One Reason I Hate Doing Online School with my Son
I relive my own childhood insecurities from elementary school.
Something dawned on me this morning while helping my son with online school. It is a small step towards understanding the sheer fury I feel while trying to coax an uninterested child with Down Syndrome to do school work.
I write this not only as an illuminating observation for myself but as a possible explanation for what other parents might be feeling during this moment in time when we thought our children would be gloriously away at school for 6 hours and are instead in our dining rooms.
It just occurred to me that I am listening to the teacher not just as a mother but also as my young child self who struggled to pay attention and internalized shame that I didn’t do better in school.
I am beginning to think that one of the biggest challenges here is having to interact with residue from my childhood while refraining from putting all that shit on my boy. And this takes remarkable effort.
It is just so easy to put my own issues onto my children.
I was a squirrely child in the classroom. Smart but distracted by so many other things. My brain went non-stop in multiple directions when I was expected to focus on one thing. I had so many thoughts and things to say about those thoughts and often procrastinated work until the last minute, unable to wrangle my ideas into an assignment.
And I really, really wanted to be liked by my teachers, but I often felt their affirmation was doled out more to other students than to me. I was low-middle tier in the social hierarchy of my classrooms, envying those in the upper echelons who garnered both peer and teacher affections.
Whether any of this can be verified by the adults or my classmates, I don’t know. But it is how I can best describe my internal experience of those years. Much of them were marked by wishing I could be smarter, cooler, better equipped to perform at higher levels. So, I often look back wincing in discomfort.
Now, here I sit with my son, who has some of these same enthusiastic (I’m choosing a more positive word here) qualities I saw in my younger self. Sometimes, I can actually visualize myself responding to these similarities in the two of us with magnanimous empathy and compassion.
But usually I just get angrier and angrier.
I am still ashamed of the young girl who didn’t perform better in school.
This identity is so deep that I carried it through college, where I was an incredibly curious and interested student who barely graduated with a B average because there was just so much else to pay attention to.
All of this bubbles under the surface while I sit next to my son.
Listening to his teacher (who, for the record, exudes superhuman patience as he navigates on-line school with students who exhibit a vast array of needs and abilities) I am unconsciously transported back to my own grade-school classrooms listening to the teacher praise some students and chastise others (me) for incomplete work and distraction.
I say unconscious because it wasn’t until this morning that I began to slowly uncover some of this as I questioned the temptation to throw my coffee mug against the wall every time I sat down next to my youngest at the computer.
My initial interpretation of all of this centered largely on my parenting expectations of myself and my boy; demanding high academic performance of us both because I have always assumed that is how it’s supposed to be. (Down Syndrome or no Down Syndrome.)
Now I am rethinking my high expectations. Or rather, I am reordering what I would put at the top of the list.
At the moment, my expectations are to contain my rage at all of this and not project my feelings of inadequacy and failure onto my little guy.
That seems like a reasonable expectation to meet.
My next expectation for myself is to create a boundary between what my son’s teacher says and my interpretations of those messages as words that shame me for not doing enough.
Lastly, I expect myself to redefine “enough.” For instance, I have done enough when my son participates in morning Zooms and I verbally encourage him, reminding him he is unconditionally loved no matter how he performs in school.
Even as I type those words I can feel doubt dancing in the wings.
Could that actually be a possibility? Unconditional love no matter how my son performs?
And by “my son” I mean, “me.”