In Between The Not Dying And Never Relaxing

Sometimes being a parent is like being held at knife point for twenty years.  At any moment, if you make the wrong move you're going to find yourself bleeding from the jugular.  The success of your child's upbringing is dependent on several factors:

You not dying a violent death.

The child not being strangled by you.

And you being on guard for 20 years until the kid matures and goes off to make his/her own drastic mistakes.

It's not that there's no fun in between the not dying and the never relaxing.  For instance, I had a great game of chess with Max last Friday. 

He was, as I recently reported, doing really well in school.  As soon as I shared that out loud his good attitude and his mellow mood deteriorated.  But not because I said it out loud.*  He goes to a few other teachers for different classes/groups outside of his regular class.  One that he started last week seems to have really stressed him out.  On day one I got complaints.  This isn't unusual for my kid.  He doesn't like new things.  He doesn't deal well with disruptions to his routine.  I figured we'd wait and see.  Every day last week he came home with more complaints about this one class and more specifically about the teacher.  I told Max he would have to go for another week before I would consider letting him drop it.

I promised him that I would try to help make the situation easier, maybe talk to the teacher in question to see if we could modify the assignments a little bit.  On Thursday he came home in tears for the first time in a long time and it took an hour long conversation and a lot of love to get him back to earth calmly.  On Friday he told me he was scared of this teacher he's been complaining about.


I learned my lesson well a couple of years ago when I crushingly realized that I wasn't being Max's advocate the way I should be.  I was assuming that whenever something was going wrong between him and other children that it was his fault.  I didn't really realize I was doing it until he asked me why I believed what everyone else said before I would believe him.  On that particular occasion he was getting in trouble for a minor thing when the girl he was playing with was not getting in trouble for a larger part in the dust up.  She was also lying about her part in it and I believed her rather than him until she admitted that what he said was true.

I promised that I would listen more carefully to him and be his advocate.  Which is one of the reasons I don't hang out with people who don't like him anymore.

It can be difficult sometimes to know when a kid is being overly dramatic and when they are telling you the dead straight truth.  But I think that when a kid is telling the truth the evidence piles up pretty quickly.  This morning Max begged his dad not to drop him off next to this teacher he's scared of who happened to still be out front of the school.  He told Philip that this teacher creeped him out.

So we're pulling him from this class.  I haven't stepped in much like this because one thing I think is valuable for people to learn early on is that most of us don't get to live life only working with people we like or having to interact with only the people we enjoy.  Most of us have to learn to deal with people we don't like.  I'm not the kind of parent who feels I need to shift my kid around until he has a teacher he doesn't have any complaints about.  (Because such a creature does not exist)

I actually have to admit that I had the same feelings Max did when I first met this person in question and I set those feelings aside because there was a chance that this person could help Max with some of his issues.  My gut, today, says that Max feels unsafe around this teacher.  My job as a parent may sometimes mean insisting that he learn to interact decently with people he doesn't like, but at his age it's also my job to protect him from people who could hurt him at all times. 

Is this person he's afraid of really a threat?  Probably not.  But both of us, Max and I, are generally good judges of character.**  What I know is that his regular teacher just told me that he's been falling behind in class in the past week and not finishing any of his work and she wants to know if there's something wrong that she doesn't know about.

I have a kid who freely tells me all that is wrong with him every minute of the day.  (For now, anyway)  The only thing he's been talking about being wrong and horrible and that he's pleaded with me to intervene on is this one particular class.

Which started last week.

I see a connection.

I know I'm doing the right thing and not for a second could any one else convince me I'm wrong, but that doesn't change the fact that all of this makes me tired.  It reminds me of how fragile this whole parenting balancing act is of being your kid's advocate but not being your kid's crutch for life.  This whole job of needing to keep them safe but also needing to help them get strong by exposing them to the world piece by piece and teaching them how to navigate through all the quicksand.

I know that while I may be able to find ways to help Max become more comfortable in the world and find him tools to make his success more viable, I also know that it's never going to get easier for me. 

At least for today I know I've been the parent Max needs me to be.  That has to be good enough.





*Although most things in my life do tend to go sour once I open my mouth.  One of these days you might find me using some button hole thread to stitch up my lips.  It will be painful but I won't be able to speak.  Oh, and I'll have a full time keeper to monitor my exposure to all writing tools in the house- only taking them out of the safe while I'm working.  This scenario needs some smoothing I think.

**I know you don't believe me anymore what with all the mistakes I've made with the friendship choices.  If I had trusted my gut early on in those friendships I would not have ended up making such messes of them later.