His teachers began showing signs of stress. Zachary began spitting at them, hitting them. In a short time, they quit trying to work with him at all, and simply recorded his behavior each hour he was there, producing a laundry list of obnoxious behaviors that they'd hand to me at 1 o'clock when I went to pick him up. They didn't mention the lists in the letter they wrote later to say that they felt the school and Zachary had ceased being a good fit.

At the time of Zachary's entrance into preschool, Lisa and I were breaking up. I thought surely some of his behavior was triggered by the shifts in our lives together, and if not by the shifts, then by the fact that we were two women. Maybe we didn't know how to raise a boy. The teachers would imply this too, coyly asking, "And how do you discipline him at home?" "Are there any men in his life?" I often felt, and still do feel at times, like the mother of the misfit boy in Anne Tyler's short story "Teenage Wasteland:"

Had she really done all she could have? She longed she ached, for a time machine. Given one more chance, she'd do it perfectly, hug him more, praise him more, or perhaps praise him less. Oh, who can say ...

Tyler's fictional boy gets lost in the crowd and disappears. Zachary's problem seemed to be an inability to get lost in a crowd, to blend in. Even strangers would come up to me at parks and say, after a few a minutes of watching Zachary, "He's just like my son. He has ADD doesn't he?"

"Nooooo," I would reply. "He's just a spirited child." I couldn't see how someone would perceive Zachary as deficient in anything. He's a wonder. Yes, he requires more work than most kids, but I figure that's the price you pay for having a kid who can't walk to the car without pretending he's tip-toeing across a log, trying to keep his feet from being eaten by alligators.

People often comment on how bright he is. But all the things about Zachary that I find exciting and positive -- his constant motion, the way his mind darts this way then that, proved to work against him in a school setting.

He attended a private Catholic school for one year, we pulled him out at the end of kindergarten because they insinuated that if he couldn't read by the time he entered the first grade, he would be held back. There was no way he was going to perform well under that kind of pressure. Not only that, but his teacher carried a cowbell onto the playground, jangling it loudly at children who failed to swing straight.

One day before we pulled him out, I parked next to the playground, waiting for the school bell to ring. Children swarmed over the sand, swinging, jumping rope, playing chase. My eye was drawn to a kid who'd put a box over his head. He careened wildly around the playground, a couple of other boys in tow. They'd get close enough to touch him, then box-boy would whirl away and they'd back off. They laughed hysterically as he whipped himself in circles, like a cat with its head stuck in a can.

He looked like he'd go over the edge any minute, start head-butting somebody or something with his box. I waited for the teacher to jangle the cowbell -- if anybody deserved it, this kid did. I could see he was out of control, and I was relieved. Someone else had a kid like Zachary. The school bell rang and the children scattered. Box-boy slowed down, wobbly as a top, then BAM! He popped the box up high off his head. It was Zachary. My heart sank.

Lisa found a private school that advertised itself as focusing on the arts. It was a small school, and the staff was open to working with Zachary, or so it seemed. In retrospect, I see that the only reason he didn't get kicked out for three years was that Lisa was forever in the office pleading Zachary's case. She literally bullied them into keeping him.

Hardly a day went by without Zachary committing some indiscretion, some mild, some scary. He called one teacher an "ass"; he called another one an idiot. He played too rough on the playground, wouldn't listen in class. In a conference, the principal said that Zachary was going to ruin her school. She said she'd never seen such a rude child. One day after he insulted a substitute teacher, the principal grabbed him by the chin and threatened to "break his face." So we were at that place again, the place where the adults in authority wanted to kill him.