As it turns out, Ford hates school. He dreads it like a fat set of immunizations, asking every night whether the next day is a school day, telling me that he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s already feeling sick; he asks me every morning if it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a school day, and tells me that he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not going to school; he runs away from the classroom on some mornings, bolting back towards the car. This is a lot to pay, on top of tuition, for the three hours each morning that he is in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153school.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d In his defense, Ford says he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153bored,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and that he doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like the teacher, and the schoolroom \u00e2\u20ac\u0153sucks,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d along with the toys.nThey, apparently, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153really suck.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Straight from the horse\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mouth, four going on fourteen.<\/p>\n
And I just don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know what to do about it. I thought this would do him a world of good. After all, I loved my Montessori years: feeding the animals, teaching myself to ride a bike, learning about different countries and fiedltripping to cotton gins and post offices. In fact, the only school years I like to reflect on are those freeform, user-paced, friendly three foot-high days. Really, my heart is in unschooling him and raising him on experience and one-on-one \u00e2\u20ac\u0153lessons.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d But we aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t able to freewheel it around the globe for years at a time, immersing ourselves in the daily rhythms of various cultures, learning to make our rope hammocks in Bali, build fishing boats in New Zealand and forge our own stainless steel toenail trimmers in Germany. Who has that kind of independent wealth? If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re in this group, don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t bother raising your hand because it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s already pressing my angry buttons.<\/p>\n
I also don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know whether Ford is telling me the whole truth. When I ask him,
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Ford, what did you guys do in circle time, you know, right after I dropped you off?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153We didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t do anything. We just sat there and stared at the walls.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Is his immediate and nonchalant reply. And when I asked him about the red bump on his noggin, he told me he got hit with a rock, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153and no teacher noticed. Nobody cared.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Yeah. And when I asked him whom he sat with at lunch, on the second day of school, he replied: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Nobody. I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t sit next to anybody. Nobody cared about me.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Uh, huh. He follows with this raised eyebrow, sideways-glance. It looks like this: C\u00e2\u20ac\u2122mon, Mom. Buy it! I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m so convincing! And you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re soooooo gullible!
\nFor the record, I sat in today and watched the little rugrat in circle time. Lo! He did sit and stare at the wall. Complete disinterest! And I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m beginning to see why. He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the eldest in his class, eccentrically focused on resistors, capacitors, stratacone volcanoes and molecules. He could care less about \u00e2\u20ac\u0153learning to roll a rug\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (which, according to Ford, he has practiced in circle time three days in the past week) and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153how to walk in a line\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s lesson\u00e2\u20ac\u201dsomething I thought he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d learn if he ever entered public school). <\/p>\n
So, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m in a conundrum about what to do with him. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m a neurotic, borderline schizophrenic parent who plays devils advocate with herself and her decisions. I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t decide what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s best for Ford. I think I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m deciding for my own reasons, at this time, since those few morning hours are well-spent laughing uninterrupted with Chas, helping him learn to pour rice down a funnel and into empty cups, feeding the chickens, reading books and brushing little teeth. I like this time alone with him. But the situation is not ideal for all of us, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m left feeling guilty at the end of the day that I just can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t figure out what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s best for my child. After all, isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t this really my job? I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t seem to get the hang of parenthood; it constantly throws me curveballs. <\/p>\n
I wonder, staring across the house while I do dishes: how do some parents exhibit such
\nconviction in their decisions? What makes me so neurotic? Is it all a matter of self-esteem, for my part, or is it just pigheaded perfectionism? With the huge parent market out there, it seems that keywords such as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153THOSE CRITICAL FIRST YEARS\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153HOW TO BUILD YOUR BABY\u00e2\u20ac\u2122S BRAIN\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153DON\u00e2\u20ac\u2122T YOU WANT WHAT\u00e2\u20ac\u2122S BEST FOR YOUR BABY?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d have anchored in my brain, flailing wildly around the canyons of doubt, to echo, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153DON\u00e2\u20ac\u2122T FUCK THEM UP! IT\u00e2\u20ac\u2122S ALL UP TO YOU! DON\u00e2\u20ac\u2122T FUCK THEM UP!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Even though my teeny rational brain, tucked away in my frontal lobe somewhere in a fold, is meanwhile repeating the mantra in a soft whisper, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not up to you, how the kids turn out. I mean, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s your job to give them security and love, but they will evolve for themselves out of experience\u00e2\u20ac\u201dit\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not what you hand them, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how they process what they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got to work with.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Or something like that. It’s hard to tell, because I can’t really hear it under all that screaming.<\/p>\n
So…I guess the pivotal part of my job becomes clearer amid the conflict: staying sane.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As it turns out, Ford hates school. He dreads it like a fat set of immunizations, asking every night whether the next day is a school day, telling me that he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s already feeling sick; he asks me every morning if it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a school day, and tells me that he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not going to school; he runs […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,9,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily","category-ford","category-thinking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.stephs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.stephs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.stephs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.stephs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.stephs.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.stephs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.stephs.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.stephs.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.stephs.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}