High School Is Always High School

A couple of weeks ago, my high-school-freshman son came home from school with some surprising news: A girl in his class was pregnant. Not so surprising, I guess, in this day and age, but when your kid is in self-contained special education, you kind of expect that his classmates will be protected from the kind of teenage issues that make the soap operas and the drama series and the nightly news.

As it happened, the girl he was talking about was a friend, someone we see often and who I was able to state with a fair degree of confidence was not a likely target for a rumor like this. I told my son that his news was not true, and who did he hear it from? The source was another girl we've known for a while, one with whom my son and his friend do not get along. Later, another friend mentioned hearing the rumor on the special-ed bus, this time from a girl I'd always thought was mostly nonverbal. Apparently, good gossip can loosen the tongue of even the speech-impaired.

Like teen pregnancy, teen gossip -- hurtful, reputation-scarring teen gossip -- is not supposed to surprise parents of high schoolers anymore. You can hardly pick up a young adult novel without getting a heartbreaking look at girls' inhumanity to girls. Again, though, when you're talking about kids with developmental delays, kids whose television interests run more toward Arthur than Gossip Girl, who need to be trained in the most elementary life skills, it's hard to imagine them going for the jugular by making up pregnancy rumors, much less getting pregnant.

And indeed, as I spoke with the mothers of the rumor victim and other rumor-hearers, we agreed that our kids didn't really seem to "get" the significance of a pregnancy rumor. It was more along the lines of an elementary schooler calling someone a bad name they heard an older sibling use, without a clue as to its meaning. My son didn't perceive his news as being hurtful toward his friend, nor did his friend really feel hurt by it. There's a degree to which they're play-acting high school behavior, trying to fit in in the worst way.

Which is a relief in some ways, and terrifying in others. Not understanding the significance of big age-appropriate issues makes you vulnerable. Trying to be like your peers without having their degree of maturity and understanding -- and yeah, when we're talking about teens, "maturity" and "understanding" are relative -- makes you vulnerable. Not understanding why teen pregnancy might be undesirable, or even exactly how it might occur, makes you vulnerable. This whole kerfuffle has been a reminder to me of the need to have The Talk with my son again, and again and again until his Swiss-cheese brain retains it.

When parents of children with special needs long for a normal life for their kids, this isn't the kind of thing we think of, is it? Inclusion in regular schools and community activities is great, having normal-kid experiences is great ... except we can't pick and choose them, can we? Exposure to real life isn't all club meetings and football games and a spot on the homecoming court. It's sex and drugs and drinking and gossip and gangs. Those regular kids we so dream of our children being go through hell in high school. Be careful what you wish for.

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_{Cover image courtesy of Brookes Publishing}