“Mom!” Ethan saluted me as he hopped in the van after school. He thrust a tiger lily in my hands, an Earth Day gift donated by our local WalMart. His palms turned up for emphasis, he said in that very loud way of his, “We watched nature videos today because it’s Earth Day! I LOVED the part where the arctic white wolf chased down the baby caribou and caught it!”
“Ew,” I grimaced. “Did you see it get eaten?”
Major eye roll. “What-EV-er. This was a Disney video. You know they’re not gonna show that part. They never show the good parts,” he ended in a mutter. I guess he had genuinely wanted to watch the baby caribou get pulled apart into threads of sinew and tissue.
Bemused, I looked in my rearview mirror at my boy’s face. He was talking again, but instead of seeing blonde hair and a pixie chin, I suddenly saw a baby caribou looking back at me, all helpless eyes and flopping body.
And there was an arctic wolf prowling at the edge of my peripheral vision.
If that picture doesn’t aptly describe my feelings about public school this week, nothing else does. If you have followed this blog for any time, you’ll know that this was Ethan’s first year in public school. He transferred out of our precious little private Christian school into a smallish elementary school not far from our house. I am emeshed in a group of homeschooling moms whom I love and respect, but I knew quite keenly that my boy wasn’t homeschool material. He’s extroverted beyond belief, with an energy level that knows no bounds. He pops up at 6:30 in the morning, wondering what fabulous things will befall him that day. He hops into the car at 3:00 in the afternoon, questioning what fabulous things will befall him that evening. He is always on the lookout for the new, the unexpected, the hilarious.
You don’t get new, unexpected, nor hilarious in my house.
So with prayer and conviction, we sent him off to public school. And truly, it has been a fabulous year. I have seen him grow physically, emotionally, academically, and socially. Spiritual growth has been kind of sluggish, and that’s ironic since it’s my number one priority. But his Christian education is the responsibility of me and Erin, and we’re handling it.
So no, largely, this year has not felt like throwing our boy to the wolves.
Until this past week. I suspect that now that benchmark testing is over, the pressure to learn and make the most of every minute at school has eased up. There is more unstructured time, and some spastic spring fever has set in. Whatever the reason, kids whose homelives are distinctly different than ours have given me more than a few panic attacks this week.
It all started when Ethan crawled in my van last Thurday and asked me what sex was, and it came to a head when he tiptoed into the office after bedtime one night this week and asked me what b***h was. He’d heard a discussion of one in the hallway and been called a son of the other by a boy in his classroom.
Three- and five-letter words have made me feel the following seven-, eleven-, and twelve-letter words: furious, exasperated, and disappointed. Panic has also set in: what’s he going to hear next? In my mind, I see my sweet ray of sunshine smeared with the filthy black tar of vulgarity.
But I know that’s not true. Vulgarity doesn’t live in his heart. It didn’t spring up in his mind. He heard a word, and he trustingly repeated it to me. I also took the most basic route, explaining that sex (in the context in which he heard it, though it probably wasn’t intended that way) is just the proper term for our male/female anatomy, and that bi*ch is a completely innocent term that has been converted into an abusive word to hurt women.
This discussion satisfied him completely, and I have seen no evidence of his brooding or ruminating over these words. They just don’t have a place in our home. And that’s something else we discussed: I praised him for intuitively knowing they were wrong words. He decoded context, and he realized that their absence in our home meant something.
Above all, it means the boy trusts us. It also means that, yes, he is a baby caribou, but by our attentive, prayerful parenting, he won’t get separated from the herd and turned into wolf bait.
[Addendum: I want to clarify that “sex” is not a wrong word in and of itself; it’s just not a word our kids have been introduced to yet, but trust me, I’m prepared with books aplenty! However, the way the child at school used the word was perverted and wrong. And a story for another day.]
The Myopic Life 
Your perspective is a wonderful one! As a seasoned mom and public school teacher, I know that it is a very difficult decision to “throw our young to the wolves”, but when their foundation is solid, it makes all the difference. Keeping that line of communication, trust and intuitive sense keen and forefront will be huge as your family grows. Help them keep Jesus as the center of their lives. Keep up the good work:)
Many thanks! I struggle often with that balance of being in the world, but not “of” it. This was one of those moments I really had to ask myself if we were doing the right thing. I sincerely believe we are, but we can’t for a moment let down our guard.
I must be honest I have considered home schooling for that exact point. I know that it wouldn’t work though. Horrible to have to worry about things like this. Xx
It is horrible to have to worry. I feel very sad for the children who come from homes with inattentive parents. Or worse. We talked about these two boys who shared this colorful language. Both are troubled children, so we talked about how people with hurting hearts hurt others. Ultimately, it became less a conversation about cussing and more a conversation about compassion. But did I want to have it with a seven year old? No.
We threw Samantha to the wolves in 5th grade. She, like Ethan, innocently came home and said “What is the “f” word?” I thought she actually wanted a definition of the word…upon clarification, she didn’t care what it meant, she kept hearing people use the phrase “f word” and wanted to hear the real word.
While I debated (internally of course) how to proceed with this discussion, she went on to tell me how she just found out the ‘s’ word was not the word “Stupid.” True, until 5th grade when someone said the word ‘stupid’ she and her friends would say ….”oh, you are so going to get into trouble…we’re not supposed to say the ‘s’ word.”
So, sad to say, at 11 years of age, when my daughter first went to public school, she learned that the ‘s’ word was not stupid and what the ‘f’ word was. Yes, I told her. She like Ethan also heard that some words are never appropriate, that people use them to defile something beautiful given by God. But I could not stand for her to be the butt of jokes due to her ignorance.
Now days when we innocently hear inappropriate words in movies or shows, I’ll say something along the lines of “I am so sorry you had to hear that, my mistake” and both girls (11th and 8th grade now) will say, “mom…do you not think we hear these things at school?” I just have to start praying over them…they do not bring them home, but they do get exposed to words we wish they never had to hear.
Great that he was able to ask you what those words meant and know that you would answer him in a way that’s useful to him. 🙂
I am now creeping your blog, which I love, and this topic brings a sense of déjà vu! Wink!
Ha! Indeed. But I have never fretted over Emily’s wolf-baitishness quite like I did Ethan’s. Probably because he had already brought the scary stuff home.