If you ask T. what she wants to be when she grows up, she'll tell you "a scientist!" Then she will go on to qualify that and say, more specifically, that she wants to study marine biology. Awhile back I remember telling both kids that I had wanted to study zoology in college, but was held back from my aspirations because of math. To be fair, it wasn't math that held me back, but my reluctance to get my mind around it enough to push through the harder courses.

Math gives me a headache. I think I do have some type of learning disability when it comes to numbers, because I have trouble making sense of them in ways that go above and beyond simply not liking the subject. In school, math made me feel badly about myself. It made me feel thick-headed, and slow, and extremely frustrated. English, or language arts-centered classes, however, made me feel on top of my world.

When I teach developmental writing classes I always tell my students the story of my math challenges. I tell them I had to take the "remedial" math class in college, before I could move on to the first semester freshman math course. I tell them how I found myself caught in that avoidance cycle I see so often in my own students: I skipped class because I felt bad, which led to my poor grades, which led to more bad feelings, and more skipped classes. It was only with the help of my sister and a sympathetic and all-around great math professor that I was able to finally make some progress and turn the corner on my math anxiety.

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.

******************

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.

A friend called me yesterday. “Have you prepared the kids for going back to school?” she asked.

Sort of, I told her. Psychologically, at least. Maybe. About a week ago we began dropping little references about school into our conversations with L. We let him know how many days of vacation were left—almost a week, at the time we had the conversation. Yet although L. claimed to be happy school would start in one week, I could sense waves of anxiety rising off of him at the mere mention of it. I have spent eleven plus years tuned into this child; there is little, I think, that slips past me.

It’s okay, I told him. We still have lots of days left.

But I could feel him shutting down, withdrawing, even as I spoke the words. He’s pulled his shell in close; it’s been impenetrable. He piles his books around him at night, and reads over the same pages in his Star Wars visual dictionaries, over and over again, his mind finding comfort in the same old pictures and diagrams. Around and around his brain goes, treading along that safe groove. I despair, for the thousandth (millionth?) time how we will help him learn—if not to embrace change and transition—to accept it and to function well within it.

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).

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.

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."

***************

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.

****************

When I picked T. up from school on Thursday, she was very thoughtful. Scott was able to leave work to get L., which was a big help logistically for me that day; but also, it gave me the chance to talk with one-on-one T. a little on the ride home--something we don't get to do much if L. is in the car with us.

As it turned out L. did not, in the end, want to go to the middle school dance. He opted for a night home with Clone Wars, instead, and seemed content with that choice. I'm happy that he thought about going to the dance, though, even if just for a short time. Maybe when the next one comes around the wish to go will take root in his mind and grow into action and I'll swallow that excited-happy-melancholy-worried lump in my throat and watch him head off into a sea of kids.

A year ago even imagining L. at a dance would have seemed impossible. Now, I dare myself to wonder when it will happen, not if. And just thinking in terms of when is so new and exciting that I don't  need anything more--not now, at least.

Everywhere I go, it seems, people ask me how L. is doing. Even if they don't know our story, or how difficult elementary school was, they still ask because the words "middle school" always make people wonder how it's turning out. Parents of younger kids ask me and hold their breath, hoping for some reassurance from me that it will all be okay. A friend e-mailed me last week, worried that things weren't going well because I've been so "quiet" about L. and school on this site, and on my Facebook page. But the truth of the matter is that things are going so well, I haven't even wanted to write about it, or talk much about it, because I'm superstitiously afraid I'll jinx it all. We are so used to riding such a crazy roller-coaster, of being lulled into a false sense of everything-is-okay only to have the ground pulled from under us.