A couple of weekends ago, Son 1 started high school. This means that we drove him and his stuff to school, and moved him in.
This story will proceed in several parts, because I can't get it all written at once. The first installment (this one) is about why we chose this. Later installments will tell the story of getting there.
Why are we sending him to boarding school in the first place? Why not, as I have been asked more than once, save the money for college? (It's not like we are made of money. Thank God for financial aid!) Well, there are several reasons:
I suppose the first point is that, if I have to choose between the two, I think high school has the potential to be more important than college. Certainly for me it was. (This isn't everybody's experience. Certainly it wasn't Wife's, nor D's.) College, after all, trains the mind; but high school has students during a time when their hearts and spirits are maturing and plastic to an extent that they will never match again. I think it is an unparalleled opportunity for the building of character. And if a suitable character is built in high school, it is less important which college a student attends. Of course one naturally wants one's kids to go to the best college they can get into, but that doesn't always mean the most expensive one. It depends on what is "best" for each individual kid, and even in the case where there is only one "best" there will be many other institutions that are "very good." Anyway, this by itself isn't an argument for an independent school, especially as there are some which seem designed to mold a child's character in an unsuitable direction. (I mean the kind of school -- I've seen some -- which is aimed primarily at the rich and snobbish, to insulate them in their class bubble.) But it is an argument for considering several different kinds of schools rather than simply assuming one or another by default.
In the second place, high school represents an age where children are often starting to reach beyond their families -- not necessarily to reject them, but to see that other adults can pose alternative models for how to live. I think it is easier to do this if you live among them, rather than coming home every night. And I know from my own experience that it seemed as if I had a different identity or personality at school than I did at home. So as I came home every day, I had to spend a certain amount of time packing up the one identity and putting on the other. If the school is the right one, if the teachers are admirable people whom a child would do well to imitate, then living around them is all to the good.
I should digress at this point to say that of the three independent schools Son 1 applied to, at least two of them meet this kind of criterion albeit in very different ways. (I was never quite so sure about the third, but that turned out not to be a problem because he didn't get admitted there.) And in all of this we figured that if none of the schools seemed right -- or if he didn't get in -- he would still do very well by going to the public high school near where we live, which is really pretty good.
The foregoing arguments worked only intermittently on Wife, who was often afflicted with fits of "My little boy is going away!" So for her I emphasized two other points. The positive one is that Son 1 will have to leave home sooner or later, and it will be a big adjustment whenever it happens; isn't it better, therefore, for him to have to make the adjustment in high school (when the administration will expect students to have a hard time with the transition, and will therefore be watching for signs that someone is falling through the cracks) rather than waiting till college (when the administration is likely to take a far more laissez-faire attitude)? This thought appealed to her native over-protectiveness, although she still felt conflicted.
There was also a darker, negative point that I sometimes made as well. A bit of background: everyone who knows Son 1 remarks on how responsible and cooperative he is; in fact, he shows far more of those virtues to others than he does at home. In cold honest truth, Wife is starting to find him ungovernable. Now, he is rarely rude or disrespectful. But he ignores her completely and does what he wants instead. There are at least two sources for this behavior. One is that sometimes the things she requires of him make no sense, because (as I have discussed before) Wife's parenting skills are at best middling and she doesn't understand boys very well. But sometimes he is being out and out obstinate. (A concrete way to pick up the distinction is to look at how he reacts to me. I have a far higher success rate than Wife in getting him to comply with things, because I have a better idea how to talk to him and it is less often that I ask crazy stuff. But sometimes -- very rarely, but sometimes -- he defies me too, and in those cases it can be awkward to find the right means to motivate him.) I should also add that once upon a time I felt I had to step into the breach to defend her, so that even if she was asking something irrational it was more important that he obey than that the order make sense; and I would back her up. I have stopped doing this, because I have lost patience with her. So I let her manage her own relationship with Son 1. On the whole that hasn't worked much better than her relationships with a lot of other people, but I have given up thinking it is my problem. (Wife's general interpersonal skills are no better than her parenting skills. Often worse.) Anyway, the point is that whenever she has had a particularly frustrating encounter with Son 1 I have asked her, "Do you really want four more years of this? Do you think it is going to get better in that time, or worse? And do you want him to spend his high school years learning (by habituation) to have respect or disrespect for the adults around him? If what you want is for him to learn respect, wouldn't we be better off putting him in an environment where he is more likely to build a habit of respect through repetition -- because we already know that he is always respectful to non-family members -- rather than keeping him at home and setting him up to learn disrespect because he will show it to us (meaning: you) so often?" She hates it when I pose the question this way, but she also generally admits (very grudgingly) that there may be a point there. I have to be careful not to add, "Besides, you don't begin to understand him" because that would be completely counterproductive. It might not even be strictly true, and I have to be careful not to over-congratulate myself; but it is certain that she doesn't have any good clue how to manage him.
This leads into some of the darker reasons for wanting to send the boys to boarding schools.
One is that I want to get them away from Wife, because I think her example is poisonous. Regular readers know by now that she is chronically whiny, dissatisfied, and narcissistic; and her understanding of the rules of basic human interaction are so flawed she might as well be speaking another language. If you ever saw the Monty Python sketch about the English-Hungarian phrasebook, that about sums up Wife's general level of success in social situations. ("My hovercraft is full of eels." ) I realize full well that she learned all this behavior from her mother (who was just as awful), but that consideration makes it all the more important to me to get the boys away from her and around healthier examples at the earliest feasible opportunity. (In fairness, and for the sake of completeness, I should add that she did a little better when they were younger. Her illness had advanced less far, making it more possible for her to think about other people besides herself, and the skills required to raise a five-year-old successfully are rather different from those needed for a thirteen-year-old.)
A second reason is that I want to get them out of the house because the overall atmosphere is so much worse than it once was. Now, my perception is that we actually fight less than we used to, because back in the summer of 2009 I insisted that we separate our finances. This meant that for the first time in 25 years I was no longer held hostage by her manic-depressive spending habits. I think I have described how we split the common household expenses and the boys' expenses, but I reserve the right to refuse to pay for anything she buys that I think is crazy. So for the first time we no longer fight about money, because I no longer scream at her in helpless desperation, "You went out and bought WHAT???" I just tell her, "That's nice but it's on your nickel." On the other hand, this has caused the overall atmosphere in the house to chill perceptibly; and I know she complains to the boys about how I am "cruelly forcing her to live in poverty." All because I "have to control her." Anyway, if I can get the boys moved to a place where they don't have to listen to that poison on a regular basis, so much the better.
And finally, I have figured that if both boys are out of the house then she and I can dismantle our life together and separate a lot less traumatically. I mean, at this point I really am staying with her "for the sake of the children"; I am persuaded -- fashionable propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding -- that most children don't really care a lot about their parents' happiness but want their home intact. If it can't be kept intact, I figure that the very least I can do for the boys is not force them to watch it torn apart. Let them go to school somewhere else. Then she and I can start sorting through who gets what, she can throw all the screaming tantrums I expect to hear from her about how this will ruin her life, and they won't have to be in the next room hearing it all. I won't be able to stop her from telephoning them (for example), but I think that geographical distance will have to be a benefit.
Why are we sending him to boarding school in the first place? Why not, as I have been asked more than once, save the money for college? (It's not like we are made of money. Thank God for financial aid!) Well, there are several reasons:
I suppose the first point is that, if I have to choose between the two, I think high school has the potential to be more important than college. Certainly for me it was. (This isn't everybody's experience. Certainly it wasn't Wife's, nor D's.) College, after all, trains the mind; but high school has students during a time when their hearts and spirits are maturing and plastic to an extent that they will never match again. I think it is an unparalleled opportunity for the building of character. And if a suitable character is built in high school, it is less important which college a student attends. Of course one naturally wants one's kids to go to the best college they can get into, but that doesn't always mean the most expensive one. It depends on what is "best" for each individual kid, and even in the case where there is only one "best" there will be many other institutions that are "very good." Anyway, this by itself isn't an argument for an independent school, especially as there are some which seem designed to mold a child's character in an unsuitable direction. (I mean the kind of school -- I've seen some -- which is aimed primarily at the rich and snobbish, to insulate them in their class bubble.) But it is an argument for considering several different kinds of schools rather than simply assuming one or another by default.
In the second place, high school represents an age where children are often starting to reach beyond their families -- not necessarily to reject them, but to see that other adults can pose alternative models for how to live. I think it is easier to do this if you live among them, rather than coming home every night. And I know from my own experience that it seemed as if I had a different identity or personality at school than I did at home. So as I came home every day, I had to spend a certain amount of time packing up the one identity and putting on the other. If the school is the right one, if the teachers are admirable people whom a child would do well to imitate, then living around them is all to the good.
I should digress at this point to say that of the three independent schools Son 1 applied to, at least two of them meet this kind of criterion albeit in very different ways. (I was never quite so sure about the third, but that turned out not to be a problem because he didn't get admitted there.) And in all of this we figured that if none of the schools seemed right -- or if he didn't get in -- he would still do very well by going to the public high school near where we live, which is really pretty good.
The foregoing arguments worked only intermittently on Wife, who was often afflicted with fits of "My little boy is going away!" So for her I emphasized two other points. The positive one is that Son 1 will have to leave home sooner or later, and it will be a big adjustment whenever it happens; isn't it better, therefore, for him to have to make the adjustment in high school (when the administration will expect students to have a hard time with the transition, and will therefore be watching for signs that someone is falling through the cracks) rather than waiting till college (when the administration is likely to take a far more laissez-faire attitude)? This thought appealed to her native over-protectiveness, although she still felt conflicted.
There was also a darker, negative point that I sometimes made as well. A bit of background: everyone who knows Son 1 remarks on how responsible and cooperative he is; in fact, he shows far more of those virtues to others than he does at home. In cold honest truth, Wife is starting to find him ungovernable. Now, he is rarely rude or disrespectful. But he ignores her completely and does what he wants instead. There are at least two sources for this behavior. One is that sometimes the things she requires of him make no sense, because (as I have discussed before) Wife's parenting skills are at best middling and she doesn't understand boys very well. But sometimes he is being out and out obstinate. (A concrete way to pick up the distinction is to look at how he reacts to me. I have a far higher success rate than Wife in getting him to comply with things, because I have a better idea how to talk to him and it is less often that I ask crazy stuff. But sometimes -- very rarely, but sometimes -- he defies me too, and in those cases it can be awkward to find the right means to motivate him.) I should also add that once upon a time I felt I had to step into the breach to defend her, so that even if she was asking something irrational it was more important that he obey than that the order make sense; and I would back her up. I have stopped doing this, because I have lost patience with her. So I let her manage her own relationship with Son 1. On the whole that hasn't worked much better than her relationships with a lot of other people, but I have given up thinking it is my problem. (Wife's general interpersonal skills are no better than her parenting skills. Often worse.) Anyway, the point is that whenever she has had a particularly frustrating encounter with Son 1 I have asked her, "Do you really want four more years of this? Do you think it is going to get better in that time, or worse? And do you want him to spend his high school years learning (by habituation) to have respect or disrespect for the adults around him? If what you want is for him to learn respect, wouldn't we be better off putting him in an environment where he is more likely to build a habit of respect through repetition -- because we already know that he is always respectful to non-family members -- rather than keeping him at home and setting him up to learn disrespect because he will show it to us (meaning: you) so often?" She hates it when I pose the question this way, but she also generally admits (very grudgingly) that there may be a point there. I have to be careful not to add, "Besides, you don't begin to understand him" because that would be completely counterproductive. It might not even be strictly true, and I have to be careful not to over-congratulate myself; but it is certain that she doesn't have any good clue how to manage him.
This leads into some of the darker reasons for wanting to send the boys to boarding schools.
One is that I want to get them away from Wife, because I think her example is poisonous. Regular readers know by now that she is chronically whiny, dissatisfied, and narcissistic; and her understanding of the rules of basic human interaction are so flawed she might as well be speaking another language. If you ever saw the Monty Python sketch about the English-Hungarian phrasebook, that about sums up Wife's general level of success in social situations. ("My hovercraft is full of eels." ) I realize full well that she learned all this behavior from her mother (who was just as awful), but that consideration makes it all the more important to me to get the boys away from her and around healthier examples at the earliest feasible opportunity. (In fairness, and for the sake of completeness, I should add that she did a little better when they were younger. Her illness had advanced less far, making it more possible for her to think about other people besides herself, and the skills required to raise a five-year-old successfully are rather different from those needed for a thirteen-year-old.)
A second reason is that I want to get them out of the house because the overall atmosphere is so much worse than it once was. Now, my perception is that we actually fight less than we used to, because back in the summer of 2009 I insisted that we separate our finances. This meant that for the first time in 25 years I was no longer held hostage by her manic-depressive spending habits. I think I have described how we split the common household expenses and the boys' expenses, but I reserve the right to refuse to pay for anything she buys that I think is crazy. So for the first time we no longer fight about money, because I no longer scream at her in helpless desperation, "You went out and bought WHAT???" I just tell her, "That's nice but it's on your nickel." On the other hand, this has caused the overall atmosphere in the house to chill perceptibly; and I know she complains to the boys about how I am "cruelly forcing her to live in poverty." All because I "have to control her." Anyway, if I can get the boys moved to a place where they don't have to listen to that poison on a regular basis, so much the better.
And finally, I have figured that if both boys are out of the house then she and I can dismantle our life together and separate a lot less traumatically. I mean, at this point I really am staying with her "for the sake of the children"; I am persuaded -- fashionable propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding -- that most children don't really care a lot about their parents' happiness but want their home intact. If it can't be kept intact, I figure that the very least I can do for the boys is not force them to watch it torn apart. Let them go to school somewhere else. Then she and I can start sorting through who gets what, she can throw all the screaming tantrums I expect to hear from her about how this will ruin her life, and they won't have to be in the next room hearing it all. I won't be able to stop her from telephoning them (for example), but I think that geographical distance will have to be a benefit.
... to be continued .....
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