Running away from dinner

This story dates from the beginning of February. It is one of the ones that I have had backlogged for a while. I’m not sure any more why I thought to post it; it’s just depressing, self-centered, and whiny. It may have the minimal advantage of setting up a couple of my later posts about the boys. Still, you probably want to skip it.

This spring, Son 1 will graduate from the eighth grade. I think I have mentioned that our local public high school is pretty good, but we have also been looking at private options. So anyway, one day at the beginning of February, Son 1 and I had visited one of these schools. We got home about 4:00. I was exhausted by that time (maybe from getting to bed late the night before) and fell into a nap for an hour. But first, I asked Son 1 to spend some time working on the short-answer section of his application to the school we had just visited. When I got up an hour later, he was playing computer games and had not touched the application. I shooed him off the computer and came out to the kitchen. Wife was just putting the dishes in the dishwasher so I could make dinner (why does she always wait till the last minute?) and Son 2 was trying to ask her a question about his math homework. I looked at the problem and he was approaching it in a bizarre way; so I showed him how those problems are normally done, and he got huffy and sarcastic with me.

I assembled the ingredients for dinner. After a few minutes I checked back in the study -- and Son 1 was again playing computer games. "But I did what you asked!" This turned out to mean he had written one sentence on each of the short-answer questions. They left room for a paragraph, and I told him to write more. Back to making dinner. Next, Son 1 was in his room reading comic books. "But I wrote more!" Well what about checking online to see if you have any homework from today that will be due tomorrow ... homework that you missed hearing about by not being there today? Go check. Back to making dinner. A few minutes later he hadn't budged from reading comic books, and I had to insist.

Meanwhile, Wife was having great trouble getting Son 2 to focus on his math. Indeed, she was saying many of the same things we have to say to Son 1: write neater, show all your work, don't do it in your head. I tried to second these injunctions while chopping carrots and assembling the carrot pie I had planned for dinner. Once the pie was in the oven -- and I had checked on Son 1 once more, who was doing something else to blow off his work (I'm losing track) -- I sat down to try to help him with one problem that seemed especially difficult. But Son 2 was too upset or too mad -- I'm not sure at what -- to pay any attention and finally I suggested he take a break. He came back a few minutes later and finished the problem, but his face bespoke cold fury.

And I just felt like giving up. I have told you before how sometimes I despair of being able to convey basic attitudes that I took for granted at that age – simple-minded, superficial shit like trying to please the teacher or tackle my homework diligently. I’m not asking for anything profound or fundamental here. These aren’t going to make them better or more moral people, heaven knows. They won’t improve their lives in fundamental ways. But it baffles me how to work with them if attitudes like that aren’t kind of assumed at some level, as a kind of common language. Don't all kids want to please their teachers? I mean -- OK, I know that's a dumb question. Of course the answer is no. But it seems so simple. It's not like it requires any deep soul-searching or internal striving. I took it for granted when I was a kid, absolutely unstated. And I have no idea how to convey it. So I figure I can't. I know D tells me that the boys will learn all the most important values just by living with adults who practise them. But sometimes, like this night, it is hard to feel that; and the picture that unrolls in my mind instead has me butting heads with them in increasingly fruitless ways until they leave home -- having acquired whatever they have acquired in the way of life skills -- and go off to live their lives however they live them, it making in the end almost no difference that they were my children instead of somebody else's for all the good that I was able to do them. I don't say this picture will be the truth; but I do say that sometimes it is what plays on my internal movie screen.

So I felt, as I say, like giving up. And in a manner of speaking I did just that. I made a salad to go with the pie; then when the pie came out of the oven I put on my shoes and a jacket, grabbed my walking stick, and told the family to sit down and enjoy dinner while I went out for a walk. I figured that Son 1 was mad at me for my badgering him to get something done all afternoon; that Son 2 was mad at me for ... well, whatever it was about the way I tried to help him (I'm still not sure); and that Wife wouldn't miss me, just on general principle. And I was so tired of having people mad at me, so tired of having to be stern about anything. So I went out walking for an hour and a half.

When I came back, Wife was already asleep. The boys were up, but it was time for them to get ready for bed. I booted up my computer, checked my mail from work, and wrote a letter to D. And I had a little salad and pie as I wrote. It wasn’t bad, actually. Meanwhile, I know that I shouldn't have run away from dinner. I know that. In the first place, probably nobody was as mad as I thought they were; and in the second place, I belonged there regardless. I just didn't feel up to it at the time.