What doesn't kill you

A flow chart chronicling good times …

For the record, I didn't go to junior high with Kelly Mills. But really I did.

Because you did too. You went to junior high with me and I with you. We all went to the same junior high, the same special hell, the same goddamned gaping ulcerated hole that marks the major flaw in the U.S. public education system.

Why, in the name of holiness, would adults remove kids from elementary school and put them on a separate campus for two years, there to stew in their own pubescent juices, their id hanging out for all to see,  barely living hair triggers of rage and uncertainty and painful bone growth and sex and cruelty?

And I count myself one of the lucky survivors. I remember some wonderful people who just came apart during that time. Not that junior high caused it, but junior high didn't help.

(Turns out someone took credit for the junior high system. His name was William Alexander, an educator who thought middle graders' needs were being neglected, so the "father of American middle school" ushered in the separate campuses. Penal colonies, more like.)

Kelly Mills last week captured life in junior high perfectly in the San Francisco Chronicle blog "The Poop." I love the photo published with it, a still from the British movie version of William Golding's Lord of the Flies, itself the ideal metaphor for every poorly supervised school recess everywhere in America.

Mills wrote the blog because she was sending her daughter off to middle school (the penal colonies' accepted name now); though Mills thought her sociable kid would adjust, she couldn't help but tumble backward in memory of her own junior high days.

Hers was a time of vicious and mercurial cliques, best friends who inexplicably and instantaneously ostracized her, and merciless mocking. A fitness trainer, Mills said all but one of her staff (and that one went to school overseas) harbored the same bitter memories; men remembered being bullied and beat up. All recalled body issues that were only magnified by ridiculous PE uniforms.

Though her daughter reports students are more tolerant and less openly homophobic than in my generation, the mockery via social media is more insidious: an especially heartless kind of target marketing.

I remember tense bus rides similar to this toon, in which bullies pestered and poked and hit until they got me to react, then turned the tables as if I had threatened them, which escalated usually into hollow threats to beat me down once I got off the bus. The bus drivers usually did nothing except drive the bus. Like Mills said, I felt largely on my own.

My PE teacher made me clean up my vomit after my first mile run, and for most of the seventh grade and half of the eighth, I tried to will myself sick on the days we ran, and couldn't eat scrambled eggs again for another 10 years. I made my parents heartsick begging them to let me stay home.

(He was the same teacher who ridiculed me for pointing out his accounting error that incorrectly gave me a presidential fitness award.) 

By eighth grade I slimmed down and had enough strength to run and eventually run fast — fast enough to delude myself into believing I could make the 1976 Olympic team. Proof alone we were unstable individuals who should not have been shunned.

I undermine the good stuff: Mrs. Coffin's drama class, especially the improv sessions … Mrs. Burch's choir class, even though her style of inspiration was to scream louder (now I wish I had taken drama and choir in high school) … Mr. Lynch's leadership history where we studied the legislative process and even took a week trip to San Francisco and Sacramento to present bills we had written (though it came at the cost of the U.S. history we would have been studying at the time) … Mr. Beebe's hiking club. So many other teachers and adults I'm leaving out; most of them had guts and heart.

Mills found similar to like, but I agree with her on this point:

You still couldn’t pay me enough to go back and repeat that time in my life.

In fact, when I was a substitute teacher I strenuously avoided middle schools. Nothing has changed. Much is worse.

On one assignment, another substitute teacher volunteered to guide me to my classroom. He spent the entire walk explaining what animals these kids were (he had subbed in the same class before) and how I need to establish my dominance right away if I wanted to survive the day.

Along our walk, I could hear teachers screaming — yes, screaming! — at students. Out of the open doors I could hear teachers cutting down individual students for the amusement, terror and relief of others unpicked on.

The school was named after a state lawmaker. I think maybe he died from the heartache of knowing his name graces a glorified juvenile detention facility in his beloved city.

My class turned about to be a dozen students who didn't speak English very well. Not an animal in the bunch. One spoke Vietnamese, the rest Spanish. In what little Spanish I know, I told the majority I don't speak Spanish very well but I'm here to help. Help me, please, I said. We spent the day working together, no trouble, no screaming, no frustration … and I learned some more Spanish.

Vice principals would walk into my classroom at this school, talking through megaphones, with some odd idea they were calming the students for me at 80 decibels.

On another time, same school, attempting to teach math where students had only enough textbooks for every three to share (and they couldn't take the books home), one kid sat in the middle of the rows, a man-child king, letting his court attend to him. He ruled; I was a seventh grader again, a big pimply scared knot of intestines.

I had to work around this kid, picking off his court one by one to attend instead to their work.

Something about the man-child seemed familiar, and I placed him later in the day when he returned to retrieve something. He was a little fireplug of a four-year-old nine years before, when I was coaching Junior Giants baseball in our neighborhood and his mom begged me to sign up her son even though he wasn't old enough. We let him play; he was overjoyed.

When I reminded the man-child, a big goofy smile took over his dull menacing face. "Oh, yeah! How you doing, Coach Turner?"

He might be a high school senior now, might have mellowed a bit, might have stopped being a big jerk. High school was a better time for me (though not for many), a time for settling down and caring less about what others thought of you.

A time for going your own way.

Yeah, you couldn't pay me to go back.

(It just occurred to me that maybe that was old Bill Alexander's intent. He wanted us to face all that social and biological anarchy away from society so we'd learn the hardest way how to toughen up and mellow out. It's the most pervasive kind of conspiracy involving teachers and administrators and parents, to give us something to have to live through. Good ol' teachers and administrators and parents …)

Close to the bone

Our daughter: Mercurial, second on the scene,
instantaneously disenchanted with the status quo;
wanted at least an equal share in everything,
but wouldn't turn down getting more …

Peter Hartlaub socked me in the gut last week — quite a trick considering he was more than two hours away.

Dropped me to the floor, just the same.

As pop culture critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, Hartlaub blogged about what he might have done differently as a parent (read it here if you must pull yourself away, but just for a wee moment …)

Peter's children are quite young; so is Peter, for that matter, but he often writes about events that cross my life path, and tells me things this outsider has always wondered about the Bay Area, where he grew up.

Our son: First born, adopting a
wait-and-see approach to life;
he'd grow out of it …

In his blog "The Poop," about all things parenting, Hartlaub mused about his few regrets as a dad, and invited readers to lay bare their own shortcomings, in a cheery, casual, public manner.

Finding the usual difficulty trying to add comments to Hartlaub's blog via the Chronicle's website, I'll respond here instead.

(Distracting digression: Critiquing pop culture must be exhausting. One would have to live it, first of all, and I'd find that tiring enough. I couldn't do it. I was sports editor for my college newspaper once and could barely get through that, suffering the ironic affliction of not being a sports fan; even my sports column was called "I Don't Wanna.")

Hartlaub's topic touched off a tsunami of emotions in me, and I returned hard to the moments, intense in themselves, when we first sent each of our kids off to college.

All in a rush at those moments, I wondered if I had done what I/we could to have prepared them. I wandered frantically about in my head, searching for the wrong turns and hinky paths I took as a dad, searching where I might have gone better instead.

Our kids are all right, in many senses, more despite me than because of me; they're blessed beyond me with ideas and ambitions and their own voices and minds; I'd been more like a bumper car rink in their lives.

Like Hartlaub, I've had parenting regrets; here are his, and I'll add a bit to the list.

Hartlaub wrote, "If I could do it again I would …"

• Teach my sons more of the fundamentals … Gifted at couch forts and kite flying, Hartlaub said he wishes he had been better at teaching bike riding, baseball catching, shoe tying and the like.

I was the opposite, more apt to coach and teach than to model childlike behavior. I was born a middle-aged man.

• Build a treehouse … Hartlaub recalls his dad having built him a loft when he was a small child. This is the splurgiest of splurges for kids, but I'm sorry I didn't do this. Not that I lacked plans. They're in a manila folder in my file cabinet, and if not they're still tattooed on my brain.

It would have been a treeless house, though, built on the ground with a deck/quarter deck/mountain cliff about five feet off the ground, accessible by stairs and/or rope. The house would change as the kids grew, becoming a homework nook as its childhood charms began to elude them. Finally, it would become my office, where I would have moved all my drawing tools and books from the back of the dining room and front of the laundry room of our first house.

A treehouse is the best bad idea (or the worst good idea): It's a monument to the flush of love parents feel, that they would invest in a structure that would probably not get much use even at the peak of treehouse-loving childhood, and would molder (which is why I planned the house I never built to change use over time).

As years pass, parents look at the treehouses and remember building them, remember the moments that may or may not have happened there; children see the old places and apply the same shining faulty memory. I have two cousins who had a tree fort — no more than a well-built but simple redwood floor with thick redwood planks that tilted out slightly to create low walls — in an oak tree on their property. I'll always remember it as a refuge for scarfing junk food, far from the intrusion of health-conscious parents.

• Yell less: "Not a lot less," wrote Hartlaub. "My kids needed to know who was in charge." But he said he could have cut it down by a third, and attributed much of his yelling to being too lazy to find a better solution.

This was the brunt of Hartlaub's stomach punch. Boy, how I overdid the yelling! Working from home, I had the school pickup duties and more of the day-to-day school volunteer work and general errands. For many, many reasons, our kids' school stressed me out, and I yearned for our kids to do their best and toe the line, when I really should have chilled out. Too many times I took my stress out on them. I'm sure other parents could see me driving away from school, red faced and shouting at the windshield as if in some shadow-play road rage, when instead I was mowing down one of our children with a spoken assault for a missed assignment or misbehavior. They'd get upset (surprise!) and feel horrible, and I would only turn up my volume and invective. What a rotten guy I was!

Were I to take back time, I'd erase those horrible moments. All of them.

No excuses, but parents need parenting class. Such a class carries the stigma of being for unfit or unprepared parents, but we are all unfit and unable. Some parents have innate notions about being good at it, but most of us, despite generations upon generations of precedent, rely on narrow advice or, worse, on our own advice. The worst of the worst advice: "I'm not going to do what my parents did!" Fine, but what are you going to do instead?

Did my parents yell at me? Sure. Did I reject that for myself? I'm certain. But there I was, filling a tiny car with hot air and hot words, withering my children, consenting them to yell at their children.

Better ways exist. Parents need to know and practice — before they become parents.

• Enter the Super-Crafty Halloween Costume Contest … Hartlaub laments not being more crafty with his kids. Ehh. Hard to side with him on this, since it's a floating target. I was far too crafty when the kids were younger, designing Halloween costumes that my wife had to create, creating birthday cake monstrosities that people had to eat. When our kids were old enough to have a say-so, homespun could not compete with Power Rangers, and I think we were all happy to accede to childlike wishes.

• Buy the Merritt Bakery hamburger cake … Hartlaub refers specifically to a signature Bay Area dessert, but means those grand luxuries parents sometimes shell out for on children, sparking lifelong memories.

I'm parting ways with Hartlaub here, too; I'm not knocking, just questioning its worth. My parents took my sister and me to Disneyland a couple of times (I remember being very sick both times, not their fault), and to Yellowstone and Glacier national parks, and camping. Though I remember moments from each, my default memories are of my mom volunteering in the snack bar at the Little League field (I just thought it was cool she would do that, and sell kids baseball cards) and my dad walking with me out to a space in the woods on the edge of a road my sister and I dubbed Turner's Corner, a three-foot shelf of compacted yellow sand that seemed like Ali Baba's Cave to us. My dad had recently stopped working the 3 p.m.-to-midnight shift out at the Air Force base, and was able after a long absence to spend afternoons with us.

I gave dad the grand tour of Turner's Corner (I doubt it resembled much to him) and then we followed a black wasp back home, watching it fly perfect right angles, wondering why it did so, its wings flashing electric blue over the low sage.

It cost nothing and meant everything.

To Hartlaub's list, I'd add one big, bold item:

• Less structure, more time … As with many families, ours was filled with school, Cub Scouts, Girl Scouts, Little League Baseball, girls' softball, swim team, water polo team, rec soccer teams, drama, dance class — even at a glance, a dizzying and daunting array of commitments designed, I suppose, to enrich their lives. Too often they stunted our family life instead; I've written before about coaching and leading Scouting, and how instead of enjoying time together, I just rained another level of anxiety on all concerned.

Given another chance, I'd like to have cut out most of that, maybe even all of it (maybe our children would disagree). We didn't give our kids enough time to play and imagine and create and Not Do Anything, so fearful of what would happen if we left them to their own devices or let them out into the neighborhood (the terrible bane of a lot of parents nowdays; my generation has barely managed to keep the state parks open, and lost the neighborhoods completely).

I never showed our kids Glacier National Park, a place they must see, a place we all must see before we lose the glaciers too. I would have gone to more museums, or more random trips just to see what was around the corner; our son's third grade teacher marveled once at all the museums we had taken him too, but the truth is he held the few trips in vivid recall.

I can hope our kids find something instructive in this as they set out in life. 

The irony: Now my wife and I have a lot of time.