Which way do I turn? And the week-end round-up.
Posted on October 26, 2007
Filed Under kids, parenting, suburban joys, education, bus rides, Friday round-up, juvenile deliquents |
Today I’m going to do a sort of week-end round-up…just like NPR but less astute or relevant.
As for Spider Mama and mini-me - they are all gone. GONE I say. Not a single spider is left hanging in the now tattered and forgotten web in my east bedroom window. There are tons of bugs still stuck in the awkward, splayed poses of the vanquished but there is no spider left to eat them. Rather than think of the spider-absence as a sure sign of arachnoid demise, I prefer to think of it as a temporary loss. Those spiders packed it up and went to Bonita Springs for the Winter. They’ll be back, come April, with the robins and the tulips and the sweet smell of new grass.
*****
There’s been a nice and unexpected development in the bus situation and I’m left feeling reassured that there are some kind kids still left on the planet. I did a little reconnaissance yesterday. And hired a fifth grader to do my snooping. I have an acquaintance whose son rides the bus with O and G. He’s a quiet kid, a well-behaved eleven year old who is rarely in trouble. I asked this child’s mother if she had heard any bus-tales from her mild son. She had heard nothing but promised to ask him about the bus on his return from school.
She called last night to say she’d spoken with her son and he had validated O’s cry of foul. According to quiet-boy there are two or three kids who give my O a really hard time. This child not only felt concerned about how O was being treated, he felt sympathetic enough to offer to be O’s seat partner on the bus. There is safety in numbers. There is safety among the green vinyl seats of school bus hell when a big fifth grader offers to watch your back. Needless to say, O and I are thrilled and thankful and anxious to see how this new alliance changes the dynamic on Bus 7.
*****
While I’m talking about dynamics, I’ve gotta share the interesting news that was presented to me last night. (Yes, it was a very busy phone night at the Madmarriage household). I was chatting with my friend and mother of another student in O’s class, (okay, I was complaining about the trials and tribulations of being a room parent and she was patiently listening), when she broke in to tell me about the true drama at hand in classroom 137. According to my friend, there has been a great to-do surrounding a the new kid, I’ll call him Justin. Apparently Justin has a penchant for developing long and violently disturbing stories during journal time. His tales of animal dismemberment and bloody conflicts have frightened some of his classmates. The mothers of the frightened classmates have launched a full offensive designed to remove Justin from the class and the school. Phone calls home to Justin’s parents have not been returned. Child services may be called in to do a home visit. A witch hunt, perhaps justified, perhaps not, has been launched. There are angry mothers demanding that this Justin-kid be burned at the stake.
I feel sort of sorry for Justin, clearly there are issues at hand. And I feel deeply sorry for the teacher, Mr. S, who must soldier through the brouhaha and sort fact from fiction all while trying to reach Justin’s disinterested parents and dodging the expert advance of mothers with inflamed imaginations who, if left to their own devices, would have Justin hog tied and roasted on a spit.
I am confused by my own reactions to the news about Justin. After all, I had a perfectly normal conversation with Justin’s mother just yesterday about the upcoming class Halloween party. She didn’t strike me as negligent or pathological. She did mention that they had just moved. Perhaps, in the relocation process, her voice mail was broken and phone calls from the school were lost rather than ignored. I’m inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt and I guess I’m naive, but I have a very hard time believing that a parent would purposely ignore phone calls from their own child’s teacher. The idea of deliberate neglect is just so hard for me to fathom.
But while I’m feeling all kinds of progressive and accepting, I’m also wrestling with my inner neurotic. After all, there have been more than 50 school shootings since 1997, Columbine (the mother of all school disasters) and Paducah and Jonesboro and Va. Tech and Cleveland, all jangling at my nerves, making me feel edgy and irrational and fiercely protective.
This Justin-thing is a tough one as it is really none of my business until, well, it is. And it will only become my business once my O is directly effected, violently or otherwise. So I soothe myself with the facts. All but one of the notorious school shootings were perpetrated by children twelve years old or older. There is only Mount Township, Michigan to remind us that even six and seven year olds can die at the hands of their peers.
Amid all this worrying, my e-mails to the parents of Room 137 about candy corn relays and spider web cookies and Monster Mash Freeze Dance must seem incredibly discordant and unbelievable. But, really, eight year old children and their parents should be concerned with pumpkin table clothes and how many jelly beans are in the Halloween jelly bean jar. Morbid thoughts of potential grade school violence are just not normal.
Each year, this parenting thing gets a little more complicated. The answers to difficult questions become more elusive and obtuse as my children grow older and spend their days swimming up stream, in a river of peers and perverts and juvenile delinquents. What a world. What a world.
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