The Stardust Lounge_ Stories From a Boy's Adolescence - Deborah Digges [3]
I'm keeping my own secrets regarding a sense of fear and failure. I, too, am torn between identities. I have been a snob, a bohemian snob who believed that the arts, music, poetry were religion enough by which to raise my sons and that somehow, above all the groups in culture—rich and poor alike—we were superior in our passionate pursuits.
I have judged Stephen's new friends; moreover, their parents in their business suits and furs, who speak to me coolly, if at all, on the occasions when I have visited the school on Parents’ Night, or to watch Stephen perform his censored raps in the talent show. Their children play flat, dispassionate Bach on the violin. One girl, dressed as a pauper, sings badly “Wouldn't It Be Loverly?”
At the same time, I have tried to mold Stephen to “fit in” here. Night after night I have done Stephen's homework, listed the phylum, class, order, genus, species. Mimicking the hand of my thirteen-year-old, I've written notes on his history text, mapped the Nile, made up a rap for him of the capitals, while Stephen, having disappeared up those steps again, spray-paints his tag on another mailbox, climbs a fire escape to put up a piece, a wall of graffiti that will chide greater Boston on its way to work.
And while I have always been an advocate of the underprivileged, the ones in culture most in need, I have to admit to myself now that, well, I guess I didn't mean it this way. I didn't mean, for instance, that Stephen should befriend street kids, bring them up into our apartment and feed them and give them his clothes, his watch, his bed. That's not what I meant. But what did I mean?
Other self-condemning words go round, culture's words for Stephen and me, words I read on the faces of the Park School parents and their children, dysfunctional, enabling, words I've heard Stan say over the telephone. Frustrated, he tells me that I've never been strict enough with my sons and that now I am paying the price.
And I hear the same frustration from my family as they bemoan the fact that I've brought up my sons without organized religion. They offer that perhaps we've moved around the country too much and that this has bred an unhealthy alliance—perhaps I am too much a friend to my boys, not enough mother. Implicit in their words is the slap of the fact of my divorce from my sons’ father, my marriage to Stan, our commuting relationship.
And because they love Stephen and me they offer advice. One of my sisters suggests a school she has looked into where troubled children like Stephen are dealt with through highly structured days, lots of sports, severe consequences for their actions. “Hip restriction,” she explains. “It means kids have with them at all times one of the school staff, wherever they go.”
I've looked into such a school located in western Massachusetts. But such schools cost twenty-five to thirty thousand a year, almost a year's salary for me. And when I try to imagine Stephen under those circumstances, I see him in his infancy, a baby so violently undone if I left him that I gave up my teaching assistantship in California to stay home with him.
Then there is the “Tough Love” approach, which Stan offers as a solution. This idea costs nothing. According to its policies one simply locks one's child out, calls the police if there is a disturbance, and hopes the world beats the kid up enough that he begs to come home on any terms.
But this approach to our problems is absurd. It is too dangerous to do such a thing to a thirteen-year-old. Better than anyone, I know Stephen, know that he would get lost, would in his anger and despair take some risk that would very likely kill him. I'm not willing to take such a chance with my son.
“You just won't give him up,” Stan offers.
“This isn't about you,” others suggest.
In the end, I agree with both assessments. I won't give him up and it isn't about me. Sometimes there is