So you had a bad day...

I suspected middle school would be tough.

Political theory friends told me about their kids...hell on earth, amazing they made it through it, the worst part of their lives.  And now these kids have finished college and become political theorists themselves. Paul says that this is not necessarily the best case scenario, not a cause for optimism. I have another drink and decide to blog about it.

I was horrible in seventh and eighth grades (Paul was good but had no friends). Not quite Gus Van Sant level, but not nothing. I ran away (got caught before the night was done), did drugs (just pot but it was Alabama, and maybe I shouldn't erase the prescription drugs I scrounged out of our bathrooms), cut classes, got caught smoking in the locker room (I thought the teacher was an old hag, but she didn't turn me in), rounded more bases than Disney would acknowledge.

But not my kid, not my perfect brilliant angel, my musician, my math kid, the ethical kid who weeps for the outcasts, the kid who tells me about his life, who still hugs me, who endures the stuffed animals I place on his head and around his neck before he goes to sleep.

Change. Hormones. Who am I? Where do I belong? Do I have a place? Don't lock me in. I'm not you. You don't know me. You can't make me. But I did. I do. Don't I?

My students help. They tell me I over-analyze. Seventh graders don't think like political theorists (or do they? we've been reading Nietzsche. It fits: we saw kids playing king of the mountain outside our windows-- the perfect Nietzschean game).

He got beat up. The message from the nurse was that they weren't sending him to the hospital. The ice packs were enough. He started it. Provoked it. I'll see the footage tomorrow. Provoking a fight and then getting the shit beat out of him. And crying. Wanting respect, wanting to set the stage, the pace, wanting to call the shots, to be the man. And getting pummeled into black and blue and red.

He started it. He put a dirty broom on another kid, said "Mexican," and mocked him. That was last week. Or so it appears in the recap I head I heard this morning, the three minute version of days of his life, days I know too little about, but can't really ever know.

And also last week: "moose." Why does it hurt him to be called "moose"?  I don't get it. It's a gesture to a logo on the clothes we get for free, from another family whose son outgrows them. "Moose." Does this mean preppy? white? privileged? Weak?

I thought about making him delete or erase all his WOW levels. Start at the beginning. My students said this was way too harsh.

But still I navigate a terrain where the familiarities are deceptive and any move will have repercussions I cannot foresee but only regret.

Comments

[Craig]

"I'll see the footage tomorrow."

This is the same school that your son's friend got in trouble for filming a teacher?

[Jodi]

yes--there are surveillance cameras.

[old]

refuse to watch it! tell them you are going to sue them for videotaping without permissions from every parent.

ay yi yi. My daughter is five and I'm dreading the teen years. I think were going to figure out a way to go with the Mennonite Central Committee to someplace in Mexico or South America as soon as the oldest hits 12.

[ktismatics]

I hope your kid never finds out you wrote these things about him, exposing his humiliation to even more public scrutiny. This is the sort of anecdote you'll probably tell his second wife when you're old and don't give a damn about self-restraint any more. Hey, it's what my mother would have done.

[Jodi]

Ktismatics--I don't understand your comment at all. To me this is not an anecdote but an extremely painful and difficult situation. I'm stumbling my way through it, at a loss as to how to get through to a kid whose response to most everything over the past few months is 'it's no big deal.' And while I don't think that many folks who know my son read this blog, it could be that if he found out I wrote this that maybe he would have more empathy for the kid he put a dirty broom on and provoked.

[ktismatics]

Never mind then. I'm sorry your son had to go through this, and you too.

[CR]

I remember the clothes thing from when I was that age. In my case, a ton of stuff that I had was printed with the logo of my dad's company (must have been some 1980s high water schwag point). Also, Polo shirts that the bought me sometimes, and maybe even the little Izod gators before that.

To this day, I'm still allergic to logos on my clothes. The only warm weather sweater I have that's presentable is an Adidas number, with a little crest on the arm, but it embarrasses me to wear it into the office. Last year, an undergrad came up to me, plucked at it, and asked "what is this all about? I don't know Professor CR." Kind of made me cringe.

Sometimes I think that my politics are at least in some significant part defined by my years wearing a uniform to Catholic school. I understand the arguments against, but god do the uniforms take a lot of noxious friction out of the middle school experience.

Anyway, sounds to me like you're doing a good job Jodi, even if you don't know quite what to do.

[infinite thought]

Sorry to hear you're going through this, Jodi. I think you've answered your own concern in some ways though by remembering your own experiences. There's not a single person I know who didn't have a bad time in their teens in one way or another (withdrawing, acting out, fighting, etc.). He'll come back to you - I'm sure he knows how good a mother you are, I could see that when we met.

[Jodi]

Thanks, CR and IT. I really appeciate it.

[aidan]

CR - my school uniforms were bought second-hand, which meant an anxious beginning of the year when some of the rich kids would try to identify the poor kid wearing the one they'd donated to the sale. (Did mum bother to change the name sewn into the collar? Worse, had some kid marked his old uniform somehow so he'd know who was wearing it?) So I don't think that friction just goes away. But at least you don't have to worry about wearing the same thing every day...

Jodi, your son sounds like a really nice kid! He probably won't repeat that mistake either. I hope he's ok.

[Jodi]

Thanks, Aidan. He says that he realizes his mistake. I've asked him to do some writing over the past couple of days. A friend who teaches at the middle school said that choosing quotes would be easier/more age appropriate than addressing open questions. So I've asked him to write about respect and what that means (when he read it to me I couldn't stop the tears from streaming down my face). Today's quotes were about character. His writing gave me a chance to listen to him without my intruding too much. This let us talk about some of the things that bother him. For example, he said something about 'not being Italian.' This seems to bother him because the Italian community is extensive and close knit. We don't have family ties in the area. So I think that his comments about ethnicity are inflected by his attempt to figure out his place.

The clothes business seems a variation on the same thing--which group is he in and how labels signal this. Getting the signals wrong is dangerous.

[other]

Remember that kids are robust and that their experience is both more phenomenally intense and more temporally transient than that of adults. Your boy will probably be over this before you are. I got the ever-loving crap knocked out of me all the time for most of my formative years (I probably lost over 150 fights during the course of elementary and middle school and had to go to the hospital twice as a result of fights), and I like to think that I have managed to develop at least the trappings of emotional maturity. Kids are soldiers, and they get no credit for it.

[Dejan]

Jodianne maybe your kiddo is trying to be rebellious because he feels himself oppressed somehow, by your Desire? You indicate in the letter that he's your special boy. If you have some extra nurturing, give it to me; I'm a sucker for Oedipal moms.

[Dejan]

It's also interesting that he chose some racist slander, while you keep talking about these issues all the time

[Bob Allen]

As a father of three boys, I can testify that parenthood has a reactionary, conservatizing effect, however it also verifies what is reactionary-- concretizes, for example, that racism and "getting the signals wrong" are real, and that critical analyses are valid, that there are social constructs out there that are alienating, that is, commodifying...