What is the heart and crux of a human life? Put simply I don’t know. In all my reading while I have found many people willing to make a buck or promote particular agendas by claiming something is the heart of human life I have yet to find one that holds up for me. Is the answer to this question what I feel and experience of the world around me? Maybe, but I am not sure. Being engaged and active in living life seems to be something that is important but I am not sure it is the heart of life. No guru, no teacher, no method, like Van Morrison said I just want enlightenment, whatever that is.
Last night was very hard on my soul and psyche. I had to cancel my younger son’s participation in a school field trip, the fun field trip of the year. Secundus had been given the assignment of getting teacher signatures on a sheet showing what work he had turned in and what still owed. His grades right now are abysmal. When I called him at day’s end he told me the sheet was completed. When his mother got home he admitted he had not done it, not at all.
When I arrived home it was a scene out of my childhood. I found myself being directed into the living room to be the inquisitor. Facing my boy I asked him what had stopped him from getting the signatures. The claim was he had forgotten to do it for the first two classes and at that point he decided it was too late to get signatures from any of his other classes. Does this sound like a valid or good reason? To me it sounds like an excuse offered for a decision made early on in the day not to subject himself to the embarrassment and potential of being called to task by his teachers. Secundus had been warned there would be consequences and I have acted.
It was probably one of the harder parenting decisions I have had to make of late. Opting to go to the ER was easier. I have always hoped and believed that Secundus would rise to whatever challenge was put in front of him. He is ferocious as a debater. He is an omnivore of all kinds of knowledge. But something this year has taken him off track. His teachers blame it on him. I don’t at least not entirely. Some of the blame clearly belongs to me for not interceding early and often when things began to get bollixed up. Some of the blame belongs on the teachers, all of whom have my e-mail and my phone number for not contacting me when they were observing problems.
Secundus has fucked up. But so did I, as a kid. Hopefully he will right himself. In my case it took a move away from home to bring about change and that is not possible here. It may happen that I have to move him to another school. We’ll see. I so want to protect him from all the major problems that confronted me but I guess I can’t. Maybe life’s tough turns, those are its heart.
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/first-steps-to-digital-detox/
2 comments:
actual really bad consequences trump a minor intervention any day
I concur with Ssing. For what it's worth, my youngest daughter survived both my parental screwups and a number of failures by ELHS to provide the kind of education our high taxes were supposedly paying for by allowing her to basically blow off her Jr year. Same sort of thing -- the crack teaching staff would apparently rather she and her pals skip, and NOT notify her parents for a week or two, than have her in class. By the time we could intervene, it was long past the time for action. But, as I said, she survived........and now has a daughter of her own. So there IS some justice in the world. Somehow she learned that she was responsible for the consequences of her own behavior. Not sure how......
Stay healthy, my friend, and keep blogging. You have a gift......or two.
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