turned into screaming and crying. I often had my assistant remove him with a few toys to another room and play with him 1:1 until circle time was over. This sometimes helped, but the task switching was another huge challenge for him.
I felt for him. In his little mind, there were still approximately 7,000 stimuli from his classmates being processed, and he hadn’t finished doing that yet. He wasn’t ready to process that we were now doing structured circle time. My brain is similarly busy all the time. I can’t blame him for not keeping up very well. I can’t always keep up very well myself. I just have had more practice than him at withstanding that much stimulus, and will save a crying jag about the work of it all till later. There’s a reason why I carry noise canceling headphones with me whenever I’m going somewhere alone for more than a few hours.
Noah’s receptive language was clearly quite good. If he was calm, he would do as he was asked, and engage in a moderate amount of play. You could ask him to take a toy shopping basket to the store and come back with apples, and he’d find the toy apples. You could show him how to do a simple shape-sorting task, hold up a circle block, ask him where it belonged, and he would point to the box with the other circle blocks in it.
His productive language lagged behind the other students by increasingly significant amounts. When he wasn’t matching his peers’ development by about 2 months into the school year, my assistant and I recommended him for early evaluation for autism. It took months and months and months to get his parents onboard, but he was eventually evaluated and diagnosed around 3 years old. The diagnosis was pivotal in him later being able to access early interventions for autism. Early intervention is critical, and often helpful in catching up language skills with fairly mild cases like his.
Noah’s lack of productive language generally caused him a lot of frustration. He often wanted to play with toys in a way that didn’t immediately make sense to me or his peers. He would try to show what he wanted with gestures and vocalizations, but he wasn’t often able to get his point across, and his peers would abandon play with him. My assistant and I would keep trying as time allowed. But his increasing frustration at not being able to communicate how he wanted to play often culminated in a screaming meltdown.
While my own linguistic development was the polar opposite of Noah’s, I’ve absolutely experienced the situation he’s in here, and I believe many of y’all have too. Sometimes you want to be doing something that just is not what’s currently happening, and you’re not completely sure what it is you do want, it’s just not this. As adults, this is generally not an acceptable state of being and leads to consternation and frustration in relationships. It’s something you have to have specific coping skills for, because while it is an early childhood educator’s (and young parent’s!) job to try their damndest to read kids’ minds, adults do not have that responsibility towards one another.
I think about Noah a lot. He was a lot of what made that particular year of preschool teaching so difficult. His behavioral difficulties were tough to manage day in and day out. His antics often brought me to tears on my breaks, furiously trying to walk off my frustration towards him, because he’s just a kid, goddammit, he has no clue what he’s doing.
He made my life pretty tough. But he also grew my empathy in a manner that was in no way his responsibility as a literal toddler, but it happened anyways. The more I thought about him, the more I realized that he and I were not so different. My only difference from Noah was age, and access to resources. I shared many of his difficulties (and still do!), and have simply had more time and therapy to develop coping mechanisms and alternative behavioral patterns.
I’ve never sought an autism diagnosis. That may change some day. For now, it’s not the most pressing thing on my over-full health plate. It’s not lost on me, though, how similar I find myself to a child who did end up receiving a formal ASD diagnosis.
I worry about over-identification with diagnostic labels anyhow. I found that had a pretty harsh ending point when I was diagnosed with cancer (hasn’t been back for 10 years and was caught super early, no one panic). Treating diagnostic labels as core parts of your personality can (for some folks, anyways) lead you down a path that terminates in a pretty dim view of the miracle and ongoing magic that is your existence.
Thinking about Noah doesn’t often make me wonder, hey….am I autistic?! More often, it makes me wonder where else I might be experiencing delayed empathy for someone. And not from a position of superiority or anything dumb like that either. Just from a perspective of, hey, the human experience is a completely unprecedented and complex undertaking every time it happens. Where else am I judging someone or something in a way that’s undeserving, because I’m forgetting that truth?
If my ongoing duty to myself is empathy, kindness, and curiosity, I most certainly owe that to other people. Noah taught me that. Wherever you’re at, buddy, I hope you’re well. And I hope you have a comfort blanket you love. Mine is soft and red.
Thanks for reading. See you next week!