hold to home's unchanging hand.
on middle school and swift transitions.
I have always considered the summer between my fifth and sixth grade years one of the defining moments of my life. Because my elementary school had identified me as a candidate for the so-called “gifted and talented” middle school track, I had to attend a summer readiness program to prepare.
It was the first time I was ever given the power to make a difficult choice. The program fell on the same dates as my family’s biannual reunion, which was being held in Los Angeles that year. (What starstruck 10-year-old would pass up the chance to fly to California for the first time?)
My mother told me I could either make the choice that would have long-term impact (the summer program) or fly to the reunion with Nana (a memorable and fun, if fleeting, experience). I chose the program.
(Quick aside: This anecdote is family lore, not an actual clear memory of mine. Now that I’m both an adult and a parent, I doubt the choice was entrusted as wholly to me as I once believed.)
My decision may have implied a level of maturity that boded well for my capacity for success in advanced placement classes, but there were other factors at play that would muddy the transition.
That summer was also when my mother married for the first time. Until then, I had always lived among women. Men were never a daily (or even frequent) presence. My mother and I would traipse freely through our home in our dressing gowns, pjs and underwear. Our bathrooms were a mess of countertop potions and feminine products. No one ever fought over music, TV or movie choices, accepting without debate that there would be early era Commissioned or Winans albums on the hi-fi, ‘70s era comedies and classic tearjerkers on VHS, The Cosby Show, A Different World, The Fresh Prince, Blossom or any other sitcom I chose before my 9:30 pm bedtime on the TV. Like most ‘80s kids, I was largely unsupervised after school, letting myself into our apartment, choosing whether or not to do my homework in the hours before my mother came home from work and losing myself in fictional families after she arrived, while she cooked dinner, made phone calls or dozed off after her long days and longer public transit commutes.
The sudden addition of man changed all that. I couldn’t bound through the house in whatever state of dress I chose anymore or peek into my mother’s bedroom to ask questions whenever I wished or climb into her bed after a bad dream or choose what to watch on TV without asking. And I didn’t quite know where I stood in our drastically-altered household, either. Rules felt more rigid, new permissions needed to be requested, “politeness” and “respect” took on new and foreign meaning.
Above all else, after living my whole short life as an only child to a single mother with a long-distance father I only saw once a year (on a good year), I felt my place in our family shifting in ways I didn’t understand. I’d committed to calling the new guy “Dad” because “Mr. FirstName” didn’t make sense after he married my mom, but within months of their marriage, the title felt like ash on my tongue whenever I spoke it. I didn’t like him. I wasn’t sure that he liked me, and I wasn’t entirely convinced that he even liked being married to my mother. Their relationship never felt like one either of them were happy to be in, and I never knew how to be happy around them. We all tried tipping around the tougher parts of interacting with one another, but that was especially hard for me.
I was already headed toward that sullen, boundary-testing phase most preteens have to navigate; my mother’s marriage in the summer after fifth grade accelerated the process for me.
The gifted and talented summer course marked my first brush with academic rigor. It culminated in a research presentation on a foreign country and its culture, during which we were to don our chosen country’s traditional garb, if any, and bring in a dish reflective of its culture.
I chose Jamaica, my new stepfather’s country of origin. I dressed in my usual uniform of a t-shirt and jeans–”Jamaicans dress like Americans, for the most part,” I explained, thinking of my stepfather’s t-shirts, jeans and church suits. I brought in a dozen beef patties he’d picked up from his favorite local spot. We cut them into quarters to stretch the serving size. It remains one of the few memories I have of us working well together, of us wanting to.
I did okay in the program – I didn’t fail – but I noticed that I wasn’t a star pupil there, and I didn’t know how to become one, either. I’d shown up, putting in the exact amount of effort that amounted to success in elementary school, but I could already tell that it would no longer be enough.
Sixth grade was jarring in all the expected ways: I didn’t understand three-ring binders, loose leaf paper or dividers, the need to separate work by class, the urgency to complete assignments right away so that “incompletes” didn’t accumulate and crash in on me at the end of a quarter like a ten-car pile-up. I couldn’t comprehend my heightened awareness of boys, how their voices were starting to squeak, croak and deepen, how it seemed that every time I turned around I had an unrequited crush on a new one. I never knew what to do with my hair. Locker combinations may as well have been physics. Pre-algebra may as well have been calculus. And I was convinced that my friends were light years smarter than I was, that their easily-achieved As and Bs meant we didn’t belong in the same classes, not when I could barely clear a C or D.
Even English confounded me in middle school. I hated Ivanhoe and Watership Down and every other assigned work by a white male author. I never read them, so I couldn’t write well about them. Every book report was a bluff. (As it turned out, I was only interested in reading and writing on my own terms, not Baltimore County Public Schools.)
The adults around me were trying to figure out why I was flailing. My mother figured I got lazy and forgot how to apply myself. My guidance counselor was calling my mother in, asking first if anything was wrong at home and then musing that I probably just wasn’t “gifted and talented material.”
I was crying a lot. Acting out. Hiding bad grades and interim reports marked in danger of failing. I was watching TV after school with nary a thought toward a single assignment I was supposed to complete at night and return to a teacher in the morning. No one spent time checking my work at home so I rarely bothered to complete it. Any attempt I made to finish homework assignments was impeded by the pesky fact that I hadn’t paid attention to the in-class lesson on which the assignment was based.
It took me a full five years to get my performance in school back under some semblance of control. I did it in time to graduate high school with a 2.7 GPA (which would never have been so high without the higher weighted averages of “gifted and talented” track work). That 2.7 was just enough to be admitted to a few colleges. And I went on to graduate college with a 3.4 and grad school with a 3.9. But none of that could happen until I taught myself how to study, organize, and cope with my complicated emotions about my home life.
For as long as I’ve been a parent, I’ve dreaded the long-looming day when my daughter would have to start middle school.
As the day approached, I tried to be both positive and realistic. I said that the experience might feel intimidating but it would provide her lots of chances to grow. New kids meant potential new friendships and also new challenges. Her teachers would be a little less attentive but that just meant their trust in her ability to do things on her own was growing.
I didn’t believe a word of it, unable to shake my own memories of those years and how long their impact on my education lasted.
Still, I silently hoped she’d have a better time of it than I had. We’d already navigated the one serious relationship I had during her childhood, where she knew, bonded and clashed with my partner, then processed my breakup in tandem with me. I’d acquitted myself well enough there; though she still brings up her memories of that short-lived Man in Our Lives, I can tell that nothing she experienced shook her faith in my devotion to her.
Middle school was a different animal, though.
The one she attended for sixth grade turned out to be wildly overcrowded, with over 35 kids in some classes and teachers who were vocal in their frustration about everything from their students' unruly behavior to how overtaxed and under-resourced they were. The work my daughter brought home ranged from rote and repetitive to oddly worded and confusing. Her teachers never hesitated to slap a failing grade on a test, quiz or assignment but rarely responded to my concerned correspondence or expressed any concern of their own. One of her teacher’s retired abruptly mid year, but not before telling my daughter’s class that she was tired of teaching students who “didn’t take their education seriously.” And on more afternoons than not, my kid hopped into the passenger’s seat of my car seething and crying over some challenge or other she’d struggled to navigate.
I thought about my own sixth-grade year on those afternoons, how I’d gone home to an empty house, suppressing my tears, tuning out and turning off for hours before lying to my mother’s weary pre-dinner queries about whether or not I’d done my homework.
I thought about how, even though I was in a position to meet my daughter at the site of her frustration every day, I couldn’t always ease it for her.
There are only so many things I can do to keep her from flailing.
I can talk to her about standing up for herself but I can’t keep a girl in the hall from calling her a bitch when she tries to. I can’t shield her from children who use the n-word with a hard -er within earshot. I can’t convince under-responsive teachers or overtaxed teams of special educators not to let my concerns fall on apathetic ears. I can’t do my daughter’s work for her (or even understand it much better than she does at times).
I just do what I can. I talk to her. I try to get her to explain to me the peer conflicts she’s navigating, her successful or failed attempts at friend-making, the cafeteria table pecking order, why she’s hopping into my car at dismissal, crying. I can gently point out when her binder and backpack are starting to look like landfills. I can be proactive about reaching out to her teachers when it seems like she’s in over her head.
I can let her emote after a tough day and point out to her when she’s crossed the line between relying on me as a sounding board and using me as a punching bag.
I can even uproot us from one neighborhood and plant us in another for no other reason than to provide what will hopefully be a better school environment for her.
It’s what I did this summer.
It’s too soon to know whether the new school will be “better” for my kid who is, admittedly, a self-professed school-disliker, but it’s not too soon to declare it objectively a calmer, more responsive space with a better capacity to manage classroom behavior and communicate with parents about accommodating their child’s special needs.
My daughter now has two weeks of seventh grade under her belt. She has hopped into the car crying once already, but she’s also greeted me with an afterschool smile, which never happened on any day last year.
If she looks back on this time as one of the defining eras of her adolescence, I want her to remember how her tears were wiped by my hand almost as often as her own, how committed I was to communicating with her, even as her emotions grew to unwieldy to articulate and how little need she had to hid things from me, even when she chose to do so anyway.
Earlier this week, she had a trying day. When I dropped her off the following morning, I said, “No matter what today is like, remember that if it’s bad, you get to come home at the end of it.”
She nodded resolutely and I pulled off, hoping I’d made our home a promise, a substance to be hoped for, a waiting balm to greet her at the end of all her bad days.