New School

It just shouldn't be that hard to get 3 kids to look at a camera. Now that Steel has her posse of fashionistas, they've all told her that the earrings she wore on the first day of school were "hideous."

I was going to helicopter in and tell JP's advisor that I thought he might be being bullied at Penn Charter.  In reality, JP is adjusting just fine, and I'm starting to wonder whether HE is instigating issues with "the jocks." He likes to see himself as a the main character in a "Diary of a Wimpy kid"-esque film.  In his kind, patient way; Tim told me to back off, and he was right.  Tim has handled this move to a private school much better than I have.  

Instead of running to the school, I wrote the following soliloquy from the point of view of my comedic son and e-mailed it to him one day.  I think it was therapeutic for both of us

So my 7th grade entry into Penn Charter was a little rocky.  First of all, there's the JP/PJ issue; both of us are new kids.  I'm JP. I'm an 80lb not-super-coordinated 7th grader who would rather sculpt with polymer clay or play video games than pretty much anything else.  PJ is a big, handsome athletic 7th grader.  He's been a water polo goalie for 4 years.  How is that possible?  Kids play water polo when they are in 3rd grade????  It turns out Penn Charter is a super jocky school. People have been confusing JP and PJ.  Everyone thinks that I'm PJ.  I think I get it.  JP is a pretty common, acceptable acronym.  PJ is short for pajamas, and I'm, well, short for EVERYTHING.  Pajamas is kind of a "little kid" word.  I don't know of too many adults who wear pajamas.  My parents don't.  I actually wish they would, but that's another story.  I used to have this great pair of Lightening McQueen pajamas; I wore the hell out of those.  I'll bet they'd still fit me now.  Anyway perhaps my classmates look and me and think "pajamas." which makes them think that I'm PJ and he's JP.
At Penn Charter there's this thing called "intramurals."   It's everyone's favorite day because we get out of the classroom and run around doing sports all day.  It's my idea of hell.  So they put ME in the soccer goal.  I lost count after I let in 5 goals. It was demoralizing.  Memo to my fellow 7th graders: On our next "intramurals" day.  Put PJ in the goal and ask JP to do something like fill the water bottles. I'll crush that.
I wonder what PJ stands for.  Is it Patrick?  Why doesn't he just go by Patrick?  My uncle Pat was my favorite when I was a kid because I was obsessed with backhoes, and he drove one.  I actually was put to sleep every night for a few years by my parents singing this song they wrote about my Uncle Pat.  "Uncle Pat gets in the backhoe.  He gets in the backhoe and he turns it on, and he digs digs digs; he digs in the backhoe.  He digs digs digs till the sun is gone."  I can't believe the second line is "and he turns it on."  Couldn't they have come up with something better than that?  One Direction did get away with the line, "The way that you flip your hair gets me overwhelmed," so the bar is low.  Maybe PJ is short for one of those incomprehensible names like "Poppasquash."  Now I'm feeling sorry for PJ.  Those kind of names only really work when you're in your 80's and you've just published a memoir about your conversations with Winston Churchill.  My little sister came home on one of the first days at Penn Charter.  She said, "Guys, there's a kid named Ridgeway in my class!"  Ridgeway sounds like a posh neighborhood in San Diego or a company that makes high end skis.
Poppasquash is actually an island off the coast of Rhode Island where my grandfather summered when he was a little kid.  He, too, was an 80-lb 7th grader.  Maybe there's hope for me. 

Meanwhile, Steel did not want to go to Penn Charter.  She preferred the school that separated the sexes.  She can barely tolerate boys.  We ran into one of her new classmates at the orthodontist.  I could tell he recognized her immediately when he walked in.  I whispered to her that a kid recognized her and was he in her class?  She said, I know he goes to Penn Charter, but I don't think he's in my grade.  There are only 14 kids in her CLASS, and he's one of them.  Boys just don't exist for her.  She was telling me how she hopes that she has a future boyfriend who comes out to her as gay.  Then she can "just be his beard for years and it will be so fun and perfect!"  She was not impressed by the girls at Penn Charter when she visited.  She thought they were mean.  The crazy thing is that she was right to detect some social issues. I'd heard of a mean girl from a few of the girl moms I'd talked to, but when the woman of 3 boys in front of whose home the bus stops said something, I knew it was a problem.  Those boys are the most stoic kids I've ever met.  When my kids wept and wailed for 10 minutes about the lack of air conditioning on the bus, her kids said nothing. On the fancy dress day, they walked out of their house, and it was a living, breathing page from a Land's End catalogue.  Both parents are doctors; all three boys are good looking, good students, polite and athletic, so hearing that one of them burst into tears at the thought of having this girl in his class shocked the hell out of me almost as much as the moment of intimacy required for the mother to divulge that to me.  

Perhaps our previous school had avoided petty mean girl stuff because they had bigger fish to fry. One of Steel's close friends succumbed to DIPG on a snow day in the middle of her 4th grade year.  The only thing I can say about Marlee's death is that I was so glad that I'd impulsively told my kids over the summer that she was probably not going to make it.  Her chances were 1 in 100, and she'd gone on a clinical trial over the summer, and it started out somewhat promising, and it had ended abysmally.  I had the impression that everyone was telling the kids: Marlee is strong. Marlee is a fighter. Marlee is going to beat it.  I didn't want my kids shocked at the outcome.  Moreover I didn't want them to think every time they hear the words, "he/she is strong; he/she is a fighter" that the person was destined to die.  Marlee's odds were terrible; that's not the case for everyone who gets sick. (Although a 39-year-old mother of one of JP's friends had died 3 months before Marlee had, so the Roxborough track record for conquering cancer has not been one of happy endings.)

I had a tough time at Marlee's funeral.  Steel and her friends were inconsolable.  They were also egging each other onto new heights of their histrionic, cinematic impression of what grieving should be.  It felt insincere, overly-dramatic and disruptive.  I, however, was not going to be that mother who shushes her grieving 10 year old at a funeral.  I held her close.  I told her and her friends to come to the studio after the service.  I wasn't going to make them return to school like that.  After a trip to Dunkin' Donuts, the three of them were gleeful little banshees.  I felt played.  The mom who had taken the girls to the viewing, the previous evening, had the same feeling about their weeping and wailing.  She said to me that they didn't know how to grieve, but acting the part was probably helping them process in some way.  That mom is 14 years younger than I am but far wiser.

Seeing the 3 different reactions to Marlee's death was heart-wrenching.  Toby with her hyper-rational mind went straight to question mode.  How old was she?  How could she be nine and die? Where is she now? Steel went straight down the rabbit hole.  "I hate life; it shouldn't have been Marlee."  Jack Peter looked at his weeping sisters and said, "Can we host DandD tomorrow?"  Steel went berserk.  "How can you ask about DandD NOW?"  JP fell apart and whimpered, "I just want to think about something fun!" 

My reaction? I probably went more deeply into whichever escapism method I normally choose: alcohol, gardening or compulsive crafting.  I still find myself bursting into tears over it on my bike ride to work or at some other baffling moment.  

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

My mom had us read Macbeth in her 9th grade English class.  Everyone had to memorize that quote.  I wouldn't call it uplifting, but chanting it as I pedaled helped in some way. Marlee's death is an incomprehensible vacuum looming around the periphery of all of our lives.  

In lieu of more about Toby, I'm putting an extra picture of her with Ava in...

Toby also wanted to go to the single-sex school, but one of her best friends was in her grade at Penn Charter.  Before visiting that other school, she'd longed to "go to Penn Charter with Ava." Whenever she complained I'd just remind her of that.  So Toby gets 2 lines of this blog, and the others get 200.  The 3rd kid really does get the shaft.

 Thank God they have Nanny around to get them new haircuts and new clothes.  If it were up to me, I'd be cutting their hair on the deck, and they'd be rummaging through hand-me-down bags for something to wear.