Twenty ought nine was not an easy time in our house. I had to seriously consider the option of walking away from my spiraling mortgage, I worried about losing my job, my available credit shrunk, and life looked very scary for a while.
My son's father moved away...only a few miles in real distance but a continent's width in emotional distance from his kid. Hard to watch.
Big Love had (very expensive) surgery and the heartbreaking, baleful look he greeted me with when I picked him up is burned into my brain forever. The recovery was hard and it took a toll on us. He became an adolescent. His fears, which are numerous and include things like cell phones and brooms, manifested themselves in some....ahem...behaviors. (You should see him go after the broom: pure menace.)And my son became a teenager in earnest. There was cutting class, grade slippage, drug and alcohol use, lying, and stealing. Two school suspensions in one semester. There was the fact that I became the sole parent in the equation. I have a stressful, demanding job and there were weeks where EVERY DAY I got a call from the high school or the doggy daycare about a problem with one of them.
So basically I felt like every other working mother out there: as if I wasn't giving anything in my life the attention it needed, and as if I was doing a bad job everywhere.
But I can't really think of it as a horrible year because there was also so much to celebrate about my kid and my own growth as a parent. When 2009 started if you asked me how my son was doing I probably would have rolled my eyes and regaled you with stories of "how checked out" he was in school or how he was lying all the time and I was ready to send him off to live with his dad.
See, I've always been a bit of a tough love and clear limits kind of parent. If you don't do what's expected, there are consequences and the consequences will be applied consistently. I was raised with a lot of rigidity myself, in an era where parents didn't think much about where their kids were developmentally or that there might be something behind their kid's bad behavior besides laziness, stubbornness, and that general hatefulness that creeps into the teen personality.
Here's the thing: I went completely off the rails in the ninth grade. I rebelled with a vengeance to the rigidity in my house. I was extremely angry and depressed. The more angry my parents got: the more irrelevant they became. I didn't think about the future, I didn't think about other people, I didn't think about anything except avoiding the pain. I dropped out of high school halfway through my junior year. For the next several years, I lived at a subsistence level, with very little education and very few skills.
Here's my idea of a living nightmare: watching your teenager make the same mistakes that you did at his age, knowing the pain those mistakes can lead to, and finding yourself reacting in EXACTLY the same ineffective ways your parents did.
The thing is, the clear limits (grounding, taking things away) didn't work. They did not result in changed behavior. What was happening instead was that the punishments increased his alienation and isolation, made him more likely to act out. He kept ratcheting up his behavior ANYWAY.
It's a lonely feeling, being a single parent, knowing your parenting style isn't working, and having no freaking idea how to turn it around. I mean, really the books are all over the map. There isn't that much info on the Internet (are there mommy bloggers who blog about parenting teens? I couldn't find them.) I talked to other parents. They were all as bewildered as me.I thought the toddler years were going to be the hard ones.
Finding myself in this position, stripped of the tools in my parenting arsenal, with a kid getting deeper into trouble everyday, I had to re-evaluate. So, first I asked myself; what do I know? I know that my son is gifted intellectually. I know he is engaged with the world and interested in learning. I know that he is deeply, genuinely a good person who feels empathy for others and who would rather step on his tongue than hurt someone's feelings. I know he is generous, funny and outgoing. He is a talented writer and photographer. He has friends who truly love him and he truly loves them back.
I also know that he cannot manage a docket of homework. That system you use with your kids that you want to tell me about? We tried it. It doesn't work for us. His grades are poor, not because he hasn't mastered the subjects (he has), but because he can't manage homework. I know that the pressure mounted as his grades slipped. I know that he felt the weight of my disappointment. I know that when he cut school it was because he was miserable. I know that his anxiety and depression increased. He isn't into high school sports. He isn't on the yearbook committee. He's not one of those kids who will have a high school "career" that seamlessly glides into a college "career" at an ivy league school. He's a skater, he identifies with the outsiders; the slackers.
And so this is who he is: a bright, interesting, nice kid who is not doing well in school. I believe all of his other self-destructive behavior flows from that. In my position I cannot avoid being absolutely honest in answering the question: what do I really want for my kid? He is at a very good public high school that sends kids to ivy league schools and to the UCs. It takes an assembly line, pen to paper approach. Decent grades at this high school will get him into a good college after which he can get a decent job and...
...and life will be easy. He will avoid the heartache I felt in my early twenties watching the college kids pass me by, being poor, feeling I had no future.
But I have been talking to people, teachers who know him, experts, counselors. Guess what? The assembly line approach doesn't work for everyone. There are scads of bright kids, especially boys, who are failing in those systems. His grades started slipping the year mandated class sizes went away. When classes went from 20 students to 40, he started falling behind. He simply can't hear what the homework is, what's going to be on the test, what the teacher is trying to teach, in a class with 40 kids. His teachers acknowledge that the system doesn't work for everyone, and often doesn't work for 15 year old boys.
There are kids who need something different. They are bright and curious, but they need more of a connection with their teacher, they need someone to reach for them if they disengage. My son could do better in public school, maybe with more support, maybe with more discipline, maybe with Ritalin, but it will be so much harder for him than it is for some of his classmates.
He is not lazy. He is not indifferent. He learns differently than others. I am ashamed that it took so long for me to see this.
He has been taking one class at a small school that offers a one-to-one student teacher ratio. He is getting a high A in a class he is taking from the hardest teacher in the school. He doesn't cut that class. He does his homework. It's private and costly, it's like outsourcing homeschooling. I am going to do whatever it takes to send him there full time.
And here's the thing: trying to protect him from being the 15 year old me because he might become the twenty year old me is parenting from a place of fear. Accepting that he is entitled to the same journey of self-discovery that I took and supporting him in who he is right now, instead of punishing him, that's parenting from a place of love. Because at the end of the day, helping him be happy and feel good about who his is now, at 15, is so much more important to me than where he will go to college. It will work out. He will be ok, because he is ok in all the ways that really matter.
