Monthly Archive

Daniel’s been doing well at school for the past couple of months, which I attribute to his developing character, his hard work, a lot of patience (from him and from those around him) and a generally tolerant attitude from those running the school. He’s losing his temper much much less. Not hitting or kicking. Not screaming with rage. Not running out of the classroom when he can’t cope any longer. He is, in fact, settling down after an enormous upheaval. We are proud of how well he is doing, without expecting that it will carry on indefinitely because that’s not what life (and development) is like. There are ups and downs and right now, we’re happy to have an up period.

His teacher, however, has chosen to describe this welcome development like this:

“He’s been so good, he’s like a different child.”

She has not said this to me ONCE (although I barely contained my rage the first time). She has said this to me a dozen times. More. She wants to know what we’re doing differently. If we’ve finally taken her oh-so-frakking-wise advice and medicated him. If we have him in some super-de-dooper therapy. Of course, we’re doing nothing differently. We’re just trusting in Daniel to grow into himself, that he will figure things out, that he will learn self-control, patience and grace. And we pour into him our trust and patience (or try to. On good days, we do). But we are not trying to fix him, because he is not broken.

And still she says to me, “He’s like a different child.”

And every single time she has said it, especially today when she said it to me while my arm was around my tired and somewhat frazzled child, I have said this:

“No, not a different child. The same child. The same exact child. All that wonderfulness you’re noticing now, that’s right there in Daniel. All that struggling he did, that’s Daniel too. The same child.”

Aren’t we all like this? Good days and bad, moments of grace and moments of struggle? Can we not let our children be thus too?

Not a different child at all. Just my child.

Thomas A. Edison - “Discontent is the first necessity of progress.”

It’s no secret I am discontented. That the flow I find in my life is currently pretty regularly interrupted by my own brain chemistry or circumstances, and I am inclined to blame the latter since my brain and I have been hanging around together for years now and have negotiated a somewhat uneasy truce.

And I’m not exactly blaming circumstances outside myself, but rather my now conditioned response to them. Here’s the thing. Having children was deeply, terrifyingly hard for me, the surrender of self it demanded, the necessity of putting others first. And it coincided with a series of moves that we made based on Ed’s life. So although I’d never really managed to answer the question — what do I want — before all this happened, the circumstances made that question almost impossible to answer. And now I’m so out of the habit of asking it that I really don’t know how to answer it.

Recently, Helena’s teacher suggested that I might like to try getting a job at the children’s school. On the surface, this would be excellent. Convenient, flexible, cozy. I’d be there for the children; no one would complain if I stayed home when they were sick. Summers off, weekends off. Perfect. Right? Right?

Only I don’t want to do it. It makes me sick to my stomach to think about it. In no way, shape or form is it an answer to the question — What do I want to do? It suits everybody else. It maintains my status as helpful, flexible, cooperative and useful. It practically institutionalizes that status. And I feel my throat closing whenever I think it will happen and I will have to do it — for years — and that by doing so, I will essentially answer the question de jour — What do I want? — by surrendering to the apparently inevitable truth that I don’t get to ask that question. That the question is unanswerable. That I am what allow those around me to ask that question, rather than an asker in her own right.

So yeah. I’m discontented. And terrified. Because without even thinking, I’d taken the teacher’s suggestion, walked into the principal’s office and essentially applied. And now they have me on the substitute ass’t teacher roster, which also makes me sick and scared. And once again, I leaped to do what would be good for others, what would be nice, convenient and useful, without considering whether I wanted to do it.

I’ll get out of it somehow. But the question remains — what do I want? And how in hell can that fit into the puzzle of lives I live in?