no subject

[lotesse]

The session with J. ended up with a hug-it-out between me and the child, a detente and an agreement to resume the argument later, when we could have J. again for mediation. i am not dismissing her, but i'm also not going to allow her to beat on me, you know?

Later that day I sort of sent out the question, what was it you wanted me to do? Skipping over all the stuff with sex and gender and the ex and whatever, if you're mad at me for losing the ability to do something, what was it you wanted me to do?

The first answer I got confused me, because it was about power: we were supposed to have reached the top, got enough power so that -- what? What did we need to get power for? I've never much been ambitious, although I've often enjoyed positions of high status. By high school, I'd perfected an exchange whereby I accepted adult levels of authority in return for adult levels of responsibility - so I basically ran the school newspaper, and in return got to treat the publications room like an adult's office space, a haven that made time at the school much more bearable for me. I didn't get paid and I didn't get credit; what I got was a certain degree of freedom that the other children weren't granted. That was what I wanted; I didn't care about the credit. I ran the newspaper, but I was never EIC, that was another boy in the class who'd been there longer. I jumped over him to become the teacher's second. More power, less status? Maybe?

So I asked her what she wanted the power for, and that answer made sense to me and has been bringing some things back together/into focus. We were supposed to go back for the ones we had to abandon before, when we were small and no one outside of the family would listen to us. WE got to leave school, but we couldn't take anyone else out with us. We had to leave them behind. We felt bad about it, but we took the chance at freedom, didn't look back.

I guess I don't know what to do with some of my residual angst? anger? i don't know the name of the feeling - it was Not Okay for me to be a student in a middling public American school system, it was dangerous for me, I always knew that, the teachers were nice ladies but they were also a threat - they wanted to steal the joy and honor of the work, make it stupid and pointless, taint the whole enterprise with authoritarian dynamics of ownership and control that would leave you alienated from the learning if you let it. My parents listened to me - I am so grateful, so infinitely grateful, that they always listened to me about school, that they fought so actively on my side - and when they couldn't transform the public schools into what I needed they took me out, educated me at home for a while, and then sent me to the experimental school where I passed the happiest years of my adolescence.

But the thing is, I had to leave all the other kids behind, because their parents wouldn't have listened to me, and everyone else thought that school was a fine and even a good thing. I was a child, and my voice had no weight to articulate what I was seeing: the other kids losing their spark. My best friend - her parents looked at the experimental school, too, but it was too outside-the-box for them, and I had to leave her behind, I couldn't .... and I was so happy to be out that I didn't want to risk it, I just took off and left her back there. We're close again now, but there was a long time there that she was struggling in such different ways from the ways I was.

I dunno if maybe it fucked me up, that what I thought I was doing teaching at the university was that work of going back to free the prisoners, and then the longer I was there the more I felt like I wasn't working for a cause of freedom at all, I'd become the kindest jailer in the prison, and I needed those kind teachers once but I can't be that myself. It's not the going-back I wanted. I don't know if I have the personal power to do reforming work from within the system; I get despairing, being around adults who don't see the problems with things that I see, what seems to me like their callousness is deeply depressing and makes me bitter and misanthropic.

The one other thing I want to acknowledge in writing is that the need to go back for the others was foundational to my relationship with my Ex. I thought I could do for him what I wasn't able to do for those other children; at sixteen I had more power than I'd had at ten, and I was going to put it to use if it killed me. He was an embodiment of all those other children I'd seen losing their spark, and I was going to fix him, and that was going to make up for the ones I'd left behind somehow. It didn't work, and when I realized it wasn't going to work I think I got confused at a deep level about what to do with the need to help that I'd felt, if I should try to deny it instead of pursuing it. I'm still confused about that one.

(I was supposed to have another session with J. today; I had to cancel bc of stupid unnecessary drama with mother that tbh I'm still sort of steamed about. Rescheduled for Tuesday. I am frightened of pain but also determined, though I suspect the first thing we're going to need to do is figure out how I can put down my fists and unlock my jaw; i'm in fighter mode over this business right now, and I don't think it's the proper approach vector at all)

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

Thank you for posting.

[lotesse]

Thank you for reading! I hesitated about putting this up last night, bc it's messy and disorganized and also I get embarrassed about coming off so melodramatic.

it means so much to me to have this space where writing/posting is always the right thing to do.

[princessofgeeks]

As someone for whom the inner child work was very meaningful and fruitful, I have really enjoyed reading your posts. And am wishing you the best.

[boxofdelights]

I suspect the first thing we're going to need to do is figure out how I can put down my fists and unlock my jaw; i'm in fighter mode over this business right now, and I don't think it's the proper approach vector at all

Yes; you have clarity now, and ground on which you can stand your ground, but the people you need to fight against... they're not here now.

[staranise]

Hm, I think this makes our conversation about non-trad education the other day make more sense. Yay, I think.

This is pretty incredible work you're doing.