And they're off ...

Oh, what joy! Oh, what bliss! Oh what wonderful gift bestowed upon us all. Have you heard? School has started again! It’s a blessing provided by our very own tax dollars for which we should all be thankful! What a miraculous opportunity for our young loved ones to become educated, enlightened, and catapulted into a successful higher education leading to an even more successful career and fabulously rewarding life!

Did anyone notice how sarcastic that sounded?

I hate the start of school. I hate the middle of school. And the only time I am pleased about anything remotely related to school is when it is over. The start of school is just the beginning of a 9 month war between me and the son. Every year we have this war. I am determined that he does his best and tries his hardest. He is determined to avoid all educational enlightenment and get away with doing the least amount of work possible. I can’t stand it. I hate it. And I dread it every single year.

There is so much time and effort spent in the preparation for the school year, going through the school day, getting ready for the school morning, figuring out and establishing what’s going to happen after school in the afternoon, and in the evening there is the additional burden of continued school work at home. No aspect of the day is free from the burden of school. It invades every capillary of life for every day in every month and every year that the children go to school.

The first year I guided the son in navigating school was fourth grade. He was recovering from having barely passed third grade and was deficient in having any idea what he was supposed to be doing, how he was supposed to be doing it, and why he was supposed to be there in the first place. Suffice to say, coming to live with me and undergoing my training camp for backward students was a life changing event. Luckily he was still young enough to be seeking his father’s approval so he went along with most everything I shoved in his path. He had to learn how to keep track of his stuff. He had to learn how to find his stuff so he could keep track of it. He had to learn how to behave in class and be able to distinguish what was acceptable behavior and what wasn’t. Believe it or not, but there is an art to learning how to be a good student, learning how to keep yourself organized, and learning how to study in a most efficient and effective manner.

I, of course, was trained in this art by the strict school teachers and demanding curriculum at the private school I attended from third through sixth grade. I have no ill will or repressed trauma lingering in my life from those years. And although they were often hellish times that drug me, not altogether willingly, down the path of higher education, I later understood and appreciated what I learned there. I was brimming with enthusiasm to pass this knowledge along and help another person successfully walk the arduous path to high school graduation. And, my friends, this is just another pathetic example of my naïve, idealistic, and completely unrealistic expectation of what you have to work with in a 10 year old boy.

A 10 year old boy is not interested in school. All he wants to do is play, get dirty, and eat. I came to pity the poor people who were so misguided as to make elementary school teaching their career. What a thankless job! What a daily doomsday of disappointment, disgust, and depression it brings to the poor humans who attempt to expose 10 year old boys to some form of higher learning. Within the first 9 weeks of experiencing the parental side of school, those poor people on the front lines had my utmost sympathies and pity.

I remembered, although somewhat vaguely, my own elementary school experience. In my mind, I was smart, eager to learn, and compliant (insert a picture here of my mother rolling her eyes and snorting with laughter). I was unable to reconcile that image in my mind with what I was seeing demonstrated to me by the 10 year old boy. I even tried to remember how my brother behaved in school. He was 10 years old once (and still might be) so I should have had some clue as to what I was dealing with, right? Wrong. I was completely unrealistic to think that a 10 year old boy would be happy to learn the art of notebook organization and the beauty of alphabetization. As a matter of fact, he looked horrified. And if I think back upon it, he probably was feeling quite trapped.

((His possible point of view: Why did Dad move in with this witch and who does she think she is to make me sit here and do all this stupid work?! I didn’t ask to move in here. I didn’t want to move in here. She won’t even let me play in my room without yelling about rules and dirt and pig sties. But I want to make Dad happy so I guess I better try to make her happy. ‘Cause whenever she’s not happy, Dad sure isn’t happy and that doesn’t seem to go too well for me.)) So for a completely different reason, the boy complied and the step-mother thought she was making progress. And a year passed and the boy made straight A’s and was surprised with himself.

My first mistake was in not realizing how INVOLVED a parent has to be. I had to supervise EVERYTHING. I had to make sure he got up in time, that he wore appropriate clothing, that he had all his books and notebooks when he left the house, and that he arrived at the first classroom of the day without getting lost somewhere between the parking lot and the school front door. Slowly the true scope of my mission became apparent as I stumbled across one mistake after the other. For example, I realized that letting him choose his own clothing was not going to work when I saw him standing at the bus stop in shorts, T-shirt and sandals on a morning when the other kids were wearing coats, sweaters, boots, scarves, and gloves. Then I looked at the temperature gauge on the dashboard of my car and saw that it was 43 degrees. After that I started making him report the morning temperature and weather for the day before approving what he was wearing. Live and learn, right?

All year long the excuse I got out of him for poor grades was, “…’cuz I’m stupid.” At the end of the year when he got straight A’s and received his invitation to join the Beta Club, we had a party in the kitchen to specifically celebrate the fact that he was officially NOT stupid anymore. And I spent the summer dreaming up fabulous ideas about what to do next year to enhance his learning experience.

And then 5th grade started. Once again I was up to my neck in the demands of being a parent involved in the school year. Filling out all the forms, sending in all the checks to pay for stuff, signing all the permission slips, paying for meals and pictures and spirit pencils and bumper stickers I would never stick on my car and all that crap. And for what? To see him bring home his first report card full of F’s? What??!! What happened to all the things I had taught him the year before? Another lesson learned at this point was that 11 year old boys don’t have any memory retention capabilities. Once again I rode him like white on rice to pound in the training of how to do homework, how to stay organized, and how to really study effectively. I figured if I could teach him these skills then the absorption of the information would take care of itself. I was wrong.

In 5th grade he started learning how to manipulate and lie to his teachers. During parent/teacher conferences I learned that the explanations he gave for not turning in work and not performing well in class was that 3 of his grandmothers had died (he only had one at the time and she was alive and kicking), that our dog evidently had a voracious appetite for his homework, that his father had said the work was stupid and that he didn’t have to do it, that he couldn’t see the board in class, and so on and so on, etc. Each teacher had a different litany of excuses and reasons he had provided to explain why he wasn’t doing his work. But all the teachers, and myself, knew the real reason – he just didn’t want to do it. And thus Free Will reared its ugly head and our kitchen table homework sessions became wrestling matches for control. I did everything possible to make the transport of completed homework from the kitchen table into the classroom something that was fool proof. But nothing ever seemed to work. At some point between our kitchen table and the classroom, the homework would disappear. I have never understood why the boy would spend the effort to do the work and then not turn it in to get credit for it. I seriously doubted his ability to form logical deductions. I definitely did not have a budding engineer on my hands.

Little did I know that this 11 year old person had a built-in counter measure device specifically programmed to ignore me, defy me, lie to me, and basically do anything and everything possible to get out of having to do anything school related. He lost books. He sabotaged his recorder so it wouldn’t play. He threw his gym uniform in the trash “because it was stinky”. He could never find a single one of the 14 million pencils I had bought for him. He never heard what the teacher said. He never wrote it down correctly. He wouldn’t write it down at all. He threw away papers whether they were good or bad. He never had anything to show for his day of work. I was completely in the dark as to what he was supposed to be doing. So I called a conference with all his teachers and threw myself at their mercy. We devised a plan of communication to draw a web of accountability around him. Once he realized he was trapped, he began to comply again. We finished the 5th year with a couple of A’s and the rest B’s.

Sixth and seventh grades were repeats of what I had experienced. However, they were more intense and required more than just supervision on my part. I now had to become the police, a private investigator, a lie detector, judge, jury, and torture dispenser. I am not even going to try to weave into this conversation our tale of adventure and excitement regarding his social development at this time. Suffice to say, the appearance of an open and empty condom wrapper under the sheets and in the middle of my bed was just the tip of the iceberg. Oh, and let’s not forget the special note that came from the lunch room supervisor around Christmas time informing us that we owed over $100 for food he ate during school. WHAT?! He ate breakfast before school and packed a bag lunch EVERY DAY. How could we possibly owe lunch money?? My husband went down there and even took a picture of the boy with him. The lunch room supervisor identified him, “Yes, that’s him; he buys pizza and cokes for himself and his friends everyday.” WHAT??!! The NERVE of him! How DARE he spend MY MONEY without permission or even a conversation? I was livid. Let’s add thief to his list of crimes.

I enacted a new consequence system towards the end of the sixth year. Keep in mind that the boy hates and avoids any type of physical exertion. He thinks that breaking a sweat is a symptom of the death throes of some serious illness. My new consequence … running laps in the back yard for every zero and failing grade I found out about. Our neighbor thought the boy was training for Track and Field because he was in the back yard so much. I stood out there – rain, sleet, or shine – counting laps and being the drill sergeant. His grades made a fast up-turn and suddenly he was a model student until the end of the year.

All this time I continued to attempt to breathe and maintain some semblance of calm and control while mumbling under my breath, “… where is your FATHER?! … I’m going to strangle this boy! … I don’t understand why he won’t do what I tell him to do?? … I’m going to explode into a million pieces if I have to hear ‘I dunno’ one more time!!!!! … “ We ended sixth and seventh grades with C’s and D’s. I was never so thankful for summer to come than at the end of seventh grade.

At eighth grade I threw up my hands. If he was going to be so rebellious and his father wasn’t going to seriously back me up, then why was I bothering to try so hard and just end up making all of us miserable? His father kept telling me to give him a chance to do it on his own and to stop breathing down his neck. So I told the boy, “Good luck and may the force be with you. You’ll need it.” And I stepped out of the way and handed the reins to his Father. I took a deep breath and told myself that if he was going to fail a grade, then eighth grade was a good one to do it in because it would not affect his high school or college transcripts. He could repeat 8th grade and it not hurt his chances for the future. And maybe failing was what he needed to do in order to understand how serious this was.

I must admit that I enjoyed the much reduced level of involvement required of me. I took him to school and picked him up at the end of the day. I made sure he had food to eat and a lunch to pack. I was reliable in providing him with school supplies, signed forms, checks for stupid spirit pencils and bumper stickers, and clean clothes. And I smiled as I watched him spiral downward, crash, and burn to a crisp. He, himself, came to me in tears during the last quarter of school finally realizing that he was going to fail the grade and only had 9 weeks left to do something to pull himself out of it. I smiled and asked if he had been following the rules I taught him, had he been utilizing the tools I taught him, and if he had been taking advantage of all extra credit, homework, and class work opportunities to make easy A’s?? Of course not. I went to the school with his father and we met with the teachers and the counselors and devised a plan that would provide him a chance to pass if he put in the work required to make it happen. And again I said, “Good luck.” He ended the 8th grade with all D’s.

Let me point out that the boy is not stupid, nor does he have a learning disability. He consistently scores in the top 95% of the state on all standardized tests. He reads at a college level. He learns quickly and gets bored even quicker. He knows enough about warfare and the middle ages to have a Masters in the subject. But do you think, at the age of 14, he can remember to write his name on his paper? Nope. Do you think he might have learned a lesson in eighth grade? We shall see.

The boy is now 15 and has started 9th grade at the high school. Once again I am involved up to my neck in forms, paying bills, getting supplies, supervising the school morning, planning for the time after school, and following up that the homework is done and the studying is complete before he begins to enjoy his privileges. I am attempting to reserve my strength and sanity for whatever the high school years may hold for us. Now I am no longer warring with typical boy-ish laziness and rebellion. Now my enemies are his raging hormones and whatever escapades they are going to drag him through as he plows his way into puberty. Oh, what joy and bliss awaits!

An instant mother doesn’t get those rose colored glasses that temper the view and love for the child and softens the pain and aggravation that the child dumps in their laps. Instant mothers have to take what was created by two other people – the good and the bad - and deal with it in the best way they know how despite the fact that they are probably ill equipped and piteously prepared for it. Step mothers are not always evil. Sometimes they are doing the best they can in a difficult situation while attempting to fulfill the role of a parent for a child that is a stranger to them and resents them for even trying. I have heard the term “blended family” describe the new wave of parents/step-parents and the mix of children in the household. “Blended” sounds very nice, polite, clean, and even somewhat gentle. In reality, instant mothers don’t feel “blended”. They more often than not feel traumatized and tossed like a paper doll into a 120 mph head wind.

I hate the start of the new school year …