I'm going to use this Friday post space to gush proudly here about how L. is on his school's Battle of the Books team. A couple of months ago in the van on the way to pick up T. he casually mentioned that he had gone to a BOB informational meeting at lunch.

"Oh really?" My heart jumped. Careful, I thought. Don't be too pushy. Don't get too excited or nosey about this. Sometimes L. trying something is like coming up on a wild animal in the bushes. If you make a sound, or move too quickly, he'll scurry away quick as a flash.

But L. continued to go to the practice meetings, and he tried out for the 6th grade class team and made it! His team placed second in the finals for his school and, encouraged by this, he went on to try out for the schoolwide team. This was big. Really, really big.

And he made it!

Now he'll get to compete countywide this month, and he stays after school for practices and everything. The other night I was telling someone on the phone about his BOB success. "He decided to do it all on his own," I told my friend. After I hung up with her L., who has supersonic hearing and hears every little conversation anywhere in the house, came out of the office looking a little sheepish.

"You know," he said. "I didn't decide ALL on my own," he admitted.

"That's okay," I said. "What do you mean?"

He'd gone to the first informational meeting, he told me, because he had been looking for a way to get out of eating in the cafeteria that afternoon.

"It was hot dog day," he said. "I hate the smell of the cafeteria on hot dog day."

I'm reading my way through stacks of letters of introduction that my students wrote last week. While it's a lot of reading, I also enjoy these letters so much. Years ago I realized that if I wanted to get more from my students than a simple "Hi my name is _______ and I'm from ________" I would need to structure the letter assignment and provide them with actual categories to focus on, turning the letter into more of a social location assignment. Since I changed up the assignment, I've been rewarded with extremely detailed and moving letters from students describing--in may cases--challenges and tribulations that far exceed those that any young child or young adult should have to experience.

And so many of my students express, in their letters, what a thrill and relief it is to reinvent themselves by coming to college; to step out of their pasts, as if unzipping from an unwieldy and weighty skin.

I used to always tell my students to leave their baggage at the door when they came to class. Now I've come to realize that such words are too easy, too pat. For some young people, it might be a simple enough act to shrug off their pasts, but for many of my students, it certainly is not. They would have to dig too deep, gouge too painfully at the scars. In the end, your past is a part of you, no matter how you wish it wasn't. And while reinvention can be a life-changing, life-saving move for many, you do always have to acknowledge how much of your past has made you who you are today, even if just to guarantee you won't go back.

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I've been thinking a lot about reinvention. The other day I asked L. if he wanted to stop by his old elementary school to say hi to some of the teachers. He shook his head.

L. had a presentation due yesterday in one of his elective classes. He doesn’t talk about schoolwork much (if at all) but he let slip mention of the upcoming presentation a few times these past two weeks--that's how I knew it was big. One time last week he asked me if he’d be in school that next Tuesday.

“Of course,” I answered.

“Great!” he said. “That’s the day of my presentation.”

We didn’t know much about the grading standards for the presentation. It’s an elective class, and all work for electives is supposed to be done at school. He’s been excited about the presentation, though, and I know this is why he wore his red and gray striped sweater on Tuesday. I have tried several times to talk to him about the content of his slideshow he prepared--on global superpowers, but he made it clear he had the topic covered.

When I picked him up after school yesterday I asked him how it had gone.

“Bad,” he said in the same non-commital, even-toned voice he uses for so much else. He's my inside-out child: disproportionately emotional and dramatic over light upsets, and even-toned and flat over the things that really matter. Yet I knew that under that flat tone he must have felt upset. I thought, not for the first time, how much easier it is to comfort a child who is visibly hurt and disappointed; you see the tears, you fix them.

His presentation had “too many words” the teacher had said, and not enough graphics. You could have done better, he said the teacher told him after class. What does that mean? Done better? How?

“It was boring,” L. told me.

“How do you know?”

“Because students did this” (here he made a loud groan) “and this” (he sighed heavily).

A couple of weeks ago I ran into an acquaintance/friend who I used to see more often. Her daughter is a year older than L., and an only child. I mentioned to her how rough the mornings are these days, with the early start time now that L. is in middle school. I told her what a battle it was to get him up and out of bed--it's a two-parent job, for certain (three parents would work even better, if we had another one on hand). I expected her to commiserate--I needed her to commiserate--but instead she told me that her daughter gets up on her own at 6:00, fixes herself breakfast, and then spends about thirty minutes downstairs practicing her violin and reviewing for any quizzes or tests that day.

Thanks, I wanted to say to her. Thanks A LOT.

Then I wondered:

Who IS this child of hers? Where did she come from?

I suspect (hope?) that this is not normal behavior for most 12-year olds. But still, it had me wondering about when children begin to become self-motivated to get up and out of bed; fix themselves breakfast, get dressed, brush teeth, etc. We are far, far away from this with L., although T. at 7 has begun to show signs of self-motivation where these daily tasks are concerned. No matter how hard we try, we can't seem to get L. going in the morning without making multiple trips upstairs, and lots of verbal prompting giving way in the end to frantic threats. I know he is only eleven years old, but because we are working very hard on teaching him to be more self-sufficient, it's difficult not to be making any progress in those areas. it doesn't help that L.'s sleep cycles have become more "teenager-like" lately--he'll stay up too late and on weekends sleep and lounge in bed until sometimes 10:00 am.

Did you know that there's a difference between a geek and a nerd? I hadn't given the topic much thought, until L. brought it to my attention the other day. He is, in his own particular way, struggling to define himself and understand where and how he fits into the social landscape of his new school. I think he was entirely unable to do this in elementary school. He saw himself only as not fitting in, and being "other" and he had no positive way to define himself in relationship to his peers. But now, I don't think he feels like an outsider--at least I truly hope he doesn't. While he might be still trying to find his place, as all 6th graders are, he does see that he has a place, and this is a big thing for him.

Last week he mentioned a kid in his German class, a friend of his. "He's a geek," L. said. "And he's so funny."

"Oh?"

"All my friends are geeks. Geeks get good grades, but they're also cool in ways."

 "Isn't a geek a nerd?" I asked. I really thought they were interchangeable, silly me.

L. then proceeded to outline all the differences that exist between geeks and nerds. While nerds are interesting people, he concluded, geeks have a clear edge over them.

"Which one are you?" I asked.

"A geek," he said."I definitely would say I'm a geek."

The first school quarter is over and done with--thank goodness. Both kids brought home their report cards on Friday, although Scott and I had already snooped at L.'s grades via the online portal the county provides so that parents can keep up with their kid's progress. It seems a little Big Brother-like, but I like having access to L.'s grades and to information on assignments--when they were turned in, or whether they were turned in, as the case may be. L.'s 5th grade teachers tried to run something like that last year, but it failed miserably and the information was never updated, or was inaccurate, which drove us crazy. But this year we can see how well an online system like that can work, if teachers are committed to updating the assignments/grade information on a daily basis.

Something strange and unusual happened on Sunday. I was left all alone in the house for a couple of hours--completely and utterly alone. T. and Scott had a Y-Princess outing to go to, and I had planned something fun to do with L. He's been asking to go downtown to walk around and look at the architecture. The weather was gorgeous on Sunday, and I thought it would be the perfect thing for the two of us to do.He's been very reclusive lately, and hasn't wanted to interact much with anyone. Although he seems happy, I don't like to see him on his own so much. Maybe I make too big a deal of this, but I can't help it. While we respect his need for more space and quiet than most people need, I do think there are days when he takes it to the extreme, and lately there have been too may days like that. Then, unexpectedly on Sunday, we got a last-minute call from his elementary school buddy A. to come over for pizza and video games.

I was torn. Video games? Aren't we trying to reduce his gaming time already? But it would be video games at someone else's house, with another kid, and this trumped L.'s  solitary gaming on our home PC. What about our walk downtown? The architecture? I hadn't told him about that plan yet, and I knew that if I presented it his gut reaction would be to decline A.'s invitation, in favor of something closer to home, more predictable, and safer. We couldn't remember the last time L. was invited to another kid's house. It seemed normal and very 11-year old kid-like, and I wanted him to go. I would pick him up at 5:00 I told him, and we'd go out for Chinese, just the two of us.

And so there I was left, with mainly myself for company, drifting around the house baking fruit bars, doing laundry, talking to the animals, and scrubbing the trim on the kitchen cabinets. I missed Scott. I missed my kids. 

When I was in middle school my parents drove a blue VW bus, just like this one. Although in its heyday the van had once been trendy and shiny, by the time I reached 7th grade it looked just the opposite. You could hear the bus coming from miles away, and closing the sliding door on the passenger side was a feat requiring huge effort and much noise and grimacing, all done in front of school property. It's funny how things come around again--I think it would be uber cool to pull up in front of L.'s middle school in a vintage VW bus. At least, I think it would be cool.

In the carpool line at T.'s school yesterday, L. suddenly broke into song. The lyrics were a little catchy, and set to "Dynamite" by Taio Cruz:

I throw my Xbox at my mom sometimes

Singing ay-oh, buy me Halo

"Where'd you hear that song," I asked, curiously. 

B., a boy in his German class, apparently set the entire "Dynamite" song to alternative lyrics (and very clever ones, too), and L. couldn't get it out of his head. He sang the song over and over again, all through the carpool line, all the way home, all through Blockbuster when we ran in there to check on a movie I needed for class, and all the way back home.

I was pretty tired of the tune by then, I tell you.

Later, when he had retreated to his room after homework, I sat with T. at the kitchen table while she finished up her math. She paused at one point, pencil in hand.

"You know Mama," she said. "It's funny to hear L. singing, isn't it?"

"What do you mean?"

"Instead of yelling in the car," she said. "It's funny that he's singing, instead."

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L. has always had a deep fear of being embarrassed. I'm not sure why, because we have never set out to embarrass him--not on purpose, of course. He will often react quite violently to the fear of embarrassment, whether it's perceived, or real. Because he's a big middle schooler now, he's imposed a new rule that we must keep conversation very minimal and light as we approach the school. If the windows are up, we can fudge this rule a little, but as soon as we cross into the school property part of the carpool line, we have to keep converstaion VERY limited.

The other day he told me he needed to have a "talk" with me and he asked me to please not embarrass him by saying "goodbye honey," or, god forbid, "good bye love," as he gets out of the car. No one is in ear shot, of course, but the rule still stands. So now, as we loop around the long morning carpool line and pull up in front of the school I say a very casual, "bye L., see you later today," and he pulls open the car door and nods goodbye (very officially) and he's off, stumbling under the weight of his backpack, into school. I have to work hard to remind myself that this is the same child who had so much trouble separating from us at drop-off, and who we would walk into school each morning until the end of third grade.

And I drive off, wanting to feel a little sad about our brief goodbyes, but instead, feeling oh so happy and relieved inside.

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