“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 