Gordon is on his tablet on the back room couch, nestled against one particular arm — a spot that I also favor for sitting and scrolling, as it conceals the lounger from view of any family members elsewhere on the first floor. The tablets (one for his brother, one for him) were purchased several years ago for use during long car rides to Ohio, but the devices have crept into other areas of our life, as devices are wont to do. These days the boys’ after school screen time (before dinner but after piano, homework, and occasionally some minor chore like putting away their clean laundry that I have staged in neat, folded piles on my bed, for their maximum convenience I guess) is usually spent with Gus using the TV to play video games while Gordon watches various Disney+ content on the tablet.
Fair enough, except for a parent-teacher conference in early February where his teachers described to us (actually just me, as Ryan and I had split up the conferences that day and I drew the short straw) an increasing pattern of disruptive, disrespectful and sometimes physically aggressive behavior, some of which, let's say, appear to go against the school’s commitment to equity and inclusion. Every piece of information, every example and story relayed in this conference was more shocking than the last, since we hadn’t noticed any change at home (yet). His teachers seemed concerned but also exhausted, fed up, and, I worried afterward, maybe starting to entertain the possibility that we were untrustworthy or negligent parents. In the days that followed, as several emails and calls about additional outbursts and unacceptable behaviors came in, I felt panicked and ill, unable to think about anything else. I could feel my mind wrenching itself out of its usual position and rotating around, viewing our family and home life from different angles, searching for an answer that I was afraid for it to find.
A few days later he came up to me with the tablet and said, Mom, look at this. I watched as he typed “superheroes” into the tablet’s general search feature, then pointed delightedly to the results, which included not just content he’d downloaded from Netflix and Disney+ but also random superhero videos from the internet. An alarm wailed in my head and I told him to go show his dad, our household’s Chief Technology Officer. Apparently the tablet had fallen out of child mode — there was no YouTube, no internet browser, but it was somehow connecting to the internet for these search results. We didn’t know how or when the settings had been changed; for an unknown amount of time the tablet had become a window out of a formerly closed room. We put the parental controls back on and talked to him about it. He told us he hadn’t seen anything frightening or violent or for adults, that he hadn’t used the search feature before just then. If this whole incident had happened a few months ago I would have moved on, lesson learned, hoping for the best. Instead my brain continued its queasy rotation: Was he telling the truth? Had we let him use it out of eyesight, out of earshot? If so, what might he have seen? Should we take the tablet away entirely, or would that just be punishing him for being open with us, at a time when it seemed so important to preserve our relationship with him, to keep our home life peaceful and predictable, a refuge from a world that was increasingly disappointed in him?
So now Gordon is on the couch with the tablet and I’m standing at attention nearby, in the bathroom with the door open, getting ready to go to a gym class. As I brush my hair I see him close the Disney app, open up the front facing camera, and hit record. “Uh,” he says, smiling at himself, bashful. “I don’t really know what to say. Happy Valentine’s Day?”
He hits stop and angles the screen towards me. Mom! he says. Look at this video I made. He presses play and we watch together, the low angle of the camera making his face look like the summit of a looming mountain. I see him considering his digital self, looking surprised and pleased. I am obviously no stranger to this sensation. I summon up a smile, ruffle his hair, tell him it’s cool. These interactions all hurt in a strange way, lately.
The night before Valentine’s Day, after the kids are in bed, I get out some construction paper, pens, and tape. The only parenting influencer that I follow on Instagram anymore, Mary Van Geffen, has spent two weeks urging her followers to use the holiday as an opportunity to write little affirmation valentines to their children (e.g. “You are a kind and thoughtful friend,” or “You think of the funniest jokes”). Not since Susie from Busy Toddler told me in the spring of 2020 to let my children play with a bunch of yard waste in a plastic storage box have I followed a Professional Instagram Mom’s instructions to the letter, but I am sad and frightened, and it seems like a good idea to celebrate and delight in our children, to even out the praise-to-nag ratio in our household. So Ryan and I sit there and brainstorm and write out six little hearts for each kid and stick them up on the outside of their door. In the morning, we hear them emerge from their room and pause. Then they both come downstairs, give us unprompted hugs, and tear into the candy waiting for them on the table.
I am surprised; Van Geffen had warned her followers about how common it is for children to tear down, tear up or otherwise destroy the hearts, and I’d anticipated a more fiery or at least eye-rolling response. But a few days later I send Gordon, mid-outburst, to his room to calm down and I hear the inevitable: The sound of paper ripping and crumpling. When I come upstairs, I find him sheepishly crouched around the remains of his hearts (his brother’s are still hanging, untouched). He picks up two pieces, fits them together, and shows them to me. “It’s like a puzzle now,” he says.
We’re at the library on a Wednesday afternoon. The kids are signed onto the computers in the children’s area, playing video games on crazygames.com until the library’s 60 minute timer boots them off. I’m sitting nearby on my work laptop, answering emails, eavesdropping on the table behind me: Two dads chatting awkwardly with one another while their two small girls color with the library’s baskets of crayons. One girl has a bit of an authoritarian streak and the other cheerfully complies with her friend’s demands; one father keeps up a layer of light corrective feedback on top of his daughter’s patter while the other dad listens (“Is that the way we talk to our friends? Well, I don’t think it is, honey”).
I have begun picking the kids up early from aftercare, sometimes barely after dismissal time at 3:15. Put one way, I am doing this out of a sense of responsibility to the community and to our child, who is struggling to control himself out in the world and increasingly at home, as well. But I also do it out of fear, as the longer we leave him in the care of others, the more opportunities he has to publicly act in defiant, destructive (and, if I’m being honest, shameful [shameful to whom]) ways. We’ve been coming to the library for these in-between hours more and more, because our kitchen is being remodeled and the idea of trying to get work done while also keeping the kids out of our contractor’s way until 5pm is unappealing. Another opportunity for my mood to swirl down the drain, considering this obscene position: A child with behavioral issues of an unknown variety and severity, his parents seemingly unable to control or help him but certainly capable of paying for and project managing an expensive home renovation.
Earlier that day, Ryan and I had a Zoom call with Gordon’s new therapist (speaking of things we are capable of paying for). I’d found her in the days after the conference with his teachers, when I did almost nothing else during my working hours other than email every child and family therapist I could find within a 20 minute drive. She had an opening starting that week and Ryan had taken him in for his first session after school, but this just-adults call was the first chance we’d had to really talk with her, to go over the intake form and describe the situation. She was pleasant and reassuring about him, about the path forward, plus we hadn’t heard anything from the school in a couple of days, so things were looking up once we got off the call. Then five minutes later Ryan got a text from a fellow school parent: There had been a physical altercation that morning in class, initiated by our son against his, that had escaped the teachers’ attention somehow but had been serious enough to leave a mark on their son’s shoulder.
We hung our heads and I gathered up my things, tired of the now-familiar numb sensation that follows these texts, emails or calls, like I’m suddenly experiencing the world behind frosted glass. All of the things I might have been looking forward to — a night out with a friend, a visit with neighbors, a chance to browse a bookstore alone, an afternoon of yardwork, even just hanging out at home with Ryan and the kids — would be, for the next unknown number of hours or days, no longer enjoyable, because nothing is. As I drove to school I wished I could get a better handle on my emotions, then wondered: What kind of person thinks it’s important to be able to experience happiness or satisfaction or peace while her child is in a crisis, hurting other children? But I don’t know what else I should wish for. The road in front of us might be so long.
Later, in the school lobby, I knelt in front of him to tie his shoes while he confirmed the story, a worried expression on his face. His aftercare teacher walked toward us and my stomach plunged — what else? — but then she leaned over and patted him on the back and said, I just wanted to let you know that he had a good afternoon. I gazed upwards, wide-eyed, beaming, first at her, then at him. I put my hand on his chest and said, wow!
Now, at the library, the kids have moved on to the catalog computer, looking up “poop” and “buttcheek” and laughing at the list of results. I decide to call it a day and close out my email, then a series of old Chrome tabs: Websites for local child therapists; a paper called Practical strategies for working with students who display aggression and violence; an article from Nationwide Children’s Hospital about disruptive behavior disorders. This last one had been of particular interest to me because of one sentence, buried halfway down: “However, affected children can come from healthy families that function well.” The sentence was underlined and I’d hovered over it, thinking it would take me someplace that would tell me more about this astonishing statement, the first of its kind that I had seen. It wasn’t a hyperlink, though. Just underlined for, I hoped, emphasis.
That night, after the kids are in bed, I ask Ryan to email Gordon’s teacher. To let her know what happened that morning, to tell her that we are aware of it, that we are continuing to work with him, that therapy has begun, that we are willing to come in for a meeting if necessary. We have to get out in front of this, I said, doing PR for my client, The Idea That Our Child Is Having A Hard Time Lately But We Are Good Parents Who Are Taking It Seriously. A feeling of unease fills the room as he types. This one seems serious, like it might open a door to a whole new set of plans and meetings and consequences, like it might herald a newly antagonistic relationship between us and the school. What’s really been bothering me, I realize, is the queasy feeling that our parenting village — teachers and other school staff, our kids’ friends’ parents, coaches, piano instructors, babysitters, our own friends and family, and now a therapist — is a constellation of support that is so hard-won and so fragile. And I am unsure how much of it is contingent on having a well-behaved, pleasant child.
Then, oh my god, we get a response from his teacher next day: She thanks us for letting us know about the altercation and says she is surprised to hear about it, since in the month that has passed since the parent-teacher conference he has been doing “an excellent job” at working on managing his emotions and holding himself accountable.
Ho
ly
shit!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This is my brain as I drive to school for pickup: Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you
RECOMMENDED
Heidi Julavits’ Directions to Myself, released last summer. It’s a memoir about raising her son, written when he was roughly 6 to 10 years old, and I was in the middle of it when I sat down for that parent-teacher conference last month. There was no comfort to be had from the book, exactly, but I thought it was a sturdy, intelligent companion while I plunged (allowed myself to plunge?) into sadness and fear. I read her other memoir, The Folded Clock, during my first maternity leave and it’s up there with Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work and Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation in terms of books that rang a bell in my brain that have never really stopped reverberating.
The New Yorker’s review of same, although I came away from it a little tender, my perception being that the reviewer is gently accusing Julavits of being too dramatic, too morose, of taking everything too seriously, of wearing her son down with her incomprehensible lectures, of borrowing trouble now in a misguided attempt to ward off an unknowable future, of, worst of all, allowing her anxieties to subsume the qualities that the reviewer found most valuable in Julavits’ previous work: lightness, absurdity, a sense of humor. I tried to track down whether the reviewer has children herself and she does not seem to; this is not a damning detail but it is a noteworthy piece of data, to me. First of all I did find the book to be funny (for one thing the reviewer seems to assume that Julavits delivered her winding, academic, overwrought sermons to her bewildered son exactly as they are transcribed in the book, which is itself a rather literal, humorless way to experience her writing); second of all I wasn’t really in a position to appreciate her seeming edict that I, that mothers of children in general and maybe white privileged boys in particular, recognize the stakes of their life and parenting choices while also wearing that responsibility lightly, so lightly, with breeziness and hope and some cool jokes. Well I’m so sorry I’m not feeling too fun ‘n’ flirty these days, Alexandra
Okay on second thought maybe I hated that review, although I can admit it was good and maybe even correct.Finally, I imagine that most people reading this are already well aware of Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s newsletter, Brooding, but her two most recent essays, Can Parents Prevent Their Sons From Sliding to the Right? and How Should You Discipline a Kid in Trouble at School? were basically published at the exact right time for me, aka when I was still really fucking depressed and scared and confused, but had already finished Directions to Myself.
I don’t recommend reading the comments, so many of which seem to come from small-minded, smug people who, I assume, are incapable of absorbing any honest, intelligent writing about parenting potentially wayward or difficult boys that comes from a place of warmth and nuance and understanding, and that refuses the reader the comfort of a tidy takeaway lesson or parenting to-do list. I am currently re-routing all of my bad feelings towards these commenters and it feels great. I hope they’re all having a terrible day, perhaps the worst day they’ve had in a while! Ha ha (sorry)
I just sat down for a quick email break with lunch and read your whole essay at once. Sending good thoughts to your family, and thank you for a lovely piece of writing and very recognizable view into the inside of a parent's/mom's brain. It's amazing at times to realize so many of us are going around with, if not necessarily the same, but similar worries and thoughts and experiences.
I read this, alternating between “holy shit, is she in my house?” And “we need a beer-commiseration hour to discuss”.
We got The Progress Report of Doom in January and have been on a similar roller coaster. It’s so hard to navigate and manage.
Thank you for sharing💚