Standing at the edge of the high school parking lot today the boy waved us good-bye for now. To me his day seems to be nothing big, it is just high school. To him emotionally it is akin to climbing the heights of Mt. Everest. Recently it seems he is trying to climb its iciest face without pitons or a rope.
40 years of living since I picked up my diploma have dulled my perception of the high school years. My memory of what was my real agony in those days has been papered over, slights have been forgiven and dispatched and the outright indignities have been buried really deep. I set aside the fact that when it got to bad I got really, really stoned.
His world is filled with those real pains of social anxiety and awkwardness. His world is a minefield of insecurity. In some ways I fell he was not served well by the justice and meritocracy driven years of Montessori. He just wasn’t prepared for the bruising back lot playground of America’s public schools.
I have told the lad, tough it out because college will be better. The best response from any of my little talks was a “Dad I don’t want to know,” when I told him I had a number of other girlfriends before I met his mother.
I have tried to tell him an anecdote or two about how life can play out in unanticipated and sometimes negative ways for the “cool” kids, but he doesn’t want to know about those tales. As far as he is concerned my experience was in a different world. Truth be told insults and slights are immediate today. Back then the person who called you a retard at least had to do it in person or within earshot to make it hurt. And the circle in travelled in only went as far as the four walls of your school. Now with Facebook and Twitter the hurt is mass media-ivied.
I get his pain but I can’t connect with him about it. High school for me just blew. I remember the agony of trying to get the hang of dating and it never, ever worked. I went to my prom but it was a Dutch date. My date and I agreed to go together because we didn’t want to be the ones who didn’t go. We negotiated the details on the back of Mr. Dietrich’s school bus. Nothing felt right; nothing was without pain. Hell it was only when I was suspended for running about the school sans cloths that my social life improved. But today with the zero tolerance policies at schools that would not work for him.
From my rolodex of buried agonies I remember one person who meaning to be kind tried to explain to me that my parents dressed me funny. But kindness intended or not, hearing that I wore “ragged assed goofy clothes” really stung. Oh and I had no self confidence whatsoever having gone from being grossly overweight to being a bit of a bean pole, all 140 pounds of my six foot frame. Hell because I couldn’t get a date I wasn’t even sure of my sexual orientation and that was pretty damned confusing.
The lad is struggling, mightily. He is not sleeping and he is always at the verge of tears. Intellectually he knows it should get better but viscerally he knows that it really, really sucks right now. I will try to be open and without judgment. I will try to approach him knowing his world is filled with pain and with peril to his personal integrity. It is in places like schools that we see how thin the veneer of civilized behavior really is.
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