My lovely sister-in-law across the street has started a new job this week and she came over the
other day to propose a change to our morning routine. Since she will now be
starting work at 8 am, and will need to leave her house by 7:30, she and my
brother have decided that it's time to let their kids (11 and 9 years old) get
themselves ready and off to school. (Until now, she left the house at 8:15 and
has been able to either drive them to school or send them off herself.) I
pointed out, first to Laura and later to Ken, that I'm right here…across the
street…doing nothing…I could be doing nothing there with my niece and nephew.
But no, they think it's a positive -- that their kids will become more
responsible and independent if they're forced to take this on. When I was
telling Dave about all this, I became unaccountably upset and I've only now
figured out why: When we were kids, my brothers and I had to get ourselves
ready and off to school even though our
mother was home, shouting out orders from her bed.
It would be impossible for me to give a reason for my
mother's actions, but it was obvious she was sad if not outright depressed. I
still cringe, thinking of her yelling at us through a closed door, and even at
the time I resented it so badly. I remember once, in grade 5, which is exactly
in the middle of my niece and nephew's ages, I was late for school and when the
teacher demanded an explanation, for the first and only time ever, I complained about my home life and said,
"Because there were no clean clothes at home and my Mom wouldn't get out
of bed to help me find something". I was expecting shock or sympathy, I had been late because I was digging
through the dirty clothes hamper to find the least dirty thing to wear as per
my mother's, shouted, instructions, but in front of the whole class Miss
Cassidy raised her voice and said, "What are you, a baby? You need your
Mommy to dress you?" *
All through elementary school, not only was the clean
clothes situation dodgy, but I had to figure out my own breakfast, and until
grade 7 I always wore a ponytail -- having haircuts, salon or otherwise, was
never offered to me, so the only way I could try and look presentable was to
drag a brush through the mop and rake it back into an elastic. (Happily, in
grade 7 I started babysitting and realised that I could walk into a salon, with
my own money, and get my hair cut. Getting those first bangs was one of the
most freeing events of my life, lol.) And every day, my mother would lay in
bed, shouting that it was getting late, we had to get a move on, but she never
got up to help us out. Ken eventually took advantage of this, and when he
decided to become a juvenile delinquent, he would sometimes smoke pot in the
bathroom, right down the hallway from our mother, knowing full well that there
was no way she would catch him. Now, also during these years, even though she
wouldn't make us breakfast, my mother insisted that we walk home for lunch.
Most kids (like 95%) were bussed into St. Mark's, so they would have their
bagged lunches, and after wolfing them down, those kids were able to join in
organised lunch hour sports. My brothers and I would have to run or bike home,
no matter what was happening at school, shovel in the beans or ravioli or fruit
cocktail that Mom had uncanned for us, and hightail it back in time to join our
friends -- no exceptions to this rule, home for lunch was obligatory. What was
incredible to me was that when I started high school, when I couldn't come home for lunch, there
simply was no lunch anymore. Nothing was prepared for us and there really
wasn't anything to prepare -- I suppose I could have always made a PB&J,
but we had no tupperware or baggies to put a sandwich in. From grade 9 on, I
had to go to school without a lunch and sometimes a friend would share with me
or buy me something from the caff, but mostly I went hungry. I did ask my
mother once why there was nothing for us to bring for lunch and she got angry
and yelled, "Because I'm not made of money". (And to be fair: When we
were in elementary school and there would be a field trip and we had to have a packed lunch, my mother
would go buy a cheap pop -- Faygo! -- and a Vachon cake for us, and I wondered
later if that's what she thought all the kids always had for lunch -- is that
what she protested she couldn't afford to provide every day?) Like with my
first haircut, though, when we moved to Lethbridge in grade 10 and I got my
first part-time job, I had an incredible sense of freedom when I was able to
start eating out.
And let's talk about the weather! My mother didn't have a
car of her own, so no matter how cold or wet or how many books or other stuff
we had to carry, we were walking kids before high school. I remember once way
back in Saint John that it was raining, torrential rain, when my brothers and I
were walking to school . It was so bad that a school bus stopped and the driver
asked if we were going to the public school (I don't even remember the name)
and offered to give us a lift. I pointed at our little brother and said that we
had to bring him to Kindergarten (which was private and in a woman's basement),
so while Ken skipped up the steps of the bus to get out of the rain, I waved at
the driver and walked Kyler to his school before going on to mine. If Kye was
in Kindergarten, then we were 8, 7 and 5, sent out into the elements alone, definitely
without umbrellas, and I can't be positive that we would have had proper
raincoats or rubber boots ("Because I'm not made of money.") Now, we
wouldn't have been any drier if our mother had walked us to school, but nothing
was ever done to make this easier for us. (And to be fair: My mother talks of the
incredibly long walk she had to make to school each day when she was young, so
she probably thought we had it pretty good by comparison.)
When Kennedy first started school, I didn't have a car of my
own, but since she was in Junior Kindergarten, and 4 years old, I naturally
walked with her. We lived pretty close, a ten minute walk tops, but the first
time there was an ice storm and I was running with both the girls under the
umbrella of Mal's stroller, the week after I had my gallbladder removed, I decided that I really needed a cheap car and
I got one. As the years went on, the need for Kennedy to start walking by
herself never came up -- since my girls are 3 years apart, I was always picking
up the younger one anyway (whether by foot or by car) so there was never any
need for them to walk alone. And since Ken and Laura moved here with their kids
and Conor is 4 years younger than Mal, and Ella is 2 years younger than him, there
has always been a younger kid who
needed to be picked up and room for the older kids too -- no need for anyone to
walk alone, ever. That changed when Kennedy started high school, a 15 minute
walk in the opposite direction from where the rest of the kids went, so of
course I wanted her to be independent and finally start making that walk alone.
Within a few weeks, Kennedy came home after school in tears and said that she
had been followed by a group of girls that she had went to elementary school
with and they had taunted her the whole way, talking about how easy it would be
for them to kick her ass. And I told her right there that she would never need
to walk to or from school again if she didn't want to -- why wouldn't I drive
her when I'm sitting here doing nothing anyway?
Sure, over the years Dave has accused me of babying the
girls -- he doesn't think I should be making their breakfasts anymore or
packing lunches for them, certainly not driving Mallory to school now that
she's in grade 10, but how could I not
do these things? I have no doubt that both of my girls could write their own
blogs, lament all the ways that I've screwed them up, but I hope that they can
eventually see all the ways I've tried to protect them from the specific things
that once hurt me. And to be fair: My own mother told me when I was little that
she resented having to scrub the floor of her childhood home every Saturday
morning before she could go out to play and she promised me then that I would
never need to scrub a floor in her house -- and I never did. We all have these
mother-issues, I know.
So back to where I started -- the reason why I am saddened by
the idea of my niece and nephew being left alone in the mornings: I'm right
here and it's unnecessary; it's like I'm my mother, laying here, refusing to
see them off, and that has always been my line in the sand; the thing I will
not do. And Ken should know better -- even if he didn't feel neglected as a
kid, he has an idea of what mischief the unsupervised can get up to. Laura
outlined how her kids have been told that they're not to cook anything after
she leaves and that they're to check in with me as they leave so that I know
they've left, but my concerns aren't about safety or truancy -- inside me I
know that a kid needs to be seen off in the morning with a smile and a hug and
a cheery "Have a good day", and even if I was just able to give them
that as they checked in with me, I'm still sad. I want to baby the babies. At
least I'm cleared to drive them in bad weather.
.JPG) |
| Conor and Ella at Little Shop of Horrors last weekend. |
*Now that Miss Cassidy is on my mind, I want to digress and
say what a miserable year I had in her class. I have always been this awkward
mix of inappropriately impulsive and painfully shy, speaking or acting before
my brain catches up, and while most teachers liked me, I got a bad vibe from my
grade 5 teacher. She was morbidly obese and quite young, the only
"Miss" we ever had, and I think the fact she wasn't a mother caused
her to have a lack of understanding and empathy -- I also think we were her
first teaching job, so I'm sure that to her us kids were still fairly
theoretical . (She was the only teacher I ever made the mistake of calling Mom
and that also got a shout-out-loud mockery in front of the class.) I remember
we had weekly contests in math and spelling and the results were kept in a
chart on the blackboard. I was flawless at spelling and my name was always at
the top of the leaderboard, but even so, when Miss Cassidy said there would be
a prize for the leaders of each contest when Halloween rolled around, I was
ridiculously nervous -- I wanted that prize, whatever it would be, so badly. I
was the spelling winner in the end and the prize was a chocolate witch, in a
good-sized box like a chocolate rabbit for Easter, and I had never even seen
anything so grand, let alone received one. Miss Cassidy gave me and the other (math)
girl our witches when the class was lined up to leave for the day, and awkward
and tongue-tied, I turned to my best friend, who was also eyeballing the
unbelievable prize, and I said, "I wonder if it's hollow or solid?" I didn't mean for the teacher to hear me, but
she did, and her feelings must have been hurt because she said something like,
"Well, if that isn't the greediest, most ungrateful thing I've ever
heard…" I was mortified and mumbled something about how I was just hoping
it was hollow because I wasn't allowed to have too much chocolate. Lame. Since
that was Halloween, so early in the school year, I'm sure that was the defining
incident that made me think that Miss Cassidy hated me for the whole year. When
I told my mother, many years later, that I thought my grade 5 teacher didn't
like me, she said, "Yes she did! In parent-teacher interviews she would go
on about how bright and engaged you were. As a matter of fact, she wanted to
let you skip grade 6 and go right into 7, but your Dad and I vetoed that right
away." That was the first I had heard of that, and since at the time of
the conversation I was a bored high school student who couldn't imagine being a
year closer to leaving that teenage prison, I whined, "But whyyyyy? Whyyy couldn't I have skipped?" Mom said the
reasons were two-fold: Since I was born in December, my Dad didn't want me to
be nearly two years younger than my classmates, especially when I got to high
school and started dating and going to parties -- and that makes sense that
those would be my uber-controlling father's reasons -- but my Mom was more concerned
about promoting me into Ken's grade and how it would have made him feel. And
that makes sense for her -- but that reason wasn't even about me, and besides,
Ken ended up failing all of his grade 9 classes in his first year of high
school (*see smoking pot in the bathroom before school above*) and was flunked
down into my grade anyway. So many resentments I hold. Purge. Release.
