The hardest school: a fantasy

For many years, I had a fantasy.

It all started because I used to be a really good student, back when I was in school. (Yeah, I know: people who brag about their student achievements forty years later are pathetic. Well I'm probably still pathetic, but I'm not bragging. Just explaining.)

Anyway, for years I fantasized about enrolling in a school that was really hard—so hard that even if I tried my absolute damnedest, I could only barely scrape by with a C-.

The point of the fantasy was what happened next. It was one of those montage scenes you see in movies, where the underdog is preparing for the Big Event, and we're shown in a matter of minutes a grueling training regimen that must span weeks or months. And I meant it as a challenge to myself, or perhaps a question: Could I do it? Could I enroll in a school where my natural gifts left me in the middle of the pack (or lower!), and then by grit and determination fight my way to the top? Could I survive even such a school as this fantasy academy, and still graduate summa cum laude? 

Or—the other alternative—were all my celebrated achievements no more than the accidental result of gifts I had done nothing to earn, so that if I had to depend on my own effort and hard work I would fail?

It was an enticing fantasy. I wondered if such a school really existed. Of course in the real world I didn't exactly look for such a school. I went to college, and then I dropped out of two graduate programs. (I allude to this briefly here and give a couple of other links.) But that didn't stop me from fantasizing, even as my real life was rolling along much duller and more pedestrian tracks.

And then one day ... years and years later ... I realized that I had in fact enrolled in just such a school.

It wasn't an academic institution. Notwithstanding that my fantasy was always an academic one, any such school would have failed to meet the essential criterion. Any academic institution would have been one where my natural gifts—the ones I did nothing to earn—would have carried me through. No, in order to meet the essential, definitional conditions, this institution would have to be non-academic. And it was. Or rather, there were two of them: both venerable institutions, and both non-academic.

Marriage. And Fatherhood.

And it's not like I tried to sign up for an easy major. I knew when I married Wife that she would be difficult. I may not have known exactly how difficult, nor why, nor in what ways. I certainly didn't know that she would be diagnosed with "treatment-resistant depression" (which I still believe to be a euphemism for bipolar disorder), and I had never even heard of Narcissistic Personality Disorder at the time. I didn't have any idea that the marriage would turn so abusive. But I knew it was going to be tough.

As for Fatherhood, many is the day that I joked "I sure hope they grade Fatherhood Pass/Fail, because I'll be damned lucky to carry a C-average." The number of days that I went to bed feeling like I had failed were many. Did they outnumber the other days? I don't really know. I never kept track, and now it's many years later. But emotionally it often felt like they did.

And of course there were also days where everything went right, and when I told the boys (as I tucked them into bed) how proud I was to be their daddy. Those days happened too, and I'll never forget them.

In the end? Well I guess I failed marriage, because Wife and I live apart today. As for Fatherhood ... I've never gotten a final grade report. Maybe it's still being evaluated. There are plenty of things my kids don't like about me. But does that actually mean I failed the class? Or is the criterion more about how independent they are, and how well they can navigate the world as young adults? You see, I don't even know what it takes to pass the class, so I sure don't know how I did.

Anyway, I didn't have the kind of triumphal finish that the movies always show at the end of those montage training scenes. But I did get to enroll in my fantasy academy, the hardest school in the world (at least for me).

How many people get to live out their fantasies? Maybe that means I'm really lucky, in spite of all appearances?

In case this discussion sounds familiar, I said something similar in this post here.