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You’re Missing The Point

Based on some of the reader feedback I’ve received lately, it’s a safe bet that some people miss the point of this blog.

Mood music:

When they read about the tougher things I’ve been through, they walk away with the notion that this is about stewing over childhood pain and obsessing over the challenges of everyday life.

But that’s not the point at all. This is about finding the beauty in life and celebrating the victories regardless of what life throws at you.

A year or so ago I led a meeting of Overeater’s Anonymous (OA), which is a 12-Step program for compulsive binge eaters, much like AA is such for alcoholics. During these meetings, the leader tells his or her story for about 15 minutes. The first five cover the speaker’s ugly path to addiction, the second five focuses on the point we hit bottom and entered the program, and the final five are about how our lives are today in recovery.

So I delved into the stormy past: The older brother dying, the best friend killing himself, the childhood disease and the depression and addiction that resulted. And, of course, the underlying OCD.

At the end of the meeting, someone expressed shock over all the troubles I’ve been through. “It’s just been one tragedy after another,” the person said. “You’ve had a horrible life.”

A horrible life? I don’t think so.

Consider the following:

I may struggle with addictive behavior, but I’m not shoving junk down my throat until my insides are ready to explode like I used to.

I may have struggled during points in my career where the demons were winning. But I’ve survived all that and made close friends in every work environment I’ve ever inhabited.

While I have been through the meat grinder, there have been many years of peace, joy and  happiness in between the bad stuff. All these events are stretched out over the 41-plus years I’ve been around. If you were to sit and watch even a three-hour replay of events, you’d find it a lot more boring.

To understand this, just think about your own life. You’ve no doubt experienced sickness and death, family dysfunction and career ups and downs.

If you haven’t, you will.

In between the rough patches, I fell in love with and married the best gal on Earth, had two precious children who keep me laughing and loving, I’ve enjoyed a lot of success in my career, traveled to a lot of cool places and found God.

That stuff doesn’t suck.

Then there’s the joy I feel every day in recovery. All the great friends I have, doing a job I love and having the OCD under control.

Would I want to go through the bad stuff again? Of course not. But the weird truth is that I’m not sure I’d change the past, either. It’s easy for someone to wish they had a lost loved one back in their life and that they were less touched by illness.

But without having gone through these things, would I be where I’m at today?

I really don’t see how.

So when you read about some of the tougher things in this blog, don’t worry about me and don’t feel bad. I’m no different from most people in what I’ve been through, and it’s all good.

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Yes, Virginia, There Is A Grinch

Everything about Christmas is infuriating me today. It’s progress, because Christmas once brought out deep feelings of sadness, and I prefer self-righteous fury over sadness.

Still, this is supposed to be a joyful season and I’m trying to find that joy. After all, nobody wants a cranky bastard in the room ruining the party. So I’ve been seeking  THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT, and I must admit the results have been mixed.

One thing that makes me cranky is the music. Erin has this “Rock N Roll” Christmas album she loves to play, but I hate it. Billy Squier and Bon Jovi singing Christmas songs grates on my nerves. So I searched for alternatives. Twisted Sister made a Christmas album, which always amuses me since they are a band of Jewish guys from New York. Check this out:

[spotify:track:4ndDBQGMALpfVUxhz5Ytwj]

That cheers me up a bit. But I also wanted to find some Christmas music that was more serious yet in tune with my heavy metal tastes. Duh, says my friend Dave Marcus. Rob Halford has just such an album. That’s right, Rob Halford, lead vocalist of legendary metal band Judas Priest.

I found some Christmassy warmth in this rendition of “Oh Holy Night” —

In another effort, I turned on all the Christmas lights even though it was the middle of the day. It all looks pretty, but it’s also a lot like the happy lamp I’m supposed to use when the darkness of winter sets in: My brain knows it’s not real sunlight, and that sort of spoils the moment.

I figured going to the Christmas pageant at my kids’ school would put me in the spirit, and it did brighten the mood for me. The kids and their teachers did a wonderful job putting it on. But it was offset by my annoyance at all the parents who get pissy about where you sit at these events because they’re trying to save a bunch of seats for relatives who are running late, like it’s their God-given right to do so.

I finished all the Christmas shopping in record time, but I see all the packages in the garage and know it’s only a matter of time before I have to start wrapping. Boo hoo.

Yeah. I’m just not feeling it. Not the warm and fuzzy stuff, anyway.

But that’s OK.

There are upsides to the downside.

One is that once Christmas Eve and Day arrive, I usually have a pleasant day with family. Maybe it’s a reward for enduring the rest of the season.

Unlike the Christmas seasons of several years ago, I’m not binge-eating my way through December. That’s huge progress, because I was always a pile of toxic waste this time of year. No binges means that while I’m still cranky, I’m healthier.

I also feel more grounded in knowing that in the end, when you strip away all the bullshit, the holiday is about Christ entering the world to save sinners like me. The annoying stuff will come and go, but that truth is always there.

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When You’re A Kid, Little Incidents Are A Big Deal

A point my mother made regarding some of what I’ve written about the past: “I remember differently than you on most entries. Not because I am blind but because children are little and see things big.”

Mood music:

I don’t disagree with that. When you’re little you do see things big.

In this case, my mother was referring to the stuff I’ve written about my childhood and whether things really happened as I remember it. “I love you but cannot understand how you can go online and write these awful Mommy Dearest entries,” she wrote to me (full comment — and my response — at the bottom of this post).

For those who aren’t aware, “Mommie Dearest” is a memoir written by Christina Crawford, the adopted daughter of actress Joan Crawford. The book, which depicts Christina’s childhood and her relationship with her mother, was published in 1978 and released as a movie in the early 1980s.

Christina’s version of her childhood is brutal. By her account, her mother beat her with a wire hanger, made her scrub the bathroom floor in the middle of the night and cut her son and daughter from her will.

As kids we joked about the movie and often suggested our mom was “Mommie Dearest.” To this day, truth be told, the scene in the movie where Joan freaks out about the wire hanger sends me into a fit of laughter.

My mother always hated when we made the comparisons, which is understandable. The thing is, I don’t really remember her as a “Mommie Dearest.” Not even close. Ugly things did happen back then, but we suffered as a family. My mother reacted back then in ways that didn’t make sense to me, but I don’t see her as the symbol of a bad childhood. Not for one second. Her love for us kids was unmistakable, even when she struggled to cling to sanity in our presence.

Why do I write about it here, for all to see? There are several reasons.

To understand my adulthood with OCD and addictive behavior, it’s important to see how I got that way. History plays an important role in how our adult demons manifest themselves. If I don’t share this stuff, the reader won’t connect with all the points I make about how I was able to overcome a lot of demons. To that statement some will cry bullshit. That’s fine by me. The memories must be shared because that’s how the reader is able to relate what I tell them to their own experiences.

Those who have written me about how this blog has helped them gain perspective about their own lives and allowed them to start dealing with their problems always point to the back story. They relate to it first, and then they are able to put my end points into perspective. Without the raw recollections to chew on, you can’t start building a foundation of strong recovery.

Also, since this blog is part memoir, the author’s recollections will inevitably leave some people stung and pissed off.

This exchange with my mom has been useful in that it makes me look at my own behavior as a parent.

I’d love to tell you that I learned from my parents’ mistakes and have been a better dad as a result, but is that really how my kids see it?

After all, as my mother noted, when you’re little you see things big.

When they’re in their 40s, will they remember my smaller quirks as explosive outbursts that cut them to the core?

I guess I’ll find out in a few years.

But for now, it gives me extra incentive to conduct myself in a way that they will look back on with respect and happiness.

If I succeed, everything I went through will have been worth it.

Mommie_Dearest

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Seeds Of Rage At The Paul Revere School

My friend Marc Serra posted an eighth-grade class picture from the Paul Revere School, circa 1984-85. The scowl on my face says a lot about the time.

Here I am, first from left in the back, looking like I want to stab someone in the eye:

Paul Revere

The photo was snapped maybe a year or so after my brother died. I was gaining weight by the boatload and couldn’t seem to stop. Some of the kids picked on me as a result, though I gave as good (or badly) as I got. Things at home were less than harmonious for the obvious reasons.

This is around the time I was starting to rebel. I grew my hair long and started staying out late, especially when I was with my father, who didn’t keep tabs on me as closely as my mother did. I learned to escape not just in food, but in alcohol and weed. 

The school district knew I was an emotional, troubled kid. I started getting extra help in elementary school because of  the toll Crohn’s Disease had taken on my young body. It worked at first, but when I went to the Paul Revere School for seventh and eighth grade, the safety was off the gun.

There, kids were divided into three groups: The A group, the B group and the C group. The first was for the kids who consistently got As on their report cards. To the lower groups, they were sort of an elite class. The B group is where most kids were. Then there was my group, the C group, where the kids with bad grades were sent to rot. I think the school was trying to do what was best for students. But the stigma of being on the low end of the student body was damaging all the same.

Call it the unintended consequence.

The C kids were never really encouraged to study their way to the B or A groups. We just got teachers that gave us the bare minimum for work and treated us like troublemakers to be kept in line.

Indeed, the C group was where all the troublemakers were. I was a quieter version of trouble. I mostly hurt myself by dabbling in addictive substances and ignoring the academics. Other kids in my class were always getting into fights and some were already getting arrested. There were some so-called normal kids in the mix who did study their way into the higher groups.

Some of the C kids got picked on a lot, including me, though I also met a lot of great kids along the way.

I remained a slacker in high school and it took a couple years of community college before I found my ability to study hard and advance.

It all worked out for me, and I have no regrets. Those days were what they were, and as I look at this picture, I see kids I remember fondly.

Marc Serra and I bonded over music, including the AC/DC song at the start of this post. All the girls in the row in front of me were kind to me. One of them, Lena Cerundolo (third from left) lost a sibling, too. Several kids were originally from the Roosevelt School in the Point of Pines, and we had essentially grown up together. I hope everyone in the picture is doing well today. I know many of them are, as I’m in touch with them on Facebook.

This picture is like the fourth-grade report card I wrote about recently. It’s a snapshot in time, something I can look at and suddenly remember everything I was going through at that point.

Staring at it in the rear-view mirror, I have no regrets or grudges. History played out as it was meant to, and here we all are.

Thanks for sharing, Marc.

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My Mother Found The Blog

In my slow effort to reconcile with my mother, I made it easier for her to find this blog. Given the raw emotion to be found here, I was pretty sure it would be rough.

Mood music:

I suspect it hasn’t been easy for her to read through this thing. Not at all. But her initial comments suggest she’s really trying to get it and put it in the proper perspective.

Some of my memories are not as she remembered the sequence of events, but I knew that would be the case. As I try to point out regularly, this blog is based on my recollection of things. But my recollection is never going to be the same as how others saw it.

One of my favorite rock autobiographies is “The Dirt” from all four members of Motley Crue. What I love about it is that each member writes about the same events, and while they remember many details the same way, there are other events each band member remembers differently, especially when it comes to what they think was going on in their bandmates’ heads. By seeing the four different perspectives, events become a lot more real and ironclad.

That’s why I always encourage family members to chime in via the comments section. If they remember an event differently, the reader should know about it. Then we get closer to the truth.

I suspect my mother will focus more on the bad stuff in here than the good. It would be hard not to when you’re essentially reliving family history as remembered by the youngest child.

That has to be a mind-bender.

She commented this morning that while she doesn’t remember everything the same way, she understands (or at least accepts) my need to write it all down and share. She suggested that she just wants me to be well and focus on my family.

She also noted that the post I wrote about my brother’s death had a couple facts wrong. He didn’t walk to the ambulance as I remembered, and he died earlier than I thought. She said it as an FYI, not in an accusatory, bitter tone.

I don’t think she would have been able to see things this way even a couple years ago.

I’m still not sure how far I want to go with this. I’m still somewhat gun shy about getting too close again. That’s not her fault. It’s just that I have my OCD triggers, and I have to be mindful of them. I have to set clear boundaries. I’m still going to keep my distance. But I’m at least ready to talk.

I started to feel this way at my Cousin Andrew’s wedding in August. I saw a lot of family members I hadn’t seen for a very long time, and I was admittedly feeling somewhat lost.

I give my mother a lot of credit. Despite all the trouble between us, she gave me and Erin hugs and was very friendly. That couldn’t have been easy. My stepfather kept his distance, but given the tension in the air, who could really blame him?

My Aunt Robin didn’t say more than three words to me, but that’s ok. She hadn’t seen us in a very long time and that has to create some awkwardness. I watched her being a good, nurturing and loving aunt to several cousins, and that made me happy. It was really good talking to my Aunt Dee. The two of them look great. Aunt Robin has such a close resemblance to my late grandmother that I was taken aback at first. It goes to show that the dead live on in others. Also very comforting to see.

One of my cousins was there and it was the first time I had seen her in over 20 years. She’s not on speaking terms with much of the family. She didn’t remember me on sight, but last time we saw each other I was a skinny, long-haired metal head. Now I’m a husky, bald-headed metal head.

Since she’s a black sheep too, it’s rather ironic and funny that she didn’t recognize me. Or maybe it made perfect sense.

This family has been through the meat grinder. There has been a lot of mistrust and misunderstanding along the way. There’s been way too much sickness and death. We’re not special in that regard. Every family has a deep reservoir of drama.

I don’t think the wedding did much to change the family dynamics. The people who are not on speaking terms need a lot more than a family wedding to resolve the overwhelming tangle of misfiring wires.

But everyone getting along in the same space showed that despite everything, despite the divisions, everyone still fundamentally loves each other. That’s important, because as one of the refrains in the second reading of the wedding ceremony made plain, you can have everything in the world. But if you don’t have love, you have nothing.

I’ve had a lot of love and blessings in my life in the last few years. I’ve come far in overcoming addictions and mental illness. Even the family discord has served a purpose.

My Uncle Bobby, the last of the siblings that included my grandmother, took me aside at one point and said life is too short to hate.

He is absolutely right.

But hate has nothing to do with it.

Mistrust, hurt feelings and deep disagreements over right and wrong? Absolutely. But not hate.

I still love everyone, and I forgave my mother a long time ago.

So why, you’re probably wondering, can’t we just let the past lie in its grave and move on? Because relationships are deeply complex things, and it is never that simple or easy.

But I let Ma find this blog, and believe me: That was a big fucking step.

I hope it leads to something better.

Michael, left, me and Wendi, sometime in the early 1970s. The family has been through the wringer over the years.
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THE OCD DIARIES, Two Years Later

Two years ago today, in a moment of Christmas-induced depression, I started this blog. I meant for it to be a place where I could go and spill out the insanity in my head so I could carry on with life.

In short order, it snowballed into much more than that.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/IKpEoRlcHfA

About a year into my recovery from serious mental illness and addiction — the most uncool, unglamorous addiction at that — I started thinking about sharing where I’ve been. My reasoning was simple: I’d listened to a lot of people toss around the OCD acronym to describe everything from being a type A personality to just being stressed. I also saw a lot of people who were traveling the road I’d been down and were hiding their true nature from the world for fear of a backlash at work and in social circles.

At some point, that bullshit became unacceptable to me.

I started getting sick of hiding. I decided the only way to beat my demons at their sick little game was to push them out into the light, so everyone could see how ugly they were and how bad they smelled. That would make them weaker, and me stronger. And so that’s how this started out, as a stigma-busting exercise.

Then, something happened. A lot of you started writing to me about your own struggles and asking questions about how I deal with specific challenges life hurls at me. The readership has steadily increased.

Truth be told, life with THE OCD DIARIES hasn’t been what I’d call pure bliss. There are many mornings where I’d rather be doing other things, but the blog calls to me. A new thought pops into my head and has to come out. It can also be tough on my wife, because sometimes she only learns about what’s going on in my head from what’s in the blog. I don’t mean to do that. It’s just that I often can’t form my thoughts clearly in discussion. I come here to do it, and when I’m done the whole world sees it.

More than once I’ve asked Erin if I should kill this blog. Despite the discomfort it can cause her at times, she always argues against shutting it down. It’s too important to my own recovery process, and others stand to learn from it or at least relate to it.

And so I push forward.

One difference: I run almost ever post I write by her before posting it. I’ve shelved several posts at her recommendation, and it’s probably for the best. Restraint has never been one of my strengths.

This blog has helped me repair relationships that were strained or broken. It has also damaged some friendships. When you write all your feelings down without a filter, you’re inevitably going to make someone angry.

One dear friend suggested I push buttons for a good story and don’t know how to let sleeping dogs lie. She’s right about the sleeping dogs part, but I don’t agree with the first suggestion. I am certainly a button pusher. But I don’t push to generate a good story. I don’t set out to do that, at least.

Life happens and I write about how I feel about it, and how I try to apply the lessons I’ve learned. It’s never my way or the highway. If you read this blog as an instruction manual for life, you’re doing it wrong. What works for me isn’t necessarily going to fit your own needs.

Over time, the subject matter of this blog has broadened. It started out primarily as a blog about OCD and addiction. Then it expanded to include my love of music and my commentary on current events as they relate to our mental state.

I recently rewrote the “about” section of the blog to better explain the whole package. Reiterating it is a pretty good way to end this entry. You can see it here.

Thanks for reading.

"Obsession," by Bill Fennell

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Slaying Old Fears In The Hollywood Hills

This week I’ve been in Los Angeles on business. But I’ve been slaying some old demons while here.

Mood music:

Let’s go back 20 years — July 1991 — when I came out here with Sean Marley on my first trip to the west coast. I didn’t really want to go because I was afraid of everything and everyone. But Sean was red hot about the idea, and back then I was always out to impress the man. So off we went, on a 10-day California trip that would take us as far north as Eureka and as far south as Los Angeles. We lived in the rental car the whole time except for L.A., where we stayed in a friend’s apartment.

In L.A., we hooked up with a guy who used to live in the Point of Pines in Revere. I didn’t remember him, but he and Sean were tight as kids. Michael was his name. Michael took us to visit a couple of his friends who were living the stereotypical Hollywood lifestyle. They had a band, but sat in their cramped bungalow all day, surrounded by towers of empty beer cans and cigarette boxes, watching all the bad daytime TV they could feast their eyes on.

One of them asked me where we were from. The Boston area, I told him.

“Dude,” he said through the cloud of cigarette smoke encircling his head. “That’s a pretty long way from here.”

The statement filled me with more terror.

A pretty long way from here. From my safe place in the basement apartment at 22 Lynnway, Revere, Mass.

Terror.

That’s pretty much what the trip was. Sean ate it all up and had the time of his life, despite me.

I didn’t know back then that I suffered from OCD-induced fear and anxiety. I was still many years away from the therapy, medication and spiritual conversion. I had no idea what the 12 steps were when I was 21. Too bad, because I SHOULD have had the time of my life on that trip, too.

But that’s what fear does. It robs you blind. Robs you of everything that should make life worthwhile.

Fast-forward to the present. I’m back in LA on business. But I decided I was going to do a few things I couldn’t do last time I was here because of the fear.

I rented a car and drove all over Los Angeles and went as far south as Orange County, using the same freeways that scared the daylights out of me back then.

Benedict Canyon, Beverly Hills

I took walks all over the place and mingled freely with people — something else I was afraid to do before.

I went deep into the Hollywood Hills and drove to some old murder sites because as a kid these places left me obsessed and afraid. The Manson Murders was particularly scarring on my young mind. From the first time I saw the TV movie “Helter Skelter” in the late 1970s through the first time I read the book from beginning to end in the 1980s it’s been the stuff of nightmares. That has fed the obsessive part of me. I read that book two or three times a year and knew exactly where every murder scene was before setting foot on the plane.

So I traveled to Cielo Drive, where Sharon Tate and her friends were murdered, and Waverly Drive a half-hour away, where Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were murdered the following night.

Behind that gate, Sharon Tate and four others were murdered by minions of Charles Manson
Cielo Drive, as seen from across the canyon. The house at the far left replaced the house where Sharon Tate and friends were murdered
On the second night of terror, minions of Charles Manson went to this house and murdered Leno and Rosemary LaBianca

I also visited the scene of the Wonderland Murders.

Scene of the Wonderland Murders

Along the way, I visited the Sunset Strip, the cradle of Rock ‘N Roll History.

Every band that ever mattered played here
Motley Crue lived here for nine months in 1981-82. Parts of the Shout at the Devil album were written here

Driving in strange places scares me less and less the more I do it. This was a big step in slaying the old fears.

The scary glow of the Manson Murders was also dimmed considerably this trip. When you look across the canyon to where the Tate-Polanski house once stood, the scene is peaceful. Driving to the gate of where the murders happened killed the mystique for me.

I think I’ll put the old “Helter Skelter” book away now.

The lesson of this post is that facing fears is sometimes the only way to slay them. I did the hardest work on myself long before this trip. But the journey has been the icing on that cake.

When you learn to manage your fears, a whole new world is opened up before you.

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Is It Bad That Two Family Members Are In Therapy?

If more than one member of the same family is in therapy, is that a sign that the family is seriously screwed up?

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/iFAweWkqqjk

That’s the question we are asking ourselves these days. As the reader knows by now, I’ve been in therapy for OCD and related issues for seven years. Duncan sees a children’s therapist to help him work through his ADHD.

Is this family a basket case? In my opinion, it’s exactly the opposite.

I wouldn’t be enjoying the equilibrium I have today if not for the years of therapy.

Meanwhile, Duncan is learning a lot of helpful techniques to help him focus and control his anger.

I’m a staunch advocate of therapy as a tool for mental health. I think too many people are embarrassed when it’s suggested that therapy would do them some good. People who stay away from therapy because they feel it’s a mark of weakness have no idea what they are denying themselves. That makes me sad.

It’s a funny thing when I talk to people suffering from depression, addiction and other troubles of the mind. Folks seem more comfortable about the idea of pills than in seeing a therapist. After all, they’re just crazy “shrinks” in white coats  obsessed with how your childhood nightmares compromised your adult sex life, right?

I’ve been to many therapists in my life. I was sent to one at Children’s Hospital in Boston as a kid to talk through the emotions of being sick with Chron’s Disease all the time. That same therapist also tried to help me and my siblings process the bitter aftermath of our parents’ divorce in 1980.

As a teenager, I went to another therapist to discuss my brother’s death and my difficulty in getting along with my stepmother (a wonderful, wonderful woman who I love dearly, by the way. But as a kid I didn’t get along with her).

That guy was a piece of work. He had a thick French accent and wanted to know if I found my stepmother attractive. From the moment he asked that question, I was done with him, and spent the rest of the appointment being belligerent.

That put me off going to a therapist for a long time. I started going to one again in 2004, when I found I could no longer function in society without untangling the barbed wire in my head. But I hesitated for a couple years before pressing on.

The therapist I started going to specialized in dealing with disturbed children and teenagers. That was perfect, because in a lot of ways I was still a troubled kid.

She never told me what to do, never told me how I’m supposed to interpret my disorder against my past. She asked a lot of questions and had me do the work of sorting it out. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what a good therapist does. They ask questions to get your brain churning, dredging up experiences that sat at the back of the mind like mud on the ocean floor. That’s how you begin to deal with how you got to the point of dysfunction.

She moved to Florida a year in and I started going to a fellow who worked from his house. I would explain my binge eating habits to him, specifically how I would down $30 worth of McDonald’s between work and home.

“You should stock your car with healthy foods like fruit, so if you’re hungry you can eat those things instead,” he told me.

That was the end of that. He didn’t get it. When an addict craves the junk, the healthy food around you doesn’t stand a chance. The compulsion is specifically toward eating the junk. He should have understood. He didn’t. Game over, dumb ass.

The therapist I see now is a God-send. He was the first therapist to help me understand the science behind mental illness and the way an inbalance in brain chemistry can mess with your thought traffic. He also provided me with quite an education on how anti-depressants work. Yes, friends, there’s a science to it. Certain drugs are designed to shore up the brain chemicals that, when depleted, lead to bi-polar behavior. Other meds are specifically geared toward anxiety control. In my case, I needed the drug that best addressed obsessive-compulsive behavior. For me, that meant Prozac.

That’s not to say I blindly obey his every suggestion. He specializes in stress reduction and is big on yoga and eliminating coffee from the daily diet. Those are two deal breakers for me. Yoga bores the dickens out of me. If you’ve been following this blog all along, I need not explain the coffee part.

I also find it fun to push his buttons once in awhile. I’ll show up at his office with a huge cup of Starbucks. “Oh, I see you’ve brought drugs with you,” he’ll say.

Our relationship has settled into this banter back and forth, and it continues to serve its purpose. We go over everything happening in my life at that given moment, and if he suspects I’m thinking in unproductive ways or lying to myself, he calls me on it.

I’m better for it.

All that is the long way of saying I think it’s absolutely healthy if multiple members of one family are in therapy at the same time.

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Should I Be Upset About This Report Card?

I’ve gotten word that a reader and dear friend was upset over last week’s post, “Reading Between The Lines Of A Bad Report Card.” She shouldn’t be.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/qga5eONXU_4

She said that she would never have sent such a bad report card to her adult child. I think she was also upset at the suggestion that my parents weren’t paying adequate attention to me back then.

I don’t mind, though. In fact, I’m happy to have that old report card. It put things in perspective for me. It was a snapshot of a difficult time. I used to get angry when thinking about those days. I had a lot of hate in my soul over it.

I don’t feel that way anymore. I think everyone did the best they could with the tools they had back then. The problem was that the tools weren’t that great.

But everything turned out fine.

Below is the original post. Have a look and tell me if you would be upset if such a report card were sent to you.

And to my friend: I appreciate your reaction to the original post very much. Yours is a friendship I treasure, and I don’t want you to worry about this one. Hence the sequel post.

Reading Between The Lines Of A Bad Report Card

My mother found my fourth-grade report card the other day and mailed it to me. On the surface it shows a chronic C student who doesn’t give a damn about anything.

But when I read between the lines I can see exactly where my 10-year-old head was at.

If you look at it on the surface, you see a straight-C student who occasionally sinks to a D in social studies and math. On the back of the report card are comments each quarter from my teacher, describing me as a kid who puts no effort into anything.

My first thought on reading it was that this teacher didn’t like me, and that the feeling was mutual. In reality, I don’t think she disliked me. I think she saw a kid adrift and was trying to scare my parents into a more rigorous study routine at home.

Unfortunately for her and me, she wasn’t the type of teacher who was going to get through to me. She took the academics very seriously, but did little to appeal to the more creative side of me. Teachers before and after her would have a lot more success in that regard. She didn’t get me and I didn’t get her. A troubled kid needs nurturing personalities to intervene.

Even as an adult who has enjoyed a fair amount of career success it’s the same:The more nurturing bosses get more out of me. The ones who shove a 13-point plan in my face and tell me to do it get nothing but trouble. Luckily for me, I’ve only had a couple bosses like that along the way.

I have been both types of boss myself, and I’ve found that most people do better with supervisors who are nurturing souls.

In the 1980-81 school year at Theodore Roosevelt School in the Point of Pines, Revere, Mass., I needed a lot of nurturing.

My parents divorced in the summer of 1980 and it was not a civilized, amicable process. The yelling and instability sent me on to such soothing pursuits as lighting things on fire and shoving the garden hose into an air vent on the side of the house.

I was also sick most of the time with Crohn’s Disease. If you look at my attendance record, there’s a 20-plus day absence in the fourth quarter. That was for one of my extended hospital stays. I missed the class picture shoot that spring, which is probably for the best. I wasn’t a pleasant site.

 

Erin was pained to look at my report card. She never got grades so consistently bad. She felt sympathy for the teacher, who was obviously trying to get my parents’ attention. But in the raw wake of divorce and the illnesses me and my older brother suffered from, they obviously were distracted. I don’t blame them.

I suppose I should have felt sad looking at the report card, but I don’t. I see it for what it was — a snapshot of a difficult period of time. I survived it, and turned into an excellent student once I had a couple years of college under my belt. I would argue that despite it all, I turned out just fine.

What makes me even happier is that at least to date, my children do well academically. Duncan has some ADHD-related challenges, but his grades are mostly good and he has a heart I didn’t have at that age. That heart will take him far.

Sean is currently the same age I was when I brought home that report card. He’s razor-sharp academically, though like me at that age, he often rushes through his homework, the most notable evidence being his sloppy penmanship. We can work with that.

I’d like to think that their better academic luck reflects that we’re giving them a good home life — better than mine was, at least.

To me, the big lesson is that when a kid brings home a bad report card, it’s not enough to just look at the grades and brand the student a success or failure based on the letters and numbers alone.

There’s always a story behind the grades, and taking the time to know the story is key to helping that child going forward.