Bad Dog

This morning at violin lessons, Freestone was ready to start when he asked me, "Do I have ballroom today?"  I said yes, and he had some weird episode where he couldn't function.  It was not pretty.  He wouldn't grab his violin.  Janet had to leave the room "to get something" while I threatened Freestone with all that is holy.  He was fine after that, but still upset that he wasn't mentally prepared to go straight to ballroom after violin, then straight to school.  He is a kid who has to wrap his head around things before he dives in.  When I dropped him off at the school, other ballroom kids were dragging in huge cardboard boxes painted like cars.  They were also dressed like Egyptians.  Free said, "Oh ya.  We were supposed to paint a car for a drive-in movie, but I can't go anyway because of my missing homework."  He had already said he didn't want to dress like an Egyptian for Egyptian day, so he went to school car-less and in civilian clothing, and incidentally, without a package of fig newtons, which was his food assignment.  I was sad because it took everything we had to get Freestone to school dressed, even without all the acoutrements.

I have mixed feelings about the reward system in which some kids get to participate in a party while others have to do homework.  I'm willing to bet the kids who are left out are some of the ones who struggle the most to keep up, and who would LOVE to be doing something right.  For some kids, it's easy-breezy to get everything done.  To put an incentive in front of the kids that may not motivate some of them (I.E. sitting in a cardboard box watching an old movie in the lunchroom), and then punish them when they don't perform, is depressing to me.  Then again, I was the kid in second grade who could not, for the life of me, earn enough fake dimes to qualify me for the weekly popcorn party.  I had a teacher who was borderline abusive, so every Friday, I had to sit at my desk with my head down, listening to the popcorn popper and smelling the warm, buttery goodness wafting toward me from the back of the room, mingled with the happy banter of children who were smarter, better, more worthy than I.  I wasn't even allowed to raise my head to look at them.  I just didn't get it.  I didn't get how to earn the dimes, or why I never did.  One time, I stole some dimes out of Janalee Hill's desk so I could experience the popcorn party, just once.  I was banned from that week's party for stealing and lying.  To this day, I don't know what I did or didn't do to disqualify me from the popcorn party.  It seemed arbitrary how the teacher would dole them out as we worked, and maybe it was.  She was a sociopath.  But it wasn't for lack of wanting to succeed that I failed.  Being excluded just made me more miserable.

So I'm reading my own experiences into Freestone's.  According to my dad, that's the whole problem with today's get-in-touch-with-your-emotions world.  My grandfather was raised on a farm, and carried farm ethics over into his law practice.  The notion of analyzing a criminal's behavior was counter to the practical morals of farm life.  In regards to the insanity defense in a case, my grandfather said, "When a dog goes after a sheep and kills it, you don't ask what the dog's childhood was like.  You just shoot the son-of-a-%#*."

So in theory, I'm OK with saying, "Look, here are the standards, and if you meet them you will be rewarded."  But then I become the parent of a desperate little boy who is brilliant and funny and loving, and who got up at 6 to go to violin to make his mom happy.  Who practices every day and goes to dance classes and scouts, and babysits and takes care of his dog and cooks dinner and stays up late talking to his mom and dad.  But he didn't make a box car because he knew he wasn't worthy.

When I go to school to take him his fig newtons, he is sitting alone in a classroom doing homework, dressed in a floor-length Egyptian tunic that another mom lent him when he came without a costume.  He's wearing eye liner that another parent put on him.  I have failed him.  Suddenly, I'm that second-grader with her head down on her desk, breathing in the buttery smell of everyone else's achievement.

I take my brilliant child away from there and go see Nana.  At her house, everybody qualifies, even the bad dogs.