Boarding School

Boys need to be challenged and forced out of their comfort zone. It’s not just about toughening up. It’s a process of integrating with the wider world and coming to terms with playing a role in it.

For the last few days, I have been tying myself up in knots of worry.

Worry over my son. My beautiful, recalcitrant, boy. He was a born resister. He even refused to come out of the womb — had to be pulled out of my abdomen sideways by tools that looked to me like farm equipment: some sort of pully system and a vacuum. He hardly slept. He hardly ate. Until about four months old, he wailed for several hours every evening. When he got older, he refused to participate in most toddler activities. He refused to go to bed, every night, for many years. He refused to potty train until he was about to start pre-school. He scratched and grabbed and fussed his way through his first years of life. Even his tenderness — of which there was a lot — was rough. His father — who bore the brunt of his violent affections — and I called him “The Badger,” and joked that he was America’s smallest domestic terrorist. He was born in the time of Occupy Wall Street, and by the time he was a toddler he had the most incredibly effective way writhing around on the ground during a tantrum that I would think to myself ‘this kid should go down and train those protestors and the police will never be able to remove them.”

Though he challenged me daily and stressed me out from time to time, mostly those first two years I was blissed out on being a mom — which had since my earliest memory been my life’s ultimate and most cherished goal. The humdrum stuff that we are constantly told is so terrible about being a parent these days - the repetition, the laundry, the endless watching over a tiny, rampaging bull — that was exactly the stuff that made my heart sing. His father on the other hand, had a different reaction. He began to slowly disappear.