Not Only Diamonds Are Forever

There is an unfinished bit of parenting business rattling around my head that I just can’t lay to rest. My son would tell you it’s over, yesterday’s news. And in some ways, I am proud of the parenting I did. I remained calm(ish). I didn’t escalate the situation. For my son, it is genuinely settled. But I am not settled because I feel like I’ve neglected my duty—not to my son, but as a member of the larger parenting village.

Several weeks ago, my son received this message on Xbox:

The message, from a boy my son knows through school, was the first of several, all equally profane, angry and appalling (I've blocked out the worst parts and any identifying screen names, but you can get the idea). One thing you should probably know right off the bat is that both boys (the message sender and my son) are not African American (nor any other minority ethnicity, from what I can tell). Their school is in a suburb that is tied for the whitest town in our state. The jab, therefore, is not only hateful, it’s confusingly racist and also inapplicable. It’s as if the sender searched his memory for the foulest words he could think of, shook them up, and then poured them out in random order.

When I first read the messages, I was horrified. I began mentally planning meetings with the school principal and phone calls to the boy’s parents. I was a mama-warrior, and I wasn’t going to let this happen to my son without a fight.

When I showed a screen shot of the offending messages to my septuagenarian father, venting and expecting to be cheered onward into battle, he surprised me by laughing. He said it reminded him of when he was a kid and they would say a list of every really bad word they knew all in a row as fast as they could, which effectively took the meaning out of all of the curses. His laughter took a little of the bluster out of my reaction (thankfully), and I decided to change my approach. I would attempt to end this line of messaging without escalating the situation for my son. (We all know there’s nothing like a marauding she-warrior mother to collapse the social hopes of a junior high boy.)

The result was a reserved message sent from me to the young perpetrator on Xbox: “Hi. This is xxxxx’s mom. I have all of your messages saved. Please stop sending them.” (If you’ve ever tried to type with an Xbox controller, you will understand that my missive was a huge accomplishment.) The messages stopped immediately, my son was able to play it off by saying that I was in the room when the messages popped up onscreen, and the sideways giggling glances toward me at school events commenced. I've made a point to say a friendly hello to Xbox boy at those occasional plays and basketball games (but my eyes whisper, “I’m watching you”).

So in a way, I’ve accomplished what I set out to do. The stream of messages has stopped. The situation was no big deal among the social ranks of the school, and the kids have moved on to other daily dramas.

But in another way, I’ve completely failed that young man.

He deserves a chance to learn from this experience. His parents deserve the chance to help him learn from this. And, frankly, the rest of us could learn from this, too.

It’s not just the lesson that you might expect, either. If I were his mom, of course I would want to talk to him about the anger and the bitterness and the awful, socially inappropriate words he chose to use to convey his frustration at being a middle school boy navigating the waters of shifting friendships ("[mutual friend] does not like u bit@h"). But beyond that, I would want him to learn that his words are now out there…forever. We have reached an age where many of our statements are no longer just funny memories for our 70-year-old selves to laugh at decades from now over lattes with our own daughters. Messages that you text or Facebook or tweet or otherwise put out there into the universe now are out there permanently. Even if you jot them down the old-fashioned way, cell phone cameras and YouTube and Tumblr ensure that a forever-reminder may only be a few clicks away. These images and statements become a layer in the archaeological record that you leave of yourself for the world to unearth. What kind of record are your own kids leaving? What about you?

Do you want to be the boy I knew when my sons were younger whose Facebook page (at the age of thirteen) proudly proclaimed that his favorite quote was, “It’s not rape, it’s surprise sex”? Do you want to be the acquaintance whose f-bomb-littered status updates turn up regularly in my father’s Facebook ticker since he is also my “friend” online? What about the teenage girl from our local area whose boyfriend uploaded a video of her performing sexual favors and then shared the link with his friends? You can delete photos and videos and posts and ill-conceived messages, but you have to assume that someone, somewhere downloaded a copy or created a screen shot or somehow otherwise captured your moment of infamy forever.

As we each create the layers of our own archeology, we need to think about what they are going to say to the world about the kind of people we are. I sometimes swear like a trucker, but is that the side of me I want the world to unearth when they look into who I am online? How would I feel if the person who mined that particular layer was my best friend’s grandmother… a future employer or client… my own mother?

As a mom, I have always tried to drive home to my own kids how important it is that they never put anything out there that they wouldn’t want seen by everyone. This boy apparently thought his message was funny when he sent it to my son. I think it became a little embarrassing when he realized it had been read by me. I wonder how he’d feel knowing my son’s grandpa read it. (Not to mention all of you.) 

Forever is a long time to have your mistakes out in the world.

Tightropes and Wonder

October is Bullying Prevention Awareness Month here in the US, and I’ve been trying for weeks now to think of the right way to share our family’s story from the past year. Blogging about real children is a tightrope walk—you never want to share anything too painful or too raw, or anything that your child feels is too personal. But you do want to share those universal moments that might resonate with other parents and kids who are struggling. Because sometimes those shared moments weave together to form a net that catches people when they are falling, helping them feel a little less alone in the void. So here goes the tightrope walk (my son gets the final edit).

Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

A little over a year ago, our family moved to a small town just south of the suburb where we had lived for all of my 12-year-old son’s life. We had lots of good reasons for moving, and both kids were ready for the adventure of a new beginning. Our older son already knew a handful of kids at his new school through sports, and he quickly acclimated to his changed environment.

Our younger son—who is delightfully quirky and enthusiastically intellectual—found himself in a country grade school where he knew no one, surrounded by kids who were nothing like him. He delighted in reading. They delighted in kicking him in the shins under his desk when he pulled out a book. He loved to grapple with difficult math problems. They loved to sneer and mock him for loving what they hated. He had a malformed, smaller left hand, and he was surrounded by kids who refused to tolerate differences.

Day by day, they peeled away his confidence and his well-being and his sense of self. They carved him with whispered taunts, cutting away at how he saw himself, until all that was left was a shell of the boy he had been. Tears. Panic. Daily heartache. And that was before the day last spring when he was attacked on the playground. A single punch to the mouth left him bleeding and stitched and swollen, unable to eat solid food for over a week. The classroom teacher truly ached for him and tried to help, but she and I agreed that the best solution for my son was to get away from there, to start over in a school with kids more like him.

We found our silver lining in a new school this year in a district not far from here—another year of being the new kid, but with much different results. My son has found his tribe. When he brings up questions about wormholes and time travel in science class, the other students mull over and discuss his ideas, never even considering that the concepts might be unusual. He passes notes with a friend coded via the Periodic Table. He jokes with his pals about his “lucky hand" and shares the hallways with a stellar athlete who has no hand at all. He has friends. He is happy. We are happy.

But what happens to those kids who came so close to destroying him last year? How do they grow past their brutish tendencies when the people who are different from them are chased away? How do they learn to be anything more than what they are? What will they do in the larger world when they are faced with people who are disabled, or gay, or culturally different from them? The thought makes me almost unbearably sad.

Yesterday afternoon, I read a delightful book that could be part of the solution. Wonder, by R.J. Palacio is an exceptionally written middle-grade novel that captures the pain of bullying so poignantly, so beautifully, that the story and its message resonate long after the last page is turned. If I were still teaching (grades 4-6), I would buy a class set of this novel, and we would spend the month of October reading and discussing it to lay a foundation for mutual understanding and to facilitate a culture of kindness. Even if you don’t routinely read children’s books just for the joy of experiencing the quality literature being produced in that category today, you should make an exception for this book. But have tissues handy. Really.

            “… in the future you make for yourselves, anything is possible. If every single person in this room made it a rule that wherever you are, whenever you can, you will try to act a little kinder than is necessary—the world really would be a better place.”

Wonder, by R.J. Palacio

Bullying is not just an October problem. It’s an everyday, everywhere problem that can only be solved when people consciously remove themselves from the neutral bystander camp and become protectors of the least of us. This month, and every day of every single other month, do what you can in your world to foster mutual understanding and compassion.

Please leave your ideas and comments below.

I Got a Rock

Remember the holiday special, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown? I always felt so sorry for Charlie Brown in that show. Every Peanuts special was filled with his failures and social belittlement, but the Halloween special was the worst of all. Remember how he went trick-or-treating—the most delightfully anticipated kid event of the fall season—and got a mean trick instead of a treat at every single house? Each of the other kids got candy and apples and money, but after every door Charlie Brown would say, “I got a rock.”

I know it seems a little out of season, but I think of that TV show every year around this time for my own private reasons. You see, “I got a rock” is the refrain that haunts me as I remember my biggest holiday gift-giving failure ever.

Let me explain.

My older son was born just five days before Christmas, a surprise tax deduction and holiday-plan-changer, since he was not supposed to make an entrance until the end of January. He was fine (if a little pumpkin-colored), but his early entrance meant that he would forever have to share his birthday with the biggest gift-giving holiday of the year.

I’ve always made a big deal about his birthday, with a party and friends and a firm commitment to never have him hear the dreaded words, “happy-birthday-merry-Christmas” as we hand him a two-fer Christmas/birthday gift in one.

When he was younger, I considered celebrating his half birthday instead, but for a number of reasons—including having a cousin born on his first birthday—that never really appealed to him. So that means he gets every gift he’ll receive all year within a five-day period in late December. That can present challenges when you’re trying to think of ideas for a child who already has way too much.

When he was in about fifth grade (I think), he really wanted Guitar Hero for Christmas. That was his entire list. I bought it early and had it waiting to put under the tree. Unfortunately, there was still that other gift-giving occasion to shop for, so I got…well…creative. And while creativity is great if you’re selling napkin rings on Etsy.com, it’s met with just a dash more scorn when you’re cobbling together a “surprise” for an eleven-year-old.

His class had done a unit on rocks and minerals that year, and he had expressed a real interest in collecting his own specimens. He was particularly taken with crystals, and showed me several in books that were especially pretty. So I decided to get him an extra-nice rock collection—including various crystals, geodes, some petrified dinosaur poop, and a professional-grade rock tumbler—as his birthday present. (I know. You can see the problem already, but I was delusional.)

So there we all were on his birthday, gathered around Austin, whose eyes sparkled with anticipation for the Guitar Hero he thought would be in that big box on the table. The paper was torn away, and there it was, stamped clearly across his face as he tried to give me a grateful smile: “I got a rock.”

It’s a beautiful set. Honest! It still sits in its place of shame next to the never-used rock tumbler on a high shelf in the back of his closet, taunting me when I have to reach into those dark recesses to put away something old or unwanted or outgrown. 

An excellent fake smile, whipped out later for the photo op.

These are the lessons I learned from my ill-fated foray into the world of rock hounds:

1.   If two gifts will eventually be given, always start with the video game.

2.   Educational gifts are best left to the grandparents.

3.   Creativity is best for gifts intended for the really old or the really young.

The search is on for two non-geological gifts for this year. Suggestions will be gratefully considered. Good grief!

Laundry Lessons (Or How I Escaped the 1950s)

I taught my 8^th grade son how to do laundry yesterday. It’s been long overdue, I know, and I apologize to his future wife for letting it go this long. Sometimes it's just less painful to do it than to teach it. But his highness and I finally reached a tipping point on Saturday night. Yup. Right in the middle of preparing dinner, Mom went on strike.

OK, it was a really short strike, lasting just long enough for me to turn off the burners, abandon the half-cooked meal in the pans on the stove, and drive to the closest Starbucks for a mocha and a much-needed timeout with a good book. But I think I made my point. A little. I hope.

You see, I am the lone female in a family populated by boys. It’s testosterone soup around here—all puppy dog tails and Axe body spray. I’ve always considered myself a bit of a feminist, really, but somehow I’ve let my life devolve into a snapshot of 1950s domestic bliss, with Mom in charge of the inside of the house while Dad takes care of the lawn. I’ve even been known to greet my dear husband wearing heels, a ladylike dress and an apron (with a bow in my ponytail) just to make a point about how far from the ideal modern balance we’ve fallen. Unfortunately, the point actually taken was that there was something oddly alluring about June Cleaver waiting for him all dolled up after work. But I digress.

My husband would have been a perfect mid-20^th-century provider. He works hard, takes great care of the yard, and successfully fixes almost anything that breaks (and that’s saying a lot in the realm of Danger Boy and Captain Chaos). He’s a great guy—a catch (according to him)—but he doesn’t cook. This despite many attempts by me to get him interested in the process (“It’s just following directions… like building a ‘some assembly required’ bookcase...”). And because he doesn’t cook, my boys have grown up with a horrifyingly sexist vision of how things work in the kitchen and around the house in general. Mom cooks; everyone else sits down when it’s ready and then rushes off to their very important soccer and basketball practices while Mom does the dishes.

To make matters worse, my older son has suddenly transformed from a generally likeable kid into (and it pains me to say this) a teenager. And just like everything else my oldest has taken on in life, he has embraced this metamorphosis with uncommon gusto. Whereas some teens may be occasionally surly, mine is like a sorority girl on PMS… every single day.

So, back to dinner and the laundry. I had been battling with the 13-year-old dark phantom all day. Every small step toward accomplishing anything was met with open hostility and scorn. Attempts to elicit help or even basic civility were devoured by the teenage wraith and expelled as unrecognizable emotional shrapnel. So, when my husband walked through the door after being away for hours scouting a high school basketball game (for his very important other job as a high school coach) it didn’t take much to send me over the edge into my Starbucks seclusion. (I'm usually more stable than this. Honest.)

The very next day, I decided that the time had come to end all of this ridiculous 1950s let’s-let-Mom-do-it garbage once and for all. The kid needed some life skill training and a bit more respect for how hard his parents (especially his sainted mother) work for him every day. I decided that since cooking required dishwashing—and since our last lesson in cooking involved me forgetting to mention that hot bacon grease does not get washed down the sink when you’re done frying—I’d start with something simpler: doing his own damn laundry.

Shockingly, he was oddly receptive to the whole idea (“This is easy! I don’t know why you guys complain about this so much.”). He made his way through the two-and-a-half loads of post-teenage-boy grungies on his bedroom floor, and ensured that he would indeed have fresh boxers to wear on Monday morning (without yelling at Mom about it—what a concept).

The upside of all of this is that Grumble-butt now knows how to launder his own dirty drawers, meaning he will have one less thing to grouse about in the dark mom-hasn't-had-coffee-yet hours as he prepares for school  And maybe my son will not be completely helpless when I send him out into the world in the not-too-distant future. The downside is that I forgot to explain that not everything goes in the dryer after it has been washed (forgetting the important follow-up lessons is getting to be a pattern with me). To complete that final half load, the boy had grabbed a few of my sweaters and, um… underpinnings to fill the machine. [Sigh]

So, if you know any eight-year-old girls who like to wear somewhat motherly but now-so-very-small freshly cleaned sweaters, drop me a line. I’ll just be sitting here in a borrowed Aéropostale sweatshirt and some nice clean boxers waiting for my laundryman to get home from school.

P.S. If you want the greatest picture book ever for teaching these lessons to your own little boys, check out Piggybook, by Anthony Browne.

 

He Said What?

One thing that helps make up for all of the whining and fighting and stinky body fluids involved in parenting two boys is the fact that kids are just so darned funny. I think that’s by design—it keeps us from chucking them to the curb when they hit the teenage years. The best stuff comes when they’re trying to be dead serious or when their innocence and cluelessness run smack into their firm conviction that they know it all.

So, in the spirit of enjoying my boys as the goofballs they so frequently can be, here are my top-five (or at least five I can remember today) things my kids said or did that made me laugh.

#5. Yeah, Mom… you’re hilarious (looking)

The other night at dinner, my 13-year-old gave me this one: “Oh… you want your blog to be funny? It’s only supposed to be funny for, like, other 40-year-old moms, right? Yeah. Cause you’re nailin’ it.”

* Life lesson #4263 - Remember that Mom has a never-ending stash of  

       those pictures when you start popping off at the dinner table. And she blogs.

#4. What does a duck say?

Both of my kids had some enunciation issues early on. Austin had a little trouble with the “qu” sound, which he pronounced as “ff.” Why does it seem like every board game and book we had back then asked the oh-so-provocative question: “What does the duck say?” His response? “FFaaack! Fack, fack, fack, fack, fack…”

In a similar vein, Caden decided that his favorite song—right at the time he couldn’t pronounce his N’s—was “Play that Funky Music White Boy.” Oh, boy. He also switched his B’s and D’s, so we heard an awful lot about him playing with his “doll” and his “dike” for a while. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

#3. Douche!

When Austin was just learning to talk, he had a few multipurpose words that applied to more than one thing. The fun part was trying to decipher what he really meant. One of these oft-used words was—sadly—“douche.” Really. It meant both “shoes” and “juice.” I remember many, many trips to the mall that were punctuated by loud drawn-out cries of “Doooouuuuche! Dooooouuuche!” He’d keep up his Summer’s Eve chant until I could figure out if he was thirsty, had lost his baby Chuck Taylors, or just wasn’t feeling springtime fresh. “Dooooouuuuuche!”

#2. Bone stickers

Back when my oldest was about seven, the boys were watching one of those funny home video TV shows, and a clip came on showing a toddler with panty liners stuck all over his head. The audience was roaring with laughter, and Austin turned to us and said, “I don’t get it. What are those things?” His little brother looked at him and replied with the earnest conviction of a knows-everything three-year-old, “Those are bone stickers!” [Duh!] Austin looked at us quizzically and answered, “I still don’t get it.”

And finally, my number one favorite kid giggle…

#1. Hey, Dude!

Some of you have seen this before, but this may be my favorite kid-mispronunciation of all time. It’s Caden back in about 2004, earnestly singing that Beatles classic, Hey Dude. It still makes me smile every time I see it.

So, what do your kids say and do that makes you giggle? Please share! (Really... down there in the comments. It'll be fun for everybody!)

Health Baby Mea Culpa

I failed as a Health Baby grandma! My son earned a 97% for the time he spent watching the “baby” (with only one small mistake), but during my short stint babysitting, I managed to almost kill the kid. On the time-stamped computer printout, I was busted for letting the baby’s head snap back three times, missing a diaper change, and even neglecting to feed the little guy within the four-minute window.

How did my own boys survive me?

Truthfully, I feel terrible, but not for little JaKobe, who I think should learn to be a little more patient on the diaper change thing. My real kids had to man up and tough it out on occasion while I navigated the slalom course of our life to get to the source of their discomfort. But I do feel terrible for my real son, who slumps and slouches through the day at school to mask the fact that he is, in fact, proud of his straight-A average (which is now in serious jeopardy). If he had a timed computer printout gauging my performance, it would have shown a major downward blip right about sixth period as he received his Health Baby report.

You see, I made him go to his refereeing gigs that day. I insisted that he leave the “baby” with me (“I parented two kids of my own! I can handle a doll… jeeez!”). It’s his first job, and I thought that canceling on his employers because of the Health Baby set a bad precedent. And really, how many dads can just quit their jobs because having a baby at home is too hard? (Thoughts on paternity leave would make an interesting future post, though…)

And then I blew it as the Health Baby’s grandma. Damn. I really thought parenting imaginary kids was one of my fortes. Little Jessica and Jennifer, my imaginary twins (whom I named back in 6^th grade) are doing splendidly. They never fight, they keep their rooms clean, and they have never once told me “I hate you”, no matter how badly I screwed up. [Sigh] Imaginary kids are so sweet!

Back in reality, my other real-life kid spent the weekend moaning on the couch with a 102º fever. I cooled his brow, brought him juice and Tylenol, and—in the moments when he felt a little better—played cribbage and battleship on a TV tray by his sickbed. I read him stories and gave him hugs, and when he was finally feeling better last night, he gave me a big squeeze and said, “You are the best mom in the world. Thank you for taking such good care of me while I was sick.”

I guess I’m one for two for the weekend. That’s not so bad, really. But I wouldn’t ask me to babysit your baby any time soon if I were you.

* Update: I went to conferences yesterday (arena-style at the middle school), and every parent I ran into already knew the sad story of my failure as a doll-watcher. You could see the reproachful chuckle in their eyes. My conference with the health teacher started with, "So... the baby..." I'm infamous for my ineptitude as a pretend baby-grandma. Jeez.

Lessons from Health Baby

Health Baby has come to visit for the weekend. This computerized simulator is here to convince my son that parenthood should be postponed until he no longer values sleep or—really—any uninterrupted time to himself. Little JaKobe (as my son has named him) cries and fusses frequently. As soon as he starts, you rub a magnet over his chest to trigger a timer that tests how quickly you can figure out which of four things might be wrong with the little guy. Is he hungry? Does he need to be burped or rocked or changed?

JaKobe sleeps for hours (you can listen to him breathing), and then he eats like a locust until he tires out again and naps, saving up his energy for the wee hours of the morning. It’s good to see a little realism written into the program. When he needs a diaper change, he’ll scream piercingly until you rub the magnet in the new diaper across his little tush, at which point, he’ll instantly coo with contentment. (Isn’t that just exactly how it went for your babies?)

It’s funny to watch a teenage boy growing more and more panicked as he struggles to decipher the baby’s cries. “What’s wrong with you?” he pleads. I so remember asking that more than a few times in the years before my kids could tell me where it hurt. Health Baby is (as you might imagine) much easier than a real child, though. I babysat the little doll this afternoon as my son went to his job as a soccer ref, and it was reassuring to know that there was always an answer to the “what’s wrong” question. (I wonder what the neighbors thought when they walked by and saw me patting the little half-naked baby against my shoulder in the living room.)

But really, Health Baby could go a long way toward being more realistic. Those changed diapers are completely fragrance-free. I want little JaKobe to give my son a realistic, full-fledged messy blow-out. You know, the squishy yellow-brown smear that goes up the back, soaks through the onesie, and leaks all over your last pair of clean jeans.

As my son nonchalantly changes that magnetic diaper, I’d like JaKobe’s little anatomically correct penis to do what little boy parts do when you remove the diaper (they don’t just make these for the fun of it), and for him to realize that that’s going to be the closest he’ll get to a shower all day. So when his sweet “Health Wife” gets home at the end of the day, he might be standing there weeping just a little, with a yellow smear on his jeans and dried pee crusting in his hair.

I don’t know if I ever realized how much of parenthood would revolve around other people’s bodily functions. Of course I knew there’d be diapers, but I didn’t think about the fact that they’d still be in diapers when they were eating solid food. Or that corn doesn’t change in any noticeable way after it’s been eaten by a child, so that when it’s running down their leg at the park, you can clearly see last night’s dinner. And I didn’t know that some kids could be champion-grade pukers either, so prone to vomiting that a simple cough can set them off. As the real-life parent, you get to be the one wiping it off and washing it away, while at the same time comforting and kissing and loving the producer of all that stomach-churning goo.

 

More than just the absence of excrement, though, Health Baby falls short of reality in one very fundamental way. Baby JaKobe only has four reasons to cry. That’s it. My son knows that if he tries each remedy for a minute, one of them will eventually work. Every parent who’s ever spent a long, dark night walking the halls with a squalling baby—wondering what’s wrong, aching over the cries of the child, begging the little one for a clue—knows that sometimes babies just cry. Sometimes they can’t be consoled. Comforting a baby sure as heck doesn’t happen in the span of a four-minute countdown. And it doesn’t end on Monday. Real babies don’t get turned back in to the health teacher at the end of a long weekend.

Still, I’m pretty sure I won’t be babysitting for my son again any time soon. So, really, this is the best health assignment ever.

* For an update on the Health Baby experiment, see Health Baby Mea Culpa.

A Separate Piece

Last Friday, my older son called to say he’d missed the bus home from school and wanted to walk over to a friend’s house to hang out until the football game that night. My husband took the call, and I heard him start to say goodbye with a quick, “Be careful crossing the highway.”

My heart froze, and I felt that tear-fighting squeeze at the back of my throat. I leapt up and heard myself shrieking, “No! You will not cross the highway! No! Give me that phone!” The conversation that followed, predictably, deteriorated from there as my almost fourteen-year-old son responded with typical middle-school disdain as I dug in my heels and threatened ridiculous months of grounding if he so much as set foot on that road. He’s a good kid, the responsible type who typically enjoys a lot of freedom and has plenty of experience getting around on his own. But there I was going apoplectic on him because he wanted to cross a street without me. “God, Mom, chill out!”

I remember when I first brought him home from the hospital. I felt like the most fragile and precious piece of myself had been thrust out into the world, becoming this separate being with nothing to shield it from harm. Before that, if someone had asked me what the most awful thing that could ever happen in my life would be, I would have offered a list of physical catastrophes that could happen to me: cancer…paralysis…death. After he was born, though, the worst things in my world had nothing to do with me and everything to do with this fragile, separate being. Why on earth were they sending him home with me? I didn’t know anything about keeping him safe! Our car had never seemed as powerful or as ominous as it did on the day we strapped him in for the very first time to drive home from the hospital.

Several years ago, when I was still working as a teacher, I had a student named Aaron. He was a bright, mischievous, redheaded ten-year-old with a big, friendly smile. One day, he and a buddy walked down the street near where we live to grab a snack at McDonalds. He stood waiting at the light, and when the walk signal told him to go, he stepped out into the crosswalk spanning the highway (yes, that highway). His friend was just about to step out behind him when a car came speeding through the red light, killing Aaron and then driving away.

I often think about Aaron’s mother, about that separate piece of her heart that was horrifyingly run down that day. I think about her face, about the pain and numbness I saw there after the accident. I think about her brave decision to donate his organs so that another mother’s worst days could be forestalled. I wonder how she got out of bed the next day. And the day after that. And how she faced all of the tomorrows filled with the hollow echo of the milestones and celebrations her son would never see.

My son thinks I’m a freak, if I believe what he said on the phone Friday afternoon. I’m lame and weird and completely unhinged. Maybe he’s right. But there is this vulnerable, separate piece of me walking around out there, battling the torments and pitfalls and trials of adolescence. I think I should get a pass on the occasional freak-out. Of course I’ll let him fall sometimes. He has to fall to learn to get back up. Of course he’ll make mistakes. He has to make mistakes to appreciate the times when he gets it right. But as long as the worst thing that could happen in my world is so awful that I can’t even think about it without feeling this tightening in my throat, I will sometimes step in and be the embarrassing, lame, mortifying and overbearing bad guy. I have to.