What’s About Me and What’s About Them
W hat is lost, sitting in the principal’s office is an arrogance, that other people’s children get in trouble, make mistakes, but not mine.
Were one of my friends to call up and agonize over a child getting in trouble in school I would not hesitate to point out that this happens to the best of parents and is not a reflection on the job she is doing. But secretly? I think I had believed it wouldn’t happen to me, I never got in trouble as a kid, and my own kids are so GOOD, each of them.
I am dismayed at my own desire to say the correct thing, to get the consoling pat “you are a good mother,” even if it means selling my child up the river a little, that before I can even get to the misery of his that led to the mistake he made, I must untangle my own guilt and blame and frustration and fear. We are in trouble. I want to set out the evidences of all the things that I have done right, to prove how smart I am, how psychologically astute and politically correct I am, that I am someone who doesn’t get in trouble. And this child of mine, I want to protest — other parents have always wanted him to come play at their houses because he is so problem-free, he has exemplary manners and is caring and generous and easy-going. The defensiveness — he isn’t a problem! — reminds me of the Ross Greene thing that assorted friends have been finding helpful in The Explosive Child and Lost at School — the gentle reminder that kids have problems, but kids are not problems.
I know better than to have bought into that, and still, it’s ingrained. I have been studying a course in Bahà’í children’s education and love that my tutor asked me “What’s boredom?” because I started thinking about all the obstacles to engagement I can remember experiencing in a classroom, all the inexpressible needs that came out as boredom, not, apparently deficiencies in me, bored, but failures of the environment to meet my needs.
I don’t expect schools to meet my kids’ needs, honestly. I see an overworked teacher with 25 small people to pay attention to, so it seems like I ought to send them off to school with all of the sort of validating and positive messages I can give them, all of the problem-solving techniques I can teach them, all of the self-awareness I can instill in them in order to armor them against a sometimes dysfunctional environment. More, I am grateful that school is working for each of them as much as it is. But it is painful to confront the fact that for all my thinking this and feeling this I cannot protect them from the mistakes they make, the problems they have, the learning they must do.
I sat in the principal’s office waiting anxiously to be called and thought about Repat’s struggle with Sontag writing about how her child recedes when she is not with him, and the ever-more to be written about how motherhood fits into the rest of the picture here (like: am I dreadfully over-identified with my children that my response to my children’s problems is so layered with feelings about myself when my husband seems to leap admirably to the child and his needs?) There is more to be written when I have another quiet moment to myself (now dictating the frequency of blog entries, apparently) about rejecting either/or mentality when it comes to motherhood and writing and the constant search for balance, but my aftermath this morning is that I must confront being fallible as a parent but this being the high-stakes stuff it is, I don’t get excused from continuing to show up with all that I am and all that I have, the intellectual and emotional responses together, and struggling the struggle the best I can. Not getting punitive with the child, nor defensive with school administrators and teachers nor casting about for other people to blame.
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My own visit to the principals office in the fifth grade what set in motion by my teachers utter frustration and utter inability to get me to admit that I had done anything wrong. As I recall the principal didn’t have much luck either
P: Don’t you think you ought to return to the classroom and apologize?
Me: (Flatly) No.
P: Why not?
Me: Because I didn’t do anything wrong
Finally, in an act of desperation the Principal said that she was going to have to call my parents and discuss my suspension from school, because I was such an unruly child, to which I finally agreed to apologize (for what I had no idea).
Jenny talking to D. about Ben on “lost”
D.: So he really is evil.
J: Not necessarily, it is never as simple as good and bad, most people think they are doing good for the right reasons…
Atticus: “you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them.”
This sounds really hard. And then, you sound very wise and full of introspective grace that I hope to muster someday given a similar parenting challenge.
I’m thinking of Judith Warner, who wrote a great essay on this sort of over-identification.
I do identify though with the thought (even w/a toddler): “for all my thinking this and feeling this I cannot protect them from the mistakes they make, the problems they have, the learning they must do.” Ugh.
And–it seems to me that it is ALWAYS an attempt to figure exactly this out: “what’s about me and what’s about them.” Indeed.
http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/11/there-was-something-about-last/
This is the one.
Oh for the love of God! Can I tell you how many times I have sat down in front of the computer to respond to this only to be pulled away by the cries of demanding little (and not-so-little) ones? Jeepers.
I’m pretty sure that we all have those secret thoughts about other people’s kids (the one’s who have different issues than our own kids have). However, not everyone has the courage or even the self awareness to talk about it. I had this moment of clarity the other day (I’m sure it was just coincidence that it happened right after an exchange with one of the more smug moms at the homeschool co-op) when I became really grateful for all the “problems” we’ve had with our first born because otherwise I could have continued being the smug, self-satisfied, why doesn’t everybody do it like I do it kind of mothers that I was when we first re-connected in Austin. Remember how I knew it all back then? Remember? ugh. It’s embarrassing to think back to those days.
Just think of all the opportunities for spiritual growth our children are providing us with. Hey, and since we each have four children does that mean that we will be more spiritually evolved than the poor slobs with just two kids? uh oh. I think I just stumbled into another land mine of smugness. Thank goodness I don’t actually believe that.
Okay, one last thought. Why shouldn’t we expect our schools to meet our kids’ needs? I’m pretty sure I do expect that, which is maybe why I’ve been so dismayed with them. What are the pros and cons to each position?
Oh, but I am so HAPPY when I am smug and self-satisfied and think I have all the answers, aren’t I? You remind me I need to put the tagline “Providing others with the opportunity for spiritual growth for thirty-six years” somewhere on my blog.
This still feels so incomplete to me. I went back and forth that the child who got in trouble got in trouble for something he had been explicitly warned against and something about it felt disingenuous, manipulative. But maybe that is a cause for even greater compassion? And then he wrote a letter of apology where he accused himself of being “monstrous” which I didn’t allow into the revision.
The Judith Warner brought up all of my own chafing at being told who I was as a pre-teen, and wondering to what extent I do that with my boys.
The expectations of schools is a whole ‘nother conversation, of course, but I grew up with teacher parents who thought of the system as already broken, so I get to be astonished when it works at all. I observe funny reactions in myself to the school as an institution, feel like I am too cowed to be a proper advocate for the boys, but then also cynical in funny ways.