Our oldest has an intellect well beyond his 10 years. He absorbs details with little effort and I can’t remember the last time he DIDN’T achieve high honors. But sometimes I forget that he’s still a kid.
Mood music:
He likes to tell us he’s a tween. To that, I tell him he’s more like a half tween.
But he is mighty mature for his age, nothing like the immature, messed up kid I was at 10. I’m proud as hell of him for that, but I think I sometimes put to much pressure on him as a result.
I sometimes wonder if, in that craving for order I sometimes get when my OCD is running hot, I put the greater burden on Sean because getting a mess cleaned up quickly is more important to me than making sure they each do their fair share. Since it can be hard sometimes to get Duncan to do what I want when I want, I immediately turn to Sean.
I’m starting to see it for the unfairness that it is.
Ironically, though I had nowhere near the intellect Sean has, I can still relate to the very pressure he might be feeling.
I started my life as the youngest of three kids, the proverbial baby of the family. Michael was the oldest, and in the Brenner family much has always been expected of the oldest son.
My father was the middle child of his generation, but he was the only son. My grandfather, who came off a boat from the former Soviet Union with all the typical old-school values, expected the world of my father. As my grandfather descended deep into old age and illness in the mid-1960s, my father became increasingly responsible for the family business.
Growing up, my older brother became the one my father leaned on the most. Michael was encouraged to chart his own course and was studying to be a plumber. But he was expected to help out with the family business and do a lot of the grunt work at home.
I was the baby, and a sick and spoiled one at that. I came along almost three years after my sister Wendi, and by age eight I was in and out of the hospital with dangerous flare ups of Crohn’s Disease. I got a lot of attention but nothing hard was expected of me. I was coddled and I got any toy I wanted.
The result was a lower-than-average maturity level for my age. At age 10 I acted like I was 5 sometimes. I would crawl into bed with my father for snuggles, just like a toddler might do.
During Christmas 1980 — the first after my parents’ divorce — I wanted it to look like Santa had come, even though I knew by that point that he didn’t really exist. I clung hard to the delusion, because my parents played Santa all the way up to their last Christmas as a couple, when I was nine. So on Christmas Eve 1980, I took all the gifts I had already opened and arranged them as if Santa had dropped them in my living room. I even wrote a “To Billy from Santa” note. Christmas morning I got up, went in the living room and expressed all the excitement of a kid who discovers that the jolly fat guy had come overnight.
My maturity level hadn’t changed much by the time I hit 13. I probably regressed even further right after my brother died. But as 1984 dragged on, I was slowly pulled into the role of oldest son.
All the stuff that was expected of my brother became expected of me, and I wasn’t mentally equipped to deal with it. My brother had a lot of street smarts that I lacked.
So I have to shake my head and wonder if I’m causing history to repeat itself.
I hope not.
I am indeed proud of Sean for all he is. But I don’t want to force him to grow up too fast.
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.
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.
A friend of mine was taken aback yesterday when I used a text she sent me in a post. I thought it would be OK because I was keeping her identity a secret. But in hindsight, I should have asked first.
That’s the challenge with a blog like this. I need to take things right to the danger line to make points I feel need making. But sometimes I step over that line. I’ve worked on being extra careful, but it’s obviously a work in progress.
But there’s a bigger point to this than my own foolishness. My friend was not amused by what I did and she made it known. But she quickly forgave me and on with life we go.
That’s one of the many things I admire about this friend. She’ll get angry and sound off, but she doesn’t hold a grudge and freeze out the folks who get on her bad side.
As many of us know, holding grudges is the easiest thing in the world to do. So is NOT holding grudges.
That’s a sign of deep character and strength. I’m lucky to have her as a friend, despite myself.
I’ve made a lot of wonderful friends among the parents in my children’s school community. But like every community, there are people who blow things out of proportion.
Mood music:
I guess you could lump me into that class of parent. I needle people, especially when I like them, and I can be like a bull in a china shop at school events. I’ve also engaged in gossip with some of the parents.
It’s easy to forget your own faults when your kid suddenly becomes the subject of that schoolyard gossip. But that’s what happened Friday afternoon.
I was sitting in my living room doing some work when I got a text from a friend whose daughter is in Duncan’s class:
“Just wanted to give you a heads up that a lot of moms are pissed at school … I guess Duncan was telling (his classmates) that Santa doesn’t exist and that the parents (do the work). Some of the moms are sending texts to everyone! I have gotten six so far!”
Duncan told us about a month ago that he figured out that Santa, the tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny don’t really exist. Ironically, he reached this conclusion because, as he told me, “To do what they do they would have to use magic. And magic isn’t real.”
That’s his point of view, of course, and truth be told we were sad about the whole Santa thing. No one wants their child to shed innocence before the age of 10, right?
We asked Duncan not to discuss it at school because a lot of his classmates still believed, and that they should be allowed to believe. We apparently needed to give him more than one reminder.
As I learned that several moms were texting each other wildly that Friday afternoon, warning parents that Duncan Brenner told kids at school Santa is a fraud, my blood ran cold and my head got hot.
How dare these moms trash talk my son, I thought. There they are, texting each other like some big emergency is afoot, in this case the potential destruction of Christmas.
The suggestion in this kind of parental banter is that the kid who can’t keep his mouth shut is a troublemaker. His parents must be troublemakers, too.
My first instinct was to get the names of the parents and apologize on Duncan’s behalf. Then my mood shifted and I wanted to tell them all off. Now, with my attitude somewhere near the center again, I’m writing this out, looking for the right perspective.
A few things occur to me:
–Kids in the school yard are going to talk about all kinds of things we’d rather they not talk about. There will be profanity and bad jokes. We parents should intervene whenever possible, but we’re not always going to be in the right spot at the right time.
–If someone is worried that their kid’s Christmas will be ruined over this, do you think it might be time to re-examine what Christmas is supposed to be about?
Here’s what really bothers me:
We all have a habit of gossiping. It’s a very human thing to do. But you know what? It’s wrong.
Schoolyard gossip rarely accounts for the things that are really going on with the kids and parents at the center of all the chatter. We make harsh judgments without having all the facts.
A good example is the mom who started trash-talking about a pair of siblings, suggesting they had anger issues over their parents’ impending divorce because the older sibling refused to work with her son on a class project.
Missing from that bit of gossip was the fact that the girl didn’t want to work with him because he was slacking. Also, he’s been teasing and tormenting her since Pre-K and she finally decided to take a stand.
This is a community and, like it or not, we are all responsible for making it work. Many parents already work tirelessly to that effect, but some do too much complaining about others who don’t march in lockstep.
That’s mean. It doesn’t inspire other parents to get involved and help. It’s not OK. We all have flaws and so do our kids. It also never accurately captures the reasons some people do what they do. We have no idea if someone is acting out of depression, heartache, work stress or any number of other things.
We can’t shield our kids from all the unpleasantness of life. Nor should we. When we coddle our kids too much, we do them a disservice by not preparing them for the challenges of life.
We should let them deal with some of the unpleasant topics of a schoolyard during recess because they just might learn something valuable in the process.
We should remember that when one kid says something other kids aren’t ready to hear that it’s not the end of the world. It’s may lead to unpleasant dinner conversation at home that evening, but it hardly qualifies as a crisis.
Above all, we should all remember that gossiping is mean, and kindly knock it off.
I recently watched Diane Sawyer’s interview with Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly. To say I was moved would be an understatement. Hers is the story of a spirited fight back from near death.
If you ever get the feeling you can’t do something or overcome big challenges, you should watch this. It will show you that nothing is too big to overcome.
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.
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.
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.
Fifteen years ago I lost the friend who had become my older brother and rudder. A vicious cycle of depression destroyed his body, but it failed to kill his soul.
Mood music:
For a lot of my more religious friends, that has to sound odd, if not foul. We’ve been taught that suicide is a mortal sin, the kind that sends the soul straight to hell. I used to believe that. Now I think that line of thinking is wrong, stupid and even a little dangerous. It makes us give up on people who were good to the core, whose only fault was an inability to climb out of the black fog depression smothers the mind with.
Here are a couple brief paragraphs on the day he died:
In the weeks leading up to his suicide, I knew he was badly depressed. I even had a feeling he harbored suicidal thoughts. I just never thought he’d do it. Or it could be that I thought I had more time to be there and help him through it. Instead, I stayed wrapped in my own world as he deteriorated.
On Nov. 15, 1996, he decided he’d had enough. It was a sparkling, autumn Friday and I was having a great morning at work. But early that afternoon, I got a call at work from my mother. She had driven by Sean’s house and saw police cars and ambulances and all kinds of commotion on the front lawn. I called his sister and she put his wife on the phone. She informed me he was dead. By his own hand.
I hated him for years after that, failing to comprehend why he would leave us that way, especially since he knew suicide meant a damned soul. That’s what we were taught.
But I’ve had my own battles with OCD-fueled depression over the years, and despite all the pain that goes with it, I’ve gained wisdom. I understand now what happens to a mind on the ropes.
In that state of being, I don’t think a person can be held responsible for the damage they inflict on themselves, because they are not acting with a fully-functioning brain. I could put it another way and say a person in that state is no longer dealing with a full deck, but you should get the point by now.
My friend Linda, herself a person of strong Catholic Faith, recently sent me a passage from the Catechism of the Catholic Church that shows that suicide isn’t the trip to eternal damnation many in the church would have us believe:
“2282 Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide.
2283 We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives.”
Nothing is as black and white as we’d like to believe.
Now that I have the peace of knowing that Sean Marley’s soul didn’t die on that confused morning, I’m able to focus on what he did for me.
–He taught me that it’s OK to question the status quo at all times, to never take things at face value.
–He taught me that it’s OK to be different, and that being different is even something to celebrate.
–He taught me that the world is bigger than the neighborhood you grow up in, and that you need to see something of the world to understand it.
–He taught me to be a fighter.
And now for some of the cool things you may not have known about him:
–He was a gifted guitarist. He could learn to play just about anything, and could write great musical bits when he wanted to. He gave me my first guitar for Christmas in 1986. It was an Ibanez strat model. He had what I think was a Guild electric guitar with a dark blue or black body. I sold the Ibanez several years later and it’s one of my biggest regrets. Sean was pissed but forgave me. I sometimes wonder whatever happened to his guitar. I hope someone’s putting it to good use.
–He was a great writer, and was a very disciplined diary keeper. He showed me several entries over the years, but I haven’t read them since his death. I know they are in safe hands, though.
–His hair went through more changes than Hillary Clinton’s, in both style and color.
–He reveled in listening to bands that weren’t as well known. He was listening to Kix several years before they achieved moderate success. He turned me on to T-Rex, Thin Lizzy and Riot (not Quiet Riot. This band was just called Riot).
–He loved the sea as much as I did, which makes sense, since his father Al was the one who really taught me to appreciate the ocean.
–He was a vegetarian who could not understand why people had to kill animals for food or any other reason. I never caught on, but I respected him for it.
–He was a very spiritual man who was always seeking. He eventually rebelled against the Catholic faith he was brought up on, but he was always reading, writing and exploring who exactly his higher power was.
–He used to find a lot of bizarre z-grade horror movies for us to watch. I can’t remember half the titles, though the Toxic Avenger was in there somewhere. One movie involved aliens who drank their own vomit. He thought that was especially funny.
–He was a Libertarian way before it was the popular thing to be. In fact, in the 1988 presidential election we both voted for a practically unknown politician named Ron Paul. He was the libertarian candidate. Sean voted for him because he was a true believer. I just didn’t want to vote for Bush or Dukakis.
–He was always taking classes, studying and studying some more. He had a serious, deep academic mind. He never stopped learning.
Thanks to him, I’ve never stopped learning. Though he probably didn’t intend it, he also taught me lessons about dealing with suicide. That may seem absurd, but if not for his death, I never would have embarked on the journey to understand.
For those dealing with a suicide in the family, I have a few things for you to consider. I’ve written this down in a few other posts, but it bears frequent repeating. Read it and then get on with your life:
–Blaming yourself is pointless. No matter how many times you replay events in your mind, the fact is that it’s not your fault. For one thing, it’s impossible to get into the head of someone who is contemplating suicide. Sure, there are signs, but since we all get the blues sometimes, it’s very easy to dismiss the signs as something close to normal. When someone is loud in contemplating suicide, it’s usually a cry for help. When the depressed says nothing and even appears OK, it’s usually because they’ve made their decision and are in the quiet, planning stages.
–Blaming each other is even more pointless. Take it from me: Nerves in your circle of family and friends are so raw right now that it won’t take much for relationships to snap into pieces. A week after my friend’s death I wrote a column about it, revealing what in hindsight was too much detail. His family was furious and most of them haven’t talked to me since. They feel I was exploiting his death to advance my writing career and get attention. What I’ve learned, and this is tough to admit, is that you’re going to have to let it go when the finger pointing starts. It’s better not to engage the other side. Nobody is in their right mind at this point, so go easy on each other. Give people space to make their errors in judgment and learn from it.
–Don’t demonize the dead. When a friend takes their life, one of the things that gnaws at the survivors is the notion that — if there is a Heaven and Hell — those who kill themselves are doomed to the latter. I’m a devout Catholic, so you can bet your ass this one has gone through my mind. What I’ve learned though, through my own experiences in the years since, is that depression is a clinical disease. When you are mentally ill, your brain isn’t firing on all thrusters. You engage in self-destructive behavior even though you understand the consequences. A person thinking about suicide is not operating on a sane, normally-functioning mind. So to demonize someone for taking their own life is pointless. To demonize the person, you have to assume they were in their right mind at the time of the act. And you know they weren’t. My practice today is to simply pray for those people, that their souls will still be redeemed and they will know peace. It’s really the best you can do.
– Break the stigma. One of the friends left behind in this latest tragedy has already done something that honors her friend’s life: She went on Facebook and directed people toward the American Association of Suicidology website, specifically the page on knowing the warning signs. That’s a great example of doing something to honor your friend’s memory instead of sitting around second guessing yourself. The best thing to do now is educate people on the disease so that sufferers can help themselves and friends and family can really be of service.
–On with your own life. Nobody will blame you for not being yourself for awhile. You have, after all, just experienced one of the worst tragedies there is. But try not to let it paralyze you. Life must go on. You have to get on with your work and be there for those around you.
Life can be a brutal thing. But it IS a beautiful thing.
People on Facebook and Twitter are honoring U.S. veterans with words of gratitude and awe. All well and good, but not nearly enough for the countless vets who suffer in silence.
Mood music:
[spotify:track:0dOg1ySSI7NkpAe89Zo0b9]
In so many ways, we continue to treat our veterans like shit. We let so many of them live on the streets, without proper shelter or medication for the mental illnesses they caught from watching comrades get ripped apart by shrapnel on the battlefield.
We look down at veterans every day as lazy, crazy, smelly vermin who prowl the streets scaring our children. We have no idea of what they’ve been through to get so scarred, and a lot of us don’t really care — even if we say we do.
Flashback: September, 2010:
I’m walking the streets of Brooklyn on a beautiful night, and a guy comes up to me. He has a hole in his head where his left eye used to be and burn scars up and down one arm.
I’m smoking a cigar, so he approaches me for a light. He tells me he was maimed in Afghanistan during military service and asks for some change so he can get a train to somewhere. He tells me he’s in New York looking for work and was stranded without money.
I give him the change from my pocket and then he’s gone.
Is he telling the truth? I have no idea, and I don’t really care. He just looked like a guy in pain who needed a few quarters to survive the next few hours, and that’s all that mattered at the time.
Flashback: Late April, 2011:
I’m on Facebook one afternoon and I see a friend commenting that he’s disappointed that some of his friends have decided to “like” a page that makes fun of a fellow known in Haverhill, Mass., as Crazy Mike.
In any city there’s a guy like “Crazy Mike.” The stereotype is usually a long beard, ratty clothes and the fellow is usually living on the street. He talks aloud to no one in particular and falls asleep on playground equipment. People like to laugh at him.
A lot of these so-called crazy guys are homeless vets whose luck ran out somewhere between the battlefield and the hard re-entry into society.
After a few seconds of thinking this through (admittedly, a few seconds is never enough time to really think things through), my temper reaches full boil and I pound out a blog post called “Liking The Crazy Mike of Haverhill Page is Sad and Stupid.”
Discussion follows online, with a big question being if Crazy Mike was in Vietnam and, as a result, sick on the streets with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. One reader insists he is indeed a veteran, and that other homeless people keep stealing his medication. Someone else says she knew the family fairly well, and that Mike is not a veteran. He’s simply a guy who has a serious mental illness.
To me, it doesn’t matter if he was in Vietnam or not. Instead, two realities have my mind spinning like a top on fire.
One is that a lot of people assume he is a veteran, but treat him like shit anyway.
Another thing is that there are a lot of homeless who ARE military veterans, and most days we don’t give them more than a few seconds of thought before we walk on by.
It’s almost as if we honor them on holidays to make ourselves feel better about being the assholes we often are.
It’s not just the homeless vets who get shafted every day. It’s also the ones who have managed to stay off the streets but need special medical attention. Every day, the system set up to help them fails them instead. Sometimes the intent is good, but the message doesn’t get out to those who need to know.
Here’s an example, courtesy of my friendMagen Hughes, who once volunteered for the Compensated Work Therapy (CWT) group:
What they do is they provide vocational therapy, training, etc. to veterans who are not only homeless, but also those who suffer from addictions of various kinds as well as mental disorders.
The group isn’t really well known (or at least, that was my impression while I was at the VA Hospital), so a lot of the veterans who could benefit from the vocational therapy are left continuing down the path that they’ve always known, no matter how destructive it may be. Or they are shoved in one of the psychiatric wards or the nursing home.
That was probably the most heart-breaking part about volunteering, was seeing that there was a service that could help them out, but no one either knew or cared enough to really do them any good. I vaguely recall even being chastised once when bringing up CWT to a nurse as an idea for one of the patients.
They didn’t think that there was a group like that at the VA and I shouldn’t be worrying about “adult stuff like that.”
Veterans need our undivided attention, every day. A holiday here and there is not enough.
Maybe we can start doing better by not ridiculing the guys that have to sleep in our playgrounds and town commons.
I count myself among those who need to do better.
I’ve driven past these guys many times. I don’t go to memorial services on Veteran’s Day like I should. I certainly didn’t adequately appreciate my grandfather’s valor when he was alive.
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.
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.
