Closer to Okay
Posted on November 29, 2007
Filed Under Anxiety, education, kids, milestones, parenting | 10 Comments
Now you can all laugh out loud, clutch your sides and roll on the floor and say very loudly in the confines of your office space, Wasn’t that predictable and I told you so and Obviously. I deserve it. Really, chuckle at my expense, have a good old superior moment and finish it off, really bring it home, with some projected pity because yesterday, after receiving the much anticipated declaration that my son has been selected to part of the top secret enrichment program at his elementary school, O had a Chernobyl-like melt down about the prospect of additional home work and high levels of expectation and the possibility that, while spending thirty minutes a week in enrichment class, he might be missing something totally earth shattering occurring back in the classroom where he spends six hours a day, five days a week. Or, and this occurred to him about twenty minutes into his protracted fit of defiance, after much table pounding and weeping and rolling on the floor, he might miss gym and he loves gym and this is just so unfair and mean, mean, mean and he won’t do it, just won’t. Just try to make him.
I issued the usual bits of wisdom. “This is not a punishment but a privilege. All things in life worth doing require effort. You should be flattered and proud and as pleased as I your father and I are.” A little bit of O must have died each time I issued a simple platitude. It was so parental, so categorically Mom-ish of me. And, of course, my attempts at coercion, fell on deaf ears, rolling right off the obstinate back side of a child laying face down on the family room carpet.
So, as I am want to do, I dug in to some anger – inspired to rage by the possibility that I had birthed a child completely disinclined to give a damn.
How could you be so lazy? So reluctant to accept that you are capable, so unwilling to strive for above average? Rise to the occasion. Grasp opportunity by the horns and excel, God damn it. It was a tirade of army sergeant proportions. With strong undertones of “Be all you can be.”
For all this bluster and blather, all this jangling of frustration, I almost missed the hushed whisper from the muffled mouth of my eight year old as he gnawed at his shirt sleeves and cried great gushes down the front of his pajamas. It was quiet but sudden and floated there between us for a moment. He said, “They made a mistake in picking me, Mom. I’m not good at anything.”
Those two sentences immediately diffused the Mom-bomb that was seconds from exploding.
I want to say I gathered him in my arms and told him he was good enough and smart enough and that no one made even the tiniest mistake thinking him so. But he had slid so far away, had dug so deep into catatonic shut down, that all my efforts to nurture and adore were rebuffed. He lay rigid on the floor as I tried to smother him with parental affection.
So I climbed the stairs, heavy with defeat, and locked myself in the bathroom for a good cry. A rare moment of jagged breaths and puffing eyes. A self indulgent pause in which I let snot run down my face, collecting in a point at the tip of my chin. There in the confines of our dingy 1960’s bathroom with the mildew and the rust ring around the sink, I gave in a little to the fact that my wants and my needs are so different than those of my children. I embraced the fear and the reluctance and the fragile self-esteem of my one and only son and let it go, all this expectation that I had hung on the hope that my kids will be exactly what I had been.
Today I feel a little bit closer to okay with the people that they are.
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