From the Elite to Something Much, Much Better

Ginny Contento
Sep 4, 2018 · 9 min read

Sprawled on the living room carpet, my young son had to write out five words that began with the letter E for his homework. After writing out “e-g-g,” “e-a-r,” “e-a-t” and “e-a-s-y,” Oliver paused with his forehead scrunched, seeming to search the air for that last word surely hanging out there. Suddenly, he smiled at me and sprang up. Scurrying back from his bedroom with a big book on dinosaurs hugged to his chest, he plunked down and flipped through the pages. He copied out his last word for the assignment: “Euoplocephalus.”

My husband and I had agreed with his preschool teacher from the year before. Giving our son this additional year before heading off to the rigors of kindergarten would serve to only insure his long-term academic success.

There was a time when I thought I had this all really well mapped out.

After a few clumsy starts, everything was falling into place. At long last a bright future was beckoning our young family from the horizon. At this private high school where I had begun teaching Spanish to the children of the Silicon Valley elite, my wiggly, T-rex-loving son could one day look forward to being immersed in more opportunities than I could ever have imagined during those years when my husband and I were eking out as teachers in Madrid, Spain. At last, our son’s educational, even professional, future looked enviably “set.” In this kind of environment, he would graduate supremely prepared for college-level work. His chances for admission at selective universities would be greatly increased. His classmates would be from “nice” families who marinate their tender youngsters in infinite sources of enrichment. My son would be guaranteed a kind of academic vaccination from a culture intent on numbing our minds into anticipating the next episode of reality TV. He would be getting the best education that money can buy… You tell me, what loving parents wouldn’t want this for their child?

Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was looking for more than just excellent schooling for my son in this rarified community. My husband had unexpectedly passed away the summer before Ollie began kindergarten, leaving us both stranded in a pit of grief and uncertainty. Apart from an excellent education, I think I was also looking for an invincible partner to help me raise my high-spirited son. By the time my son had reached the fifth grade, the new man I had by then married was beginning to sink into a downward spiral of addiction. This glossy school community held out my last hope to fill that co-parenting role I was getting ever more frantic to re-assign.

The letter of acceptance there in my hands made it official, and I could exhale. The next seven years of my son’s middle and high school education had just arrived, like boxes packed with a fresh, new wardrobe, just waiting for him to grow into it.

The first week of his sixth grade experience, my son and I were chatting over dinner. He said, ”They all seem so scared, so afraid…”

“Afraid? Who?” I asked, “What do you mean?”

“Everyone… they just seems so afraid — afraid of making mistakes… afraid of getting into trouble…”

“Gee, dear, maybe it wouldn’t hurt you to develop a bit more of that in yourself…“

He laughed, catching my sarcasm. Exemplary behavior was never exactly a celebrated trait in our family.

With his having come from a Spanish immersion public school, sixth grade in this new environment for him was predictably rocky. His teachers and I attributed the struggle to his adjusting to a new set of expectations. He was inexhaustibly upbeat, making friends easily, while facing his classwork with a mixture of humble acceptance, repeated re-dedication to improvement and a good sense of humor. He seemed in need of just time and lots of cheerleading.

The first time I ever saw my son become positively enraged was when he was in seventh grade. Yet another teacher had e-mailed me about his missing assignments. Again? We were driving home, and our discussion started to boil over. I pulled the car over to the side of the road. I nipped at him like a cattle dog with questions and accusations around his lack of effort. He stared stonily ahead. After all, isn’t this what conscientious parents do to show their reverence for education? To stress the necessity of their children’s shouldering the responsibility of doing the work? Suddenly with the force of a heavy tree branch breaking off and crashing down, he slammed his fist on the dashboard. He hollered over my blathering, “I AM trying!!!” before doubling over into sobs of defeat.

Thanks to arrangements made by the school, he was put through a full battery of tests for learning differences. The resulting report illuminated why he was finding schoolwork so exasperating. While it revealed areas of intelligence where he was, in fact, uncommonly “gifted,” it also pin-pointed areas in need of remediation and support. With the help of the learning specialist and his teachers, we devised a detailed plan, complete with accommodations, for him to move forward. He would be poised to enter 8th grade, now ready to meet with academic success.

But things only got worse.

“I get a B and it’s the Fourth of July. Another kid gets a B and it’s the Apocalypse…” he said, reflecting on what it was like being surrounded by classmates who were being groomed for the most selective colleges in the country.

By May I unfolded the letter making official his being denied admission into the Upper School. Over those next few weeks before summer, while at school he looked wilted, constantly being reminded of his not going on to high school with his classmates. Yet back at home he looked positively relieved at the prospect of getting a fresh start at our local public high school, relieved like a man who had been gasping for air but was assured that oxygen was now on the way.

His high school years continued in much the same vein. By the beginning of his freshman year, I was a single parent once again, the divorce leaving my son freshly stripped of a father-figure for yet a second time. At one point in his sophomore year, I was checking online to see that yet again he was failing to turn in assignments. At that point I still had just enough reserves in me for one more showy outburst of exasperation. I drove down to the local military recruitment office, gathered up a pile of pamphlets and left them dumped on his bed. Not a small thing to do for a woman who had been dutifully attending Quaker meetings every Sunday for the last five years.

It made no difference. The tutors, my cajoling, nagging, supervising his time spent on homework while I did mine, controlling his computer time, grounding him, losing my patience, promising rewards for his making at least an effort, not to mention a good dose of family therapy, and my own time in therapy…. nothing sustained any significant change in his academic performance. Over too many years, in my steady and earnest efforts to fix him, I missed countless opportunities to ask him really good questions, to just get to know him, to love and to enjoy him. Those are years that I can never get back.

By his junior year, I had resigned myself to praying that he would remain in good enough standing to graduate. Counting my blessings, I couldn’t dismiss that he nevertheless seemed quite buoyant, even speaking well of his high school experience. That was “nothing to sneeze at,” as my father would have said.

Meanwhile, where I was working, my students had to be constantly reminded to not drive themselves so relentlessly, that I couldn’t answer questions about homework by e-mail after 10 at night, and an A- was, indeed, not a “failing grade.”

He did manage to successfully graduate from high school, wrapping up the year on some uncommonly sweet high notes. After dislocating his shoulder in baseball and being unable to complete the season, he remained ever engaged and energetically supportive of his teammates. Consequently, at year’s end he was honored through a unanimous vote of his teammates with the award for “Most Inspiring Player.” Then at another end of year ceremony held in the auditorium full of students and parents, he stepped up to the microphone to thank me for these last four years. I’m not going to lie — it touched me profoundly. I also knew that this gesture said infinitely more about the kind of man he was deciding to become than who I had been as a parent.

Since then he has gone on to a university, majoring in hotel and restaurant management. The struggle continues, but the end of his classroom days are now in sight.

He called home a few days ago, asking if he could come home for a visit.

Over these last three years of his being away, home here has also continued to evolve. My life has been blessedly intertwined with that of a smart and soulful man, a man with whom I wish I could have raised a family. We three sat out in the back garden, bantering a bit about how the San Francisco Giants were doing. My son then shifted the conversation into announcing that he’s decided to pull out of school. While remaining in his college town, he wanted to spend this next year getting more work experience, especially as his workplace from last summer was asking him back. Thanks be to God, his experience in the working world has been far more rewarding for him than school ever was.

I didn’t show it, but I felt a familiar panic arise. Would this mean that he was dropping out of school altogether…?

As he would be making the long drive back to Flagstaff soon, my son and I took a day to go hike through the coastal mountains. With quietly panting breath, we reached the summit and looked out over Silicon Valley, basking in this moment of shared success. From this vantage point, the infinite human drama buzzing below seemed so far away and not to touch us.

Under the redwoods, we found a log to sit down on. Between mouthfuls of trail mix, he said, “I just hate it… I hate school…I know — you’ve been a teacher all your life, but I… I hate it. And… and I especially hate…. I hate how we always end up in this same conversation …” His voice trailed off, the voice of silence asking to be heard. Some birds chirped high in the trees. An airplane’s engine was humming faintly ever closer. The late afternoon breeze was beginning to rustle through the redwoods. “I know I need to finish,” he continued, ”I know that — and… and I WANT to… God, I so want to get this behind me. …I need to — for ME. But just for a year, I need…I need a break… and some time to grow up…”

His defenseless candor disarmed me. He was no child. After a while, I heard myself confessing to my own not having a clue as to what “should” be next on his life path. It was purely his to now choose. …God knows, as did my own patient and long-suffering parents, that I made many more far-fetched detours in my twenties — and thirties — many of which opened the greatest opportunities of my life. So who was I, even as his mother, to say what was right for him?

We slipped our water bottles back into our daypacks and teased each other affectionately about something random. With cameras in hand we posed and took record of this rare afternoon spent in each other’s company, now as fellow adults. Continuing to pad along the shaded trail, we came upon a boulder that blocked the expansive view of the valley. My son shimmied up its steep face. Upon reaching the top, he stood up in the sun, raising his arms high in triumph.

Gazing up at my son’s silhouette from the trail below, I ached with wanting to stretch this instant out to forever. There was Oliver, my son; a man now, standing so strong and whole against the sky.

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