January 10, 2004

• Being a parent is not all one thing or another.  It’s complicated.

  
  

  My 22-year-old son, Doug, would probably have most mothers worried and frustrated by now.  He’s not doing what most sons do, leaving home, chasing girls, zooming around in cars or on a motorcycle or snowmobile.  He has no career plans, and no ambition beyond continuing to do what he does now, consorting with a global bunch of online friends, playing games, keeping abreast of that part of the news that interests him, and writing fanfic  He also reluctantly but thoroughly and skillfully performs a number of menial and strenuous tasks around here for which we old folks are appreciative.  In that way, he earns his keep.

  
  

  Each time his step-father Greyfox and I try to push him to get his instruction permit and learn to drive, he’ll dig up the state driver’s manual and read for a while, then go back to playing GTA Vice City or Roadkill.  I ask myself if it might have been that time when he was two or three years old and somehow managed to get our car started, and ran it into the side of the house, or if it might be some traumatic memories from the winter night that a drunken friend of his dad’s first set him on a four-wheeler.  Terry put the kid in the saddle, put his hands on the handlebars, showed him how to pull in the clutch handle and twist the trottle, then told him to release the clutch.  The four-wheeler jumped over a snow berm and came down hard, throwing the kid off onto something that skinned his nose, and then (I’m so grateful) stalled before it ran over him.

  
  

  It might even be, partially at least, those 28,000 miles he spent cramped in the passenger seat of our Fiat X1/9 when he was twelve.   We called it the Big Field Trip, but due to our tight budget and the tense reasons we were out on the road at all, it was no picnic.  Living in a sports car for seven months, camping out, having a tent come apart around us in a windstorm… naah, I don’t suppose that would put him off cars for life.  Whatever it is, he’s happier to hang around here and explore the world online, at least for now.

  
  

  When he was in high school, the worries of his teachers and counselors infected me briefly.  I pushed him and I bucked against his lackadaisical scholarship.  He tested in the 92nd percentile on his worst achievement test, and as high as the 99th on some others.  At the teacher conference in jr. high when they reported that 92% to us, making it out to be some great thing, that he was so smart, the teachers and counselor didn’t seem to understand Greyfox’s and my disappointment.  We knew Doug could do and had done much better–I suppose they hadn’t bothered to look at his transcripts.  After a moment’s thought, it dawned on me that for most people scores in the nineties are good.  In this family, scores in the low nineties are bad.

  
  

  Those test scores made his teachers want to make a showpiece of him, and the kid wasn’t having any of it.  He could pass his classes without study and without doing homework, if all that was required was passing exams to prove he knew the material.  But they demanded daily effort and homework handed in regularly to show that he was paying attention to them.  Fat chance!  They passed him on the strength of his test scores right up to his senior year, but it wasn’t enough for graduation.  By his second year in twelfth grade, they would have been just as happy to see him drop out.  Not only did his anomalously low grades bring down their class averages and make them look bad, I suppose the kid was setting a bad example for other students.

  
  

  I was not going to accept his dropping out.  I wanted him to finish what he started.  I hated living under the command of an alarm clock to get him up and off on time for the school bus, but my Daddy didn’t raise no quitter, and I didn’t want to, either.  I didn’t ever insist on his going to college, but for a while I did threaten him with Job Corps, until a sensible older woman pointed out that he’s a late bloomer, and I remembered what I’d learned in prison from some women who’d been in Job Corps about the nature of that organization.

  
  

  He did summer correspondence courses between those two senior years, and took a half day of classes, with the rest filled in by study periods and work in library and as teacher’s aide that last year.  We also did the toughest of the remaining required credits at home by correspondence to make sure he got them.  He aced the correspondence courses, and the damned teachers thought I’d cheated and done the work for him.  All I had done was done the teaching, talked about the subjects, helped him find related references, monitored his tests, and KEPT HIM ON TASK.  The wage slaves of academia never knew how to handle his ADHD.  They had him in Special Ed for the handicapped and in Extended Learning Program for the gifted, all at the same time.  But no one had the time or thought it important enough to just give him an occasional reminder of what he was supposed to be doing.  That’s what I do.  I do it even now, to get the work done around here.  But I digress….

  
  

  I started this because I wanted to record the conversation we had this morning.  I had been waking up, trying to get a sluggish mind and body up to speed, in Couch Potato Heaven, playing Disgaea while Greyfox prepared our breakfast.  Doug had brought in firewood and stoked the stove, and wanted to go right to bed after having been up about sixteen hours.  I was encouraging him to get some snow shoveled off the roof before he went to bed.  He plopped onto his butt from his crouch in front of the woodstove, and lay back against the footlocker behind him.  He said, “I just get so tired of…”  …Of feeling sick and tired?” I finished for him.  He nodded.

  
  

  This winter the myagic encephalomyelitis has hit him harder than ever, and he has been dragging around with chronic fatigue.  I put down the controller and turned toward him and pronounced those words, the long, spelled-out form of ME/CFIDS.  I repeated what I’d told him before, how it runs in families but that doesn’t necessarily make it genetic.  It could be environmental or communicable, no one is sure at this point… or rather, several different people are sure it is several different things.

  
  

  I told him this “rheumatiz” kept my grandfather, mother’s father, in a wheelchair for the last two decades or longer of his life, forgetting at the time to mention that my father had it at least since his youth (which I know because it had been an old country doctor who had, when my father was a teen, recommended the first-thing-in-the-morning lemon juice and warm water that I still find helpful).

  
  

  I went on to tell him that we can either let it get us down or we can get up and deal with it.  We can go under, or we can get over it.  Greyfox joined in and said he has to make some special effort to get up at 4AM, drive seventy miles and carry a few hundreds of pounds of knives, in dozens of loads, into a hall for a trade show to support us.  I indulged myself likewise and talked about the guts it takes to do some of the tasks I do.  We talked about mind over matter, about keeping on.  The roof got shoveled and then Doug went to bed.

  
  

  Doug is a joy to me.  I suppose every parent reading this will be able to relate to the pleasure I take in seeing my wit and wry humor reflected in him.  Others may also relate to my distress at seeing him in pain and feeling it my duty to push him and urge him to go on and work hurt.  I finished that conversation with tears in my eyes.  Then as I listened to the sounds of the snow pusher on the roof, I got irritated at Greyfox for his skeptical attitude.  Even though he could hear as clearly as I could that the kid was up there working, he was expressing doubt that Doug had taken any of our words to heart.  I guess that negative attitude is one of the reasons Doug doesn’t like Greyfox.  It’s certainly one of the things I don’t like about the old fart.

  
  

  For Doug’s sake, I hope he matures and evolves enough to forgive Greyfox’s skepticism, abuse and disrespect.  At the present time, that screwed up relationship is what I see as the big negative factor in the kid’s life.  As for his career plans, his ultimate life course and all that, I leave that up to Doug.  From the beginning of his life, I stressed to him what my Spirit Guides had always been leading me to tell all my clients:  it is the spiritual, creative, Self-expressive stuff that really matters.  We do physical and material work to sustain these meat machines we move around in.  We explore the intellectual realms because that is what our curiosity leads us to do.  Only when we are channeling spirit through our creativity do we approach divinity in this life.  When I read what Doug writes, and when we talk about what he’s been thinking about, I know he took those words of mine to heart.

  • 7:43 pm
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