I continue to struggle with what is real and what is not
real in my world.
There are only 6 days left of school, and my son is feeling
every single one. In his world, he
stopped learning things of any value a month ago. To his defense, he is one of the smartest, fastest learning kids
around. Things in his head just click,
and common core standards have left him bored with the lessons that are taught
12 different ways so that everyone gets it, when he got it the first time,
finished all the lessons and enhancement materials on the first day, and has to
sit, often for another week, with nothing to do. This in not a whine about the failing health of the school system
in California, or even a justification to let him be a slacker (I don’t let
him, read on), but more of a baseline for how to balance what is real and what
is not.
My son is 11. He has
started puberty. Yes, every bit of
it. Hair, height, food, sleep patterns,
disgusting smells, and the over use of hair gel. What has also come with it,
for an overly intuitive, smart ass, super witty, hysterically funny kid, is a
complete sense of loss of reality. His
body doesn’t quite fit, his voice doesn’t quite sound right, his desires don’t
quite match his abilities, his logic is totally flawed even when the argument
is flawless, and he is angry. Angry, like all of the time. There is zero justice in the world, good
things happen to bad people, while good people get hurt, and he gets no say. He has decided that the real world is not to
his liking, and since there are no actual requirements to participate, why
bother. He has already passed 5th
grade even if he does not go to school for the rest of the year, so why
bother. It, for him is one more way
that the world is showing him that it hates him.
But that’s not real.
The world does not hate him. The
world, more than likely does not give a damn about him. But I do.
He may have figured that out. I mean, I am the person he is taking all this anger out on, and I
am the one that hasn’t left. Anger is real. He gets to have that and I get that
it is testosterone infused emotion, fueled by introspection, and a little bit
of laziness. He hates transitions. And
in a world full of them, especially in his recent past, he is struggling. He is
questioning his place in the universe, his value as measured by someone else,
and how to break out of that while still wanting to be taken care of. How much of the real world, (that couldn’t
care less about his 5th grade science project), does he still have
to put up with before he can be done. And does he, in the true sense of the
world, need to rely on anyone else for his own sense of freedom. If everything in his world is subject to
change, how does he know what is real?
If everything can change, his body, his heart, his mind, that what can
he rely on.
On the sill of a bay window, in a kitchen I have been
spending a lot of time in recently, there is a new bouquet of artificial
flowers. They are sorta pretty, until
your realize the red is too-red, and the green is too-green, and the narcissus
are too-white to be actual paper-whites.
I won’t even talk about the Styrofoam and glass marbles in the clear
vase hat make up the base, because there is no water. No movement.
I know how the flowers got there, and heard the story of why
they are preferred. It seems fake
flowers are preferred because they do not change. There is no fading of color.
There is no stagnation of water.
There is no dropping of dried petals or crinkled leaves. There is never any imperfection.
I thought about this for quite a while, about why this might
be a desire at all. I got it, the need
for stability, to have something in the world on which you rely, which you can
predict to be the same. Lasting. Forever.
Except nothing is forever.
Everything changes. Lasting, without change, is not true. The only thing
real is that which you create. Real
requires work. Fake, well, fake is an
illusion. A mask. A charlatan’s crystal ball. No one gets to know what happens.
So as I try to explain to my son that everything changes,
nothing (including the school year) is forever, how do I also help him know
that I am real?
This week some of that belief about what is real, and what
is not, hit me. With some words I did
not create, I was labeled as invisible. Non-existent and dismissed inside of a
world I was creating. This hurt me more
than I realized when I thought it through, but not for the reasons you might
think. Yes, I still have all my deep
seeded fears about no one ever getting to know me, and about no one seeing me,
and well, about being disposable and worthless as judged by my mere
existence. I know the words were just
words of self-protection and zero ability in the moment to make the hurt stop,
truly. What hurt was my own self-doubt
that I could change. What if I was the
fake flowers, pretty for a time, but with no substance? What if I really was surface and shallow and
not able to adapt and learn? What if my
being real, flaws and all, wasn’t enough?
So I picked real anyway.
I am real. I adapt and I
change. I will not stay the same,
without growth and I decided to try this in practice. What if all this frustration my son is feeling is much the same
as my feeling of not wanting to be fake (I mean, really, how many more times do
you have to do math papers you aced three months ago just to get to the end of
the semester).
I want my world messy. Calm, easy, moving forward, but
messy. I want leaves on the counter
from real bouquets. I want conversations that are hard but real, and filled
with love. I want to change the way I
do things even as I make mistakes. I
want my son to get that, too, that I will change with him as his needs changes,
and we will be okay as we figure it out.
That transitions are real, and that I will help him through it as I transition
myself. I want him to see that modeled
in my life with other people who are real so that he can see that change is okay,
and maybe grasp some (of my hard learned) lessons that life and love are fluid,
always adapting. I hope he sees other
models in his life doing the same.
It is exciting.
Scary. Terrifying,
actually. To get to move out of fake
and in to real. I also hope I get
brought flowers (apricot-colored tea roses and dutch irises are my favorite,
just in case you need to know that), and I will happily clean up the fallen
leaves to open up space for more real in my world. Join me.
